According To Hoyt

*Sorry this is so late. We had an appointment (not for me) this morning that resolved the underlying cause of the ER visit a week ago, and if the diagnosis is true, it’s not  bad at all. -SAH*

It is a characteristic of the human mind to try to make sense of things by weaving a story.  It might be a necessary characteristic and even a survival enhancing one.

For instance, if you see someone walking funny ahead of you, and something in the back of your head pings “danger” you’re not going to pretend you don’t know anything. You’re going to avoid them.  Even more so, if two people flank you in a dangerous area of town, you back up fast and take off running.  There is a story in your head these people are going to mug you, and maybe it’s false. Maybe they accidentally flanked you. But–

For the record both happened to me.  The first one, when I lived in Colorado Springs Old North End neighborhood and I got up unholy early to walk the 1.5 mile to the center of town and back, there was someone ahead of me acting funny.  First he caught my attention because he was a heartbreakingly beautiful Asian young man, with beautiful long hair down his back, (Artist speaking, not woman. He was probably younger than both my kids) and he was shirtless in 35 or 36 degree weather (just above freezing.)  Then I realized he was doing a sort of zombie walk.  And then he started… well, dancing is one term. Sort of dancing/martial art moves.  I didn’t know what he was doing but I assumed “drugs” and therefore ducked into a side street and went another way.  This week someone posted videos of people doing the “Flakka dance” and yeah, that’s what it was including the zombie walk, but he can’t have been on it very long, because he didn’t look destroyed  Anyway, given the aggressive nature of that high, I did the right thing.

The flanking thing, same neighborhood, but older son and I went for a walk of a Sunday (the most dangerous day, since that’s when the downtown is empty) and two critters flanked us.  For those who don’t know my sons, by the time they were thirteen people thought they wee my “bodyguards.”  They’re both over six feet and built. So, flanking me? low level hoodlums. Flanking Robert and I and moving center?  We decided they were trying to mug us as soon as we got off the center which still had some people.  So we ducked into a shop, and out the shop’s other entrance. Maybe we were wrong. Maybe the two guys were innocent strollers THAT time. They hadn’t been in other occasions as we checked them by look (there used to be a website) when we got home and each had a demon’s resume.

In those circumstances guessing people’s motives/intentions can be survival enhancing.

For anything more complex, it helps to remember you’re not psychic.

Honestly, I’m so afraid of ascribing bad motives to people, particularly people I deal with/am friends with, that I have gotten stung a non-trivial number of times.  I extend more chances and observe behavior, and try to formulate an hypotheses why.  If nothing makes sense, I drive myself nuts. BUT after x number of times I assume there’s malice for a reason I don’t know, which will continue to happen, and then I cut all contact. Pretty much forever. Because at that point there’s every reason to expect this will continue to happen.

What I try not to do is attribute motives. Because at that point the motive doesn’t matter. And because I’m not psychic.

And while — see cases above — I’ll react to protect myself, I really do try not to imagine things for which I have no proof.

So, say when I was out with Robert who was then two and a nice old gentleman kept insisting Robert sit on his lap (in a wheel chair) and he’d give him a ride.  Of course I didn’t allow it. Stranger in powered conveyance picking up my kid? nope.  But I’m not going to tell you the gentleman was a pedophile, or wanted to kidnap my kid.

Perhaps. I mean, he struck some odd cords, and it was a so so area of town. And he was really insistent. OTOH Robert was a cute kid, and older people who like kids can get lonely and, well… it might all have been very nice.

It’s important to remember I’m not psychic, otherwise the incipient paranoia kicks in, and we start going “What the? Perhaps…” And next thing you know you’re shouting “get away from my kid, pedophile” at what is probably just an addled elderly man. Like the crazy woman’s studies professor someone talked about before who, when two guys approached to see if she needed help ran hell for leather to a policeman and told him these guys wanted to rape her. (They just wanted to see if she needed car-help.)

That’s part of the problem.

The left is really good at creating in-head narratives that get added to disparate facts and convince people they’re psychic. They’re not.

Take the Covington boys. I never saw a smirk. As the mother of boys, now men, what I saw was mortally embarrassed teen boy.

But if you think that all white people particularly those who support Trump and wear MAGA anything are racist, you’re going to see the kid, with the Amerindian that close and be “psychic” about what the kid is thinking and what his face is doing. (For the record, because DAZ 3-D renders suck on expressions, I keep leaving them blank. But people SEE expressions according to context, which in this case was in their minds.)

Same with the guy in Chicago (some kind of TV star) supposedly assaulted by people who yelled racist and homophobic comments and yelled “this is MAGA country.”

And this is where you know the left is not telepathic.  Sorry. I can see someone assaulting a black gay man somewhere (it’s a country of 300 million. There’s assholes.)

But if this happened at all — and it’s not a fake one, which it kind of smells like for other reasons — the chances of attackers yelling “This is MAGA country” are close to zero.

Why? Because it’s not a phrase anyone on the right would say. EVER. I move in those circles and I’ve NEVER heard that.

But the left has so convinced itself that MAGA means white supremacy (Are they that racist that they think when the country was great it was all white? When would that be? I can’t think of any time, ever) that they think this is perfectly plausible.

The rest of us go “Racist, homophobic attack? Sure, could happen. Probably not political, though.  Just two outlaws (it’s always the known wolves) trying to be cute.”

But the left sees politics. The same way during the Covington incident, they heard the kids shout “build the wall” because, you know, they’re obsessed with this, so the right will just shout it at random.  And it would be random. There was no one there that would have been kept out by a wall.  If the kids were surrounded by a hostile Mexican gang? Maybe that would make some sense.  This way? No.

It just goes on.  And they deduce the craziest things because they think they know what we’re thinking.

Hence you know, you think the current books winning awards suck? You think that a revenge fantasy which imagines that all of the working class in America is racist, sexist, homophobic shouldn’t even be on the awards ballot, much less two awards ballots and win one?  Well, that is because you’re trying to keep minorities and sexual minorities from writing sf/f.  Even if it doesn’t make any sense. Even if you’re not a gatekeeper. Even if you are a woman, a minority or gay yourself.  It must be, because that makes sense, so the left “psychically” sees through your motives.

Or you don’t like your box who happens to be a woman, and you’re a man? well, you’re sexist, have mommy issues, and your penis is small.

What the hell is this even? It’s like the worst of Freudianism, where the theories kept getting more complex, until no cigar was just a cigar, no fish was just a fish, and it was all deeply sexual and having to do with your mother or father or….

Reality is not like that.  In reality, you don’t know what others are thinking.  You should watch how they act, and if they’re not dangerous, you should give them a chance.  Or you know, ask them why they did something.

And just because TV sells the idea all people to the right of Lenin are racist, sexist homophobic, what you should ask yourself is how they know.  Because they don’t. They’re just otherizing people who think differently.

And they’re not psychic either. And 90% of the time they’re objectively wrong the only way it counts: in predicting how people will act in the real world.

 

 

Look, there are two worlds as far as each of us is concerned: the world behind our eyes, and the world outside.

What I mean to say is this: you as a person feel, think and believe all sorts of things.

No one outside that space behind your eyes has to believe you.

I think I’m more attuned to this than anyone else, because the space behind my eyes contains multitudes, and the feelings/thoughts/feelings are often not exactly mine. (Recently while scouring the web for reviews of my work for an application, I came across people who consistently believed that a) my characters are me. b) the romance in the books is the romance I want.
First, people who could believe I’m both Athena and Dyce need their heads examined. Second, I’m well fixed for romance, thank you.  Have been for 34 years. And my husband has not a vague resemblance to ANY of the guys in my books. Not even a little. Not even when I bring out A Fatal Paws, where the husband is a mathematician. The technical name for someone who confuses character and author is “idiot.”)

In fact, because human memory is fallible and what we notice of the world is so dependent on us being ill, or distracted, or whatever, it’s virtually impossible that the world inside your head matches what really happened and what didn’t (i.e. facts.)

If you’ve ever lived with someone else you know this.  Dan and I are if not similar very congruent, in that we tend to take the same conclusions from things, even if we get there through different routes.  BUT if you get us into what I call “old married couple bikering” over when how or whether something happened, it can go on for hours.  “No, it was a Thursday.” “It was a Wednesday. I remember because the cat was ill.” Etc. It often turns out both of us are conflating different incidents with yet a third incident, because the image of the world inside our heads got confused (and these are usually minor things.)

Beyond that, particularly if you’ve been indoctrinated or are young and stupid enough to believe the media wholesale, you’ll put bizarre interpretations on things.  Which is how we get someone being offended by a picture of coal miners and deciding this meant people of color weren’t welcome at the restaurant.

His initial mistake wasn’t awful. I mean it’s stupid to say you feel “threatened” by the picture.  Insulted is not the same as threatened. I’m really tired of people saying that anything that offends them or insults them is “threatening.” No, you goofballs. Threatened is when someone says “Quitcher bellyaching or I’m going to give you what for.” That’s a threat.  Whether it’s a credible threat depends on the size of the person saying it and whether they’re holding a weapon. If it’s a 90 lb woke woman saying this to a 300 lb man it will be treated as a joke, no matter how much she thinks she is “90 pounds of get back.” Which yes, is based on a real incident, and again goes back to how the world inside your head doesn’t match the outside. No matter how many movies you’ve seen where the amazing! Feminist! woman! just beats a 300 lb man with no effort, reality is likely not to match.  And if, unlike that incident, the man is of a mean disposition and unchivalrous, the mismatch with reality is going to hurt a hell of a lot, even without his trying.

But if you’re a city-bred twat I can see looking at the picture with the minors WELL DRESSED (by our time’s standards) and in what appears to be black face and being offended. However, once someone explains the context to you, to double down is a thing of madness.  It is in fact, bad crazy. I.e. an insistence that people cater to the world inside your particular head and not to reality.

You see, most babies realize there’s a difference between the world behind the eyes and the world outside by I think around six months. They see the difference between me-not me.  I.e. you can move your foot, but you can’t move the mobile over the crib, unless you kick it with your foot.

But we have raised generations of kids by telling them their feelings are important, and yes, that disagreement or argument is “threatening.” So they’ve lost that distinction.

I can no longer find it, but one of the private conferences I frequent, had a video of a woman telling a guy wearing a MAGA hat is racist because she FEELS it is and feelings are real.

[Does sinal salute.]  Of course feelings are real.  A friend who is a psychiatrist keeps telling me I need to own and investigate my feelings, because they are real.

But they are real TO ME in the space behind my eyes.  For instance, if I hear Green Acres I feel all unsettled.  When Lisbon TV stations were taken over in a revolution (oh, you don’t want to know) or attempted coup, the Porto station got cut off.  And all they could even play between occasional news updates were some old reels of Green Acres.  Coming into the house at lunch time and hearing that music was a BAD sign.

Does that mean that Green Acres must mean revolution and unsettled times to anyone else? No.  And yet my feeling is REAL.  Sure it is, and the mature response to it is to go “Long ago and far away” and wander off while the kids watch it. Even if the conditioned feeling never fully goes away.

In the same way if you’ve been taught to be scared of MAGA hats, men with dirty faces, or for that matter “people who don’t look like you” the feeling is real. But before acting on it, or demanding others change to suit your “feelings” you need to step back and go “do I have any RATIONAL reason to feel this way?”  And then in many cases you have to overcome those feelings, so you can live in civilized society.

Because here is the thing, if you have to listen to everyone’s “feelings” and every single person’s feelings are as real as facts, we will all need to isolate ourselves from everyone else.  I mean, Vegans feel meat is murder. Are they entitled to execute everyone else? I feel very strongly that Marxism needs to be rooted out. I’m totes entitled to hold brain-washing sessions on everyone, and kill Occasional Cortex before she infects more people, right?  And I feel loons who assume MAGA hats are really really racist (even though there’s no FACTS to back this up other than their feelings) need to shut their whiny mouths or be given whatfor. So, if I wear a MAGA hat, which of us wins? Care to place bets?

Feelings are real and you need to learn to deal with them. You can’t just deny them. But neither can you impose them on anyone else.  Particularly when they PRESUME other people’s thoughts and feelings. Because, hey, guess what, you’re not psychic. Just because you FEEL someone is doing this or that because of “x” it doesn’t mean you’re right. And if you have no facts (and I mean facts, not, “but the media said”) outside your skull to back it up, your feelings are YOUR PROBLEM and no one else’s.

When you scream “you can’t deny my feelings” that’s besides the point.  No one denies you feel the way you do. Well, not unless they’re playing psychic, themselves.

What people can and should do is challenge the mismatch between feelings and facts.  Ones can’t be imposed on others, and the others impose themselves on all of us. Because reality is still what it is.

To think otherwise, to think that your feelings should dictate how everyone acts is a form of solipsism, where you think you’re the only real person ever.  Because if that’s not true, you will be able to realize you’ll run into other’s feelings, that contradict yours.

What this stupid idea is, really, is bad-crazy. That which unmakes civilization.

A bunch of us in the last two days — partly because of yesterday’s post, partly because of other things going on, partly because it’s the zeitgeist — have met in various nooks and cranies of the internet to talk about two things: how those of us who speak out regret/not regret speaking out (yes, I’ll explain) and how those who can’t speak out regret not being able to.

And I woke up this morning realizing something: that’s the key. That right there is where the whole thing hinges as the cultural war escalates.

Look, the crazy that is today was in the works from at least the 1980s. That’s when we started getting lectures on political correctness and half of the books on writing were predicated on how to change our language so it wasn’t racist and sexist (they still hadn’t got to homophobic.)  None of this was IN ANY WAY about eschewing name calling, which I would agree with.  I’d even have cheered if they’d said something like “you can’t use lazy stereotypes in your writing, because it’s stupid and boring.” (growing up, gay guys were used as comedy pieces, which always annoyed me. But what do I know, I used drunkards as comedy pieces in my early writing.)  The whole idea we’re upset at political correctness because we can’t use bad words for people is ridiculous. I’m upset because we can’t use “one” or “he” as the default genderless pronoun.

I’m upset because policemen are now police officers or peace keepers, even WHEN WE KNOW THEY’RE MALE. Not because there’s anything wrong with “police officer” (What’s wrong with peace keeper was joked about enough by Pratchett for me to belabor it) but because it was prescriptive, dictated and from above. Sure, I’ll use it. Unlike “they” for plural it doesn’t make me sound like I need to cough up an hairball.  And unlike herstory it doesn’t make me stand under the sign screaming “Philology, do you even speak it, mothereffer?”  I’m even more upset at the execrable “actor” for both male and female, a medium in which, yes, which one you are makes a difference.

But most of all it was the smarminess of telling us we couldn’t use these words, because these words made us “politically incorrect.”

Look, at the heart of it is the Marxist belief that humanity will change to become fit for communism, if you just cut their avenues of speech and thinking.

It works to an extent. They can forbid words. They can infect even me with things like singular they (because you see it so much. I’m also acquiring a grocer’s apostrophe, though it’s not as bad as when I read a ton of fan fiction.)

But…

But their new words acquire the same old freight as the old ones.  No, seriously.  And changing what we call people who do police work or are firefighters isn’t going to make them primarily female occupations. Because they’re dangerous work outdoors, and it’s older than civilization that that’s male work. The words don’t change it. The world changes the words.  Which is why we have leftists changing to liberals changing to progressives the same way a bad Chinese restaurant keeps changing its name.  Which is why the SJWs were very proud of their moniquer (seriously there was a game about being an SJW written by the SJWs) which, to be fair, was a masterpiece of opposite naming, kind of like the Democratic German Republic. BUT all of a sudden they had to accuse us of coming up with it, and start running from the words. Because it came to mean what it is.

And meanwhile, since the 80s we found a way to communicate outside the channels that were wholly controlled by the left… well, since then at least.

They’re absolutely sure if they push just a little harder, they’ll change us or they’ll change the majority of the people, and then utopia will happen.

But those evil bad thinkers keep evil bad thinking and they meet in places like this blog, and others.  And the left is sure we’re the hoarders and wreckers and the only reason their project is failing harder and faster every day.

So they’ve escalated. Of course they have. Their faith says if they just silence the evilbadpeople utopia starts.

So we’re where we are now: doxxing and threatening and of course, trying to make us lose our jobs.

Some people say this is the time when we refuse to accept the mark of the beast and can’t trade or work. Maybe. It’s not my tradition, but okay. OTOH maybe don’t give them ideas, okay?

It’s going to continue ramping up. That the enemy gets a say, doesn’t mean we’ve lost the war.  Note the game is always the same they’ve played, only it’s working less now, now that us thought criminals know we’re not alone. They are not by and large, safe for the antifidiots resorting to physical violence. (And the antifidiots only operate in the cities where they feel safe.) They’re yellow under all the black paraphernalia. They are using what they always used: doxxing, whisper campaigns, mobbing and destruction of reputations and livelihoods.

They’ve done this my whole life. It’s their modus operandi. It’s just that now half of their campaigns (at least) fall apart and what they wish to keep under the rug comes flying out.  And we’re not alone. And we know we’re not alone.

My guess is that we’re so far from alone that the end-game for the US is the same as Romania, in terms of the worm turning (hopefully not in terms of the stupid afterwards, but that is up to all of us.)  One morning the “progressives” are riding high and by evening they’re cooling meat.

Note that I’m not endorsing this. I’m not endorsing any kind of killing, and I pray every day and every night that this passes from us without actual killing, that we can get back the country without violence on either side.

It’s just that from my reading of history, my “Sense” of what comes next is a sudden, short and violent replay of Romania. And that’s the best case scenario.

But it’s possible a miracle occurs.  It’s possible the insufficiently attached left realizes they’re a tiny minority and conciliate. It’s possible that the real hard cases are so few that they just lose power.

It’s possible.

It’s also possible that it goes far worse than Romania, into something like Gascony was for centuries or Ireland was still in my time: a protracted civil war, with decade after decade of terrorism in our midst, in our neighborhoods, in our schools.

Needless to say I don’t want that.

I don’t see a scenario where the left wins. Not long term. I can and do a scenario where for ten years or so they force us to some kind of black market.  I certainly can see people like me who work in left dominated fields being destroyed and marginalized for speaking out. It’s what the left does. They’ve done it a long time.

So, what can we do? And what can we do to bring about the better solutions, as opposed to the horrible ones?

Well, the left needs to be disempowered.  Not silenced, mind. I want them to speak. The more they speak, the more the masks fall, the more that they show how repulsive they are.

But they need to stop having the power to silence the opposition.  And we, all of us, need to be prepared for the time our identifies are revealed (well, not mine, obviously. I have revealed it myself) even the best kept secrets, because no secret is perfect.  And we need to have a fall back in which we can speak and work and not be broke for doing so.

You know if you’re a writer there’s indie.  I’ve been struggling with this for a year, since I found out via back channels that my trad career was done. The immediate, instinctive reaction is to think your career was done. But that’s bullshit. There’s indie. I thank PJ for keeping us from going under while I got my head straight (It’s almost there now.) Because there’s a mental ramp-up time. And we’d have floundered otherwise.

However that was my fault. I should have started indie with both feet in 2011.  Yeah, health, but I should have anyway.

So LEARN.  Start now.  I’m sure there’s something you can do that is independent and brings in money.  Sure, it might not be your main job.  OTOH even if you’re a college professor, start lectures on youtube, say, teaching your field.  Be good, be catchy (don’t be political. You probably don’t need to be.)  Not only can it be a secondary income, but if you achieve ANY notoriety it becomes harder to fire you.

For writers and artists, it’s easy. If you have questions ask me.

But I know at least one friend in programming already going indie.

Crafters have etsy and heck Amazon and ebay.  Yes, some of those are left controlled but almost all the self panics about Amazon are just that.  Ebay — waggles hand.  I don’t know about etsy at all.

It might be harder if what you do is manual/physical work. It’s not impossible.  Look around. Find out something skilled you can do as a side business. Figure out what people will pay you for.  Yes, Paypal is a problem, but other alternatives are coming into being, and if you’re providing something physical, there’s also other ways.

Learn. Find something you can do outside the left dominated fields.

Yes, I know it’s hard. Look, I took a year JUST to mourn and I’m only now coming out of profound depression over it.

But it’s not impossible.

Get secondary (or multiple) sources of income they can’t take away from you.  And then put your galoshes on and prepare to slosh through hell because it is coming.

Yes, it’s going to continue ramping up until it flares, which could be tomorrow or in ten years.  Yes, the next democrat elected WILL try to strangle bad thinkers out of the marketplace.  And will succeed with some people.

I’m not telling you it’s going to be easy. It’s going to be hell.  Which is why I want you to prepare now. Think of what you can do. Think how you can cut yourself loose from fields where your income will vanish because of a calumnious campaign against you.

And then GO. Because we are survivors. The nature of survivors is that they survive.

Plan, think, and — I’m sorry — work like hell.  Your future freedom and security will require you to work double as hard right now. But then you’ll have security and you’ll have freedom.

It will give you a chance to speak out.  And if everyone speaks out, maybe the crazy stops.  It’s unlikely. But it’s possible. Okay, it would be a miracle, but sometimes miracles happen.

And if worse comes to worst, maybe it will make it brief and relatively painless.

But first, before all that, you must buy your freedom with work.

And so must I. So, I’m going back to work now.

 

 

On Being Persona Non Grata – Blast From The Past From June 2017

You could say I have a contrary disposition.  You could also say water is wet.

My brother who is almost ten years older than I, loved to tease me.  When I started taking languages and literature and emerged as one of the better students and therefore likely to have a career in diplomacy, he once spent a summer night making up a mock-newspaper of my adventures 20 years in the future, when I’d have been declared persona non grata in most of the world’s countries, and sometimes offered money to go away.

It was funny.  What it wasn’t, by then, was really true.

You see, I’ve always had a contrary disposition, and will stick like a Spanish mule, and put my four hooves down as if set in cement, if you try to push me – personally – in any direction.

But by the time he did that I was in college.  And I wasn’t stupid.  At least not stupid in the social-reading sense.

I knew where the power was, even if all the Marxists who wielded power at every institution of learning insisted they were the underdog.  I’d learned in high school that I had to toe the political line or be punished.

And I’m an introvert.  I don’t like scenes.

And I’m human.  I want to be liked and accepted by the group, at least superficially.

And then there was the fact that I thought I’d spend the rest of my life in Portugal where, as a young man from there said on FB yesterday “There are only different kinds of socialists.”  So, there was no point being the voice that cries in the desert.  We remember what happened to such voices, right?

So I went along to go along, and yes, I’m smart enough to pretend.  Also, I’ll be honest, their ideology is a very simple lens.  It’s easy to fake.

I don’t know what changed or when.  I would think it was 9/11, but before that I’d become a fire eating, don’t tread on me Libertarian, the kind who thinks we really can get along without any government.

It was, you know, that a lot of my assumptions about the things the Leftists were right on had started collapsing as I read and understood more: the dangers of overpopulation; ecological disaster looming; the problems of child labor in developing countries.

I’d started reading Sowell on economics, and suddenly it made sense as Marxist economics never did.  And then someone, maybe for a prank, sent me a subscription to Reason then under Virginia Postrel’s editorship.  I fell headlong into “everything the Marxists ever taught me was wrong”  — which is true – but went all the way to the other side of no borders and no government.

I came back with a shock on 9/11.  I think my mind was already laboring at it, because my story Traveling, Traveling is about the dangers of bringing disparate cultures together too fast, and about the fact some people will want their isolation and kill to maintain it.

I still stayed quiet in my public life.  Well, quiet on politics, that is.  Through my thirties and forties, I kept my mouth zipped.  I even tried to pretend. And heaven help me, I must have been very bad at it.

Call it being out of practice in pretending, since in the years of working towards publication I only had to please myself.  I must have been better in Portugal.  Or maybe in Portugal they weren’t on the constant lookout for heresy as progressives have been here, in the last ten years, when their monopoly on information got threatened.

It became obvious, from whispers caught (and my kids heard more, and of course told me.  My kids being darker than I, most people didn’t realize they were mine.  And Kate also heard things) that my career was being curtailed anyway.  They weren’t SURE so I’d be allowed to keep working at a low level, and they watched me all the time.  But I was given no opportunities (hell, I wasn’t allowed to have even chance opportunities) for career advancement just in case I was evil and “conservative” (which in this context means “to the right of Lenin.”)

I still couldn’t come out of the closet and continue being employed.  I did consider just quitting, but Dan asked me to hold on another year.  And besides, the other house ate money by the handfuls, which means though Dan makes enough to support us, the house would suddenly swallow 14 or 15k because a kid fell in the shower and supported himself on the tiled wall.  (Which is when we found out the idiots who flipped the house before we bought it hadn’t put green board behind.  That was…. Er… fun.  When we were done rebuilding walls and putting in mold abatement, my entire earnings for that year had gone to it and taxes.)

So.  I kept my trap zipped and continued working.  I didn’t want to be persona non grata.

I still don’t want to be persona non-grata.  I only started talking about politics, because my (then) agent told me I had to blog every day.  And it’s impossible to blog every day without writing about what matters to you, which – given that I have this wound from the cold war, and it only hurts when I laugh – sooner or later the anti-communism, anti-socialism, anti-Marxism, anti-statism would come pouring out like vitriol.  It just would.

And you’d think in the USA in the twenty first century being against those things would not make you persona non grata.  Except of course it does.

Just the other day there was another announcement for a new magazine for marginalized voices: women, people of color, people of different sexual orientations. And my head kind of twisted.  If they’re marginalized, that means most publishing slots are for conservative white males, right?  This idiot actually went out of her way to say she was opposing the Sad Puppies and promoting marginalized voices.

Will one of you tell me what major publishing house we control?  Baen books is just agnostic on politics, certainly not a “right wing house” and even if it were, it’s not one of the big four.  So, what other major publishing house runs itself by the principles of Sad Puppies?  Much less the principles the idiots think Sad Puppies followed?

And if we’re not in control of any major house, any magazine, why are these people they want to make a new magazine for “marginalized”?  WHO “marginalizes” them?  H*ll most of the editors, publishers and writers in my field seem to be women. It reminds me of being in an all girls’ school in middle school.  And H*ll, if you throw in romance, women vastly outnumber men in all publishing.  As for race, you know, there was never a time ANYONE asked me to state my race or paintchip color (Home depot Spun Gold, thank you) on a submission.  And no one can hear my accent in writing.  So if I was discriminated against, it wasn’t race!

In the end it was this, the screaming like you’re hurt while hitting other people: the active marginalization of conservatives and libertarians and even traditional democrats (even Hamilton would be read out of the current Democratic Party, I think.  And the man was a monarchist who believed in a powerful central government) while screaming that the leftists, communists, socialists and assorted proponents of the ideas that killed 100 million people were the downtrodden ones that sent me running out of the political closet.

Do I like it?  Not much.

The visions of myself, refracted, like mirrors, go echoing through the net.  On the right I get called a happy warrior.  On the left I get called crazier names, including “politically insane.”  Or “fascist.”  Or of course, the old standby “racist, sexist, homophobic” because I refuse to bow to their aesthetics of “good art is that done in the service of the eventual Marxist state.”  (Most of them don’t even remember how that came about, but yeah, that’s it.)

And even those on our side sometimes say you know, I talk too much, I talk too loudly.

I know it loses me readership.  Several people on the left were fans of Darkships before they found out my real politics.

And I never wanted to be persona non grata, whatever Alvarim thought.

But what else can I do?  The more we stay silent and let lies go around the world again and again and again, the greater the chance Western Civ dies.

And for all its faults, western civ, the notion of individual liberty, the power of only semi-fettered markets, have lifted more humans out of poverty than ever before.  They have almost eliminated famines not caused by bloody stupid kleptocracies. They’ve proven the best for avoiding those dystopian outcomes: overpopulation, pollution, famine.

I know which world I want my children and grandchildren to live in.

And if I must be persona non grata, so be it.  I’m human. Like all humans I want to be liked, to belong, to be accepted in the dominant culture of my time.  But when the dominant culture of my time is a poisonous and undermining lie, there are more important things than being liked.  There are more important things than personal success.

At another time, in another place, I’d have stayed quiet in my library, writing my fiction.

But this is not another time.  And we’re not given a choice. [And it is still worth it, even considering everything it’s cost me – SAH]

I’m not a happy warrior.  I fight because I must.

Because everything I believe in depends on it.

When I was six, I found out that people could yell at me, beat me, do anything they wanted to me, but they couldn’t get inside my head and PHYSICALLY make me obey.

Which of course MUST have made me the most fun child to parent ever.  At least my parents had their revenge as I think #2 son was born knowing I couldn’t “make him.”

The thing is, people still haven’t given up.  And they’ve gotten way more subtle in their attempts.

And it’s all being done in the name of “if you don’t do this, you’re the evil one who hates people and makes them subhuman.”

You know, I never even thought about “compelled speech” until I heard Jordan Peterson use the expression.  I was just locked in “You can’t get inside my head and make me think what you want.”

I don’t hate intersex people. I don’t hate trans people.  I don’t even dislike them as groups.  Honestly, I couldn’t care less if they’re trans or not, gay or not.  I don’t like or dislike groups as a whole.  I mean there are probably even some communists who are okay, though there’s probably some kink in their psych that makes them want to hurt people and take their stuff.  Or maybe they’re just indoctrinated.

People to me are individuals.

And for the whole trans question, I think that the idea that one is trans is being pushed on a whole lot of people, including people who don’t have the apparatus to fight back, like children and emotionally disturbed people.

This doesn’t mean I hate trans people or don’t believe there are people who are trans. Of course there are. There have always been, more or less, throughout the history of humanity.  And some acted on it, and some conformed and some lived some way between the two, as with any human who sticks out from the vast mass.

Yes, they are very few (and I’m not talking about intersex people, who also exist but are even fewer) which doesn’t mean they don’t exist.  Or that they didn’t have a really tough time when humanity lived in poorer societies which enforced conformity more.  This doesn’t make them special. Everyone had a tough time back then, one way or another.

Nowadays though being trans is a fad, and like all fads it’s being pushed on people who would not be trans in any other time or place.  This is not the first or the last time this happened.  Did everyone forget the child abuse (let alone satanic child abuse) fad of the eighties.  Dear Lord, if you had any problem at all someone would tell you that maybe you were abused as a child and suppressed it.

Again, not saying child sexual abuse doesn’t exist. Though repression doesn’t, at least not in the way we think (or at least recovered memories don’t.) OTOH the human mind is an imperfect instrument, so it’s perfectly possible that people who were sexually abused very young don’t remember it.  Most humans remember nothing before 7.  And a lot of people are iffy till about 19.  And as you get older, you forget other things and people, traumatic or not.

What I’m saying is that at its height it was deployed willy-nilly to explain all human traumas, problems, flaws and neurosis.  In the same way that “being trans” is now being deployed.

This is not an “if”.  We know it’s happening.  Most of the teens who decide they’re trans (having given no indication of it before) are kids who are unpopular, weird, stick out.  And don’t say “Well, that’s because they’re trans.”  Some of them, sure. Most of them? They’re Odds, and rejected by their age peers, though they’d be fine if they were in a place with people of all ages.  Most of us, I daresay, were like that.

And in the eighties they’d be told they were probably sexually abused as children and just didn’t remember it.  Which I’m sure some were, but not even close to all.

People on this blog, in general, know about sticking out. And it has nothing to do with abuse or trans or sex in general 99.9% of the time.  Those are just convenient excuses that become fads.  If you can convince yourself it’s that, it’s much easier than “I was just born weird.”

So, to recapitulate: I believe trans exist (duh) and I don’t bear trans any sort of ill will, or hate, or really anything. I just don’t care.  Each person must make his or her way through life as best they can and provided they don’t interfere with me and how I want to live, I don’t care.

So, you’ll say, why don’t I call them by their chosen pronouns?  Why do insist on making this a binary world that has no place for them?

[Puts thumb and forefinger on either side of nose and inclines head in a sinal salute.]

Look, bub, if the world isn’t binary, it’s the world inside your head, which I neither can know nor guess.  Hold on to that, okay, because we’ll return to it.

First, most people who are trans are “transitioning” that’s where the term comes from.  The vast majority of them is either male and wishes to be female or vice versa.

If there are no “binary” definitions, and if people are all the same inside, despite of what their body is, you cannot — CANNOT — by definition be a woman trapped in a man’s body or vice versa.  On account of our insides being all the same.

So the very fact there are trans people means that we’re something inside, as well as outside.  (Biology would tell you the same, due to how hormones shape mind and thinking, but that’s something else again and there are slips in that mechanism.)

If you say you’re trans but you’re really identifying as an ornate building which is also a wingless dragon, you’re not trans.  You’re not transitioning between anything to anything.  I’d say that you’ve just let yourself get carried away and captured in the world behind the eyes, but that’s neither here nor there.  Provided you’re polite and decent in your interactions with me, and don’t go around with your front door open and your claws showing, I couldn’t care less.  I might look at you in horrified fascination, but so is most of the world.  And that’s fine. I for instance suffer of the illusion that I’m a writer. It makes me happy and it bothers no one. (Much.)

But then we get back to the whole matter of pronouns.  Why am I so mean and cruel that I won’t call people xyr, xer, violin, little flower or purple octopus? They identify as that. Why am I mean.

Whenever someone says we should ban abortion someone hauls out the technicalities question. Having grown up in a country where abortion was banned the whole time I was there, I can tell you the technicalities are correct: you can’t know when a woman becomes pregnant, unless you police periods. You can’t tell if a woman suffering a miscarriage induced it. Even if you know she drank an herbal tea, you can’t be sure she did it on purpose. And we won’t mention how many people “accidentally” miscarried during “exams.”

To police that you’d have to become worse than the Stazi. So the law wasn’t perfect or anywhere near.  What it did by and large is keep abortions to very early in the pregnancy and — if a medical professional was involved — keep them safe and rare (because the professional wouldn’t want to get caught, and fubbing it would mean he was caught.)  There were also a vast number of unassisted abortions, which I suspect STILL go on even when it’s legal, because the woman didn’t want to be seen talking to an abortionist (yes, everyone knew who they were) or even didn’t want her husband/mother/neighbors to know. These were less safe, particularly because abortifacient herbs are often heart-attack inducing or worse.  For the record, though I heard a lot of things, I NEVER once heard of clothes hangers used. It always makes me wonder if that was even ever true. There are less crazy implements, and any woman wishing to open the cervix would have access to them, having (presumably) access to a kitchen.

So, now let’s apply the technicalities to “using the pronoun someone chooses.”

There were (we haven’t gone to a place recently, and the other the clerk has moved on) a wait person and a clerk at two places we patronized that I couldn’t place in terms of gender to save my life.

This BTW causes anyone to stare and gawp even if they try not to, because it’s an ape thing, at a deep instinctive level. If you can’t tell what a person are, now, you’re going to be embarrassed. In ape-days it called from completely different reactions and guessing wrong could cost you your life.

So not knowing what someone IS is uncomfortable, and you try to grope for clues.  These two people had no clues.  So I would catch myself telling my husband things like “Honey, just give her the bag.” or “I told him but he didn’t hear me, I think.” which was ….disturbing and embarrassing and caused these poor people to blush.

The fact is, I wasn’t trying to be mean, it just came out of my mouth, more or less randomly.  Would it be easier if I’d called them xer or xyr?  WHY?  How would I know if this person was actually some version of trans? They might be pretty males or ugly females who have no idea how sexually undifferentiated they are.  (Both were very young, so it’s possible.)  Calling them either xer or xyr under the circumstances would just be another way of being mean, wouldn’t it?

Okay, so call that person them!  Yeah, that’s brilliant.  Except that like xer or xyr, you’re saying “I don’t know what you are.”  Or possibly “I think you have multiple personality.” Or in certain circumstances “They’re seeing other people who aren’t here.”

The technical question is very important.  With all the good will in the world, in the real world of people, how do you know what someone wishes to be called?  How can you guess?

I don’t know about you, and maybe I’m horribly unusual, but I’ve been called “sir” and “he” while wearing a dress.  And so far as I know, the front mounted radar emplacements and all, I don’t think I look EVEN SLIGHTLY masculine.  And I have at least one female friend who when dressed in jeans and t-shirt, and if you don’t notice (or dismiss as fat) the breasts, you’d think “male” without a second glance.  None of my male friends are quite that pretty, but some are close.  (BTW none of these people, ever, were subjected to a panty check outside a bathroom. Hell, older son who is … the opposite of gender undifferentiated at least once (when I noticed) used the women’s bathroom at a cafe.  Not to make a point, but because he was thinking and walked into the first door.  None of the people nearby, or the woman who went in after him said anything.  I, who again am not even vaguely masculine, have made the same error while plotting or thinking of a story.  I usually realize I’m in the wrong place when I see urinals.  Sometimes I back out, sometimes there is no ah time to back out and I make for a stall fast.  No one has ever said anything or demanded a panty check. AFAICT the bathroom thing was a solution in search of a problem.)

HOW do you know what to call people, particularly when it’s a made up pronoun? Are you going to require people wear little name tags with their pronouns?  And if they leave the name tag at home and someone addresses the person by an unwanted pronoun, is that the speaker’s fault? Is he required to read people’s minds, as well as slice to an infinite amount which they might be today: an ornate building or a wingless dragon?

As for them, screw them. Them is plural. Yes, I’ve seen all the instances of “but it was used as singular before.”  Outside of making meter and rhythm all the circumstances are AT BEST ambiguous.

In writing even he/she is more elegant than “them.”  Not that it’s particularly elegant. And it gives rise to just plain bad grammar.  More and more I’m seeing people say insane stuff like “That man, they did this or that.”  Which frankly makes my skin crawl, because they are not “assuming gender” even when the person is A MAN.  Which for an ape means is crazy, a kind of paralyzing insidious craziness.  Bad crazy.

I came across this bad crazy of wanting to control what language people use, and the thoughts it enables was in the eighties reading how to write manuals: don’t use policeman. Use peace keeper.  Don’t use fireman, use firefighter.

The people who think that if they change language and thoughts they change the world aren’t wrong, precisely. They’re just crazy.  You can change the way people think and talk, but when the point meets flesh, nothing changes.  Sure, there are women in the police force.  There always were, at least in my lifetime. But when you need to separate two drunkards, a woman is far less effective.  Police detectives, police clerks and police secretaries can be either sex.  And as far as I can tell always were, even before the crazy got to the language.  Firefighters… The only “progress” I’ve seen is letting women into the force with lower strength classifications.  I don’t know about you, but if I’m trapped and unable to leave a burning building I’d rather be fireman-carried than dragged down the stairs by my ankles by a fire-fighter.  Which would probably kill me.

You can change the language all you want to.  It doesn’t change the world. It can just make people crazier and unable to understand the reality that’s about to bite them in the ass.

If someone is trans, I’ll call him/her what they look like. If that’s not their preference, so sorry, I’m not in their heads and I don’t give them right to be in MINE.

You don’t get to be inside my head and determine what I can and can’t think. And I despise that you’re getting me to use them for singular through its sheer ubiquitousness.  Because it’s wrong.

I won’t give in to your demands, not if you scream, not if you hit me, and not if you cry and tell me I’m mean.

The rest of the world won’t give in to your demands.  You can make western people unable to think, but I’d like to see you try this in the rest of the world. I’ll bring popcorn.  And yes, that comment is hateful, because I have nothing against trans people but I despise humorless scolds of any sex, gender of ornate building identification.

Here, inside my head, I can think what I very well please. Most people know that.  And the ones who don’t will wake up to it the more they’re called “hateful” by the people who want to control their every thought and speech.

Peterson is right. It’s compelled speech.  And you don’t get to compel me.  Or anyone, really.

The people being bullied now will eventually catch on.  You won’t like it when they do.

I’ll call you what you seem to be.  Yeah, sometimes I’ll be wrong.  Sometimes people are wrong with me, which my husband and I think is hilarious.

If you make it your point of making sure everyone always addresses you as you wish and think what you wish, you’re a budding totalitarian.

You’re also annoying and should prepare to be disappointed.

Because TECHNICALLY what you want is actually in point of fact impossible.

You don’t get to violate people’s individuality, there, behind their eyes.  No one does.

And that’s all.

 

I apologize to the vignette providers.  I didn’t get a word this week, which might be my email eating it, of course.  So I decided to give all you eager scribblers a visual challenge:

 

Sunday Book Promo

*Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog.  Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so.  As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste.  If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com.  One book per author per week. Amazon links only.-SAH*

FROM MARGARET BALL:  A Revolution of Rubies (Applied Topology Book 6).

The CIA has embraced mathemagics, but only as a new way of doing the same old thing: Planting bugs. Thalia and the rest of the Center for Applied Topology’s research fellows have been dispatched across Europe with the mission of attending embassy parties, and teleporting back in later to plant bugs.

Unfortunately, academics are the worst possible variable in the equations of diplomats and spies. The resulting hijinks, escapades, and misunderstandings end up with Thalia on one side of a Central Asian revolution, and her husband, case officer Brad Lensky, on the other… And if they can’t figure out a solution, the entire country may go under water!

FROM D C TULLIS & J D TULLIS:  Through the Mirror (Book 1 of The Veil Series).

In Through the Mirror, Jason Whitelock and Ellie O’Connell are two high school seniors that live in the isolated and slightly mysterious port-town known as Eastmouth. The shocking discovery of a hidden room catapults Jason and Ellie into a clash with terrifying, lovecraftian alien forces and shadowy government organizations. Stranded in an impossible situation, the two must band together to survive the odds and find a way to escape back into the semi-normal lives that they had greeted with boredom only days prior.

This book should be of interest to fans of Jim Butcher’s ‘The Dresden Files’, Larry Correia’s ‘Monster Hunter Series’, and Rick Riordan’s ‘Percy Jackson and the Olympians’. It is the first entry in The Veil Series.

FROM LLOYD BEHM II:  Shadow Lands (The Shadow Lands Book 1).

A universe out of time…a land of no return…

Jesse Salazar is a priest of the Church Militant, who spends his days—and nights—hunting and re-inhuming the monsters that bump humanity in the night. He’s good at his job and gets paid very well to do it. But when the skies go gray, he wakes up to find himself in the Shadow Lands—the world an ancient Akkadian god uses to feed his minions their favorite food…humans.

Stalked by Abzu, the lord of the realm, and all his minions—including his wife, Tiamat—Salazar must figure out a way to stay out of Abzu’s clutches while assembling a team of survivors and putting together the clues to find a way home. With only limited weapons to protect themselves and no visible means of returning home, Salazar will have to use all of his God-given talents to keep everyone alive.

Especially if there’s no way back.

FROM C. CHANCY:  Pearl of Fire.

Bombs, fire, and murder….Caldera City. Stronghold and refuge, built by faith and elemental power in the heart of a volcano; surviving through magic, tactics, and a daring alliance with dragons. For Allen Helleson, Caldera was an escape from the lives ruined by his family’s hardline traditions; now he walks the streets as an Inspector for the Caldera Watch, defending the city other nations see as a pit of hell. For Shane Redstone, Caldera was the home she risked life and soul to defend as a Flame – until enemy curses blinded her, sending her away from the front lines forever.The war has come home again….Together they survive the first bomb. But Caldera’s enemies never stop with just one. Now a scarred yet deadly ex-soldier and a spirit-reading Inspector have to find and stop the bombers… before Wards fall, dragons die, and the caldera erupts in flame. One wrong move, and the city burns.

It’s been a very bad night.  I’m on about four hours of sleep (no, not my health. Just… stuff going on that’s not mine to tell) and I was going to write a rather innocuous post on the state of the writer.  Things like “I am almost over the cold and torn between finishing the fricking novel already and almost done with finishing the shelves and want to go assemble and set up my frigging library.  Also, the house must be somewhat cleaned today, and why doesn’t the day have 48 hours?”

But then I went to Facebook.  Which these days is mostly where I come across “real live leftists” who aren’t as stupid as Occasional Cortex (Yes, I DO know that bookworm room says she’s dangerous and therefore we should always address her seriously and respectfully, and without a hint of mockery.  I disagree.  Obama got that treatment and the presumption of intelligence on nothing much [you know we never saw a grade, an IQ test or any proof of his supposed brilliance.]  I think we should have mocked him relentlessly from the moment he opened his indoctrinated, unthinking mouth in public.) or as completely insane as Maxine Waters.  Okay, some of them are, but not the majority. They are just dupes, for whom it is infinitely easier to believe what the talking heads and their professors tell them and not to compare it to reality.  Some of them have even been sold on the crazy “personal reality” theory which of course excuses them from thinking and allows them to continue comfortable and happy as part of the herd.

So I stumbled on a thread where someone was justifying the abuse rained on the Covington boys, the provocation by a professional activist of a bunch of INNOCENT HIGH SCHOOLERS and the subsequent abuse in the media of innocent families and schools by saying that the MAGA hat stands for racism, sexism and oppression.

The thing is, I’m sure the MAGA hat stands for that in this liberal’s head.  Just like Trump is “literally” Hitler.

But can ANYONE point to a single instance of MAGA-HATTED crowds being racist, sexist, homophobic or oppressive?  Yeah, I’m sure there’s an individual somewhere (though curiously not so far caught on camera. At least not any non-false-flag individual) because in a country of 300 million, there are people who believe that Star Trek was real.  But seriously: in terms of policy (and don’t tell me excluding immigrants.  Being foreign or from a shithole country is NOT a race. And the fact you think it is tells us where the racist is) what has Trump done that is racist? Sexist? Homophobic?

WHERE HAS ANY OF THIS HAPPENED OUTSIDE SOMEONE’S HEAD?

So, I want to caution our countrymen (in the presumption somewhere deep inside they’re still such) to consider VERY CAREFULLY what standard they want to hold others to.  Because most surely, in the end, this is the standard they’ll be held to.

Remember that “judge not, lest you should be judged” it wasn’t against having an opinion, but against being careful what standards you use on others, because in the end, ALWAYS they will be used on you. Sooner or later.  And it’s way later than the left thinks.

Judging people by either what was inside the judge’s head (prejudice in its absolute meaning) or by the theories the judge has (which leads to all the happy fun psychoanalyzing of the right.  Sure, we could be afraid of people who aren’t like us, and that’s why we cling to our guns and Bibles.  Or we could have seen what happened to countries where people don’t/didn’t.  And not being completely stupid we insist on being prepared.  Oh, not against the people who don’t look like us.  It would be much easier if all leftists and their willing dupes had purple hair they don’t give to themselves.  It would make life much simpler. But alas, it’s not like that.  The left looks like us enough. But people who act like them are responsible for deaths upward of a hundred million and likely more) is responsible for genocide, massacre and most of the genuine MASS oppression in the world.  Certainly for the mass deaths of innocents.

It also allows someone to say that if someone wears a short skirt they totally meant to be raped, because that’s inside the head of the people saying so.

So, again, I ask the left: is that how you wish to be judged? I don’t have to have a iota of evidence that you personally support the genocide of a 100 million people?  I am allowed to look at your wearing a shirt emblazoned with a mass murderer’s likeness (Che Guevara) NOT give you the benefit of the doubt? I don’t need to go “perhaps this person is just an idiot, who’s been maleducated. He’s still a human being, and I shouldn’t consider hurting/killing him/her without proof this particular person is actually an evil commie who wants to kill me and mine?

Cool. Let’s dance to that music, if that’s what you want.  And note that’s what you’re saying with your actions.  Because your culture heroes are not only people that PROVABLY have hurt people and taken their stuff — Lenin, Che, Mao, Stalin, Ho Chi Min, Chavez, and the beat goes on — and taken countries to unimaginable poverty which secondarily kills and destroys millions more, but you, yourself constantly talk about killing people and taking their stuff.  Or you idolize people like Occasional Cortex and Elizabeth Warren who advocate this OPENLY AND IN PUBLIC.

So, is that the music you want to dance to?

Because you’re openly putting words in the mouth of more than half this country — yes, more than half. Probably around 75% judging by how hard your side pushes fraud and tries to prevent any fraud-stopping measures, not to mention the serfs you’re trying to import — and imparting to use crazy motives.  Wanting to make America Great Again is only racist if you think America was all white when it was great.  (Say, the 1980s.)  Again, I think we found the racist.

I know stepping out of the herd is difficult, and you’re afraid they’ll turn on you. (They will, but to be fair they will even if you don’t turn.)  But this herd is being led to an abattoir and Donald Trump’s election should have been your sign that most of us have had enough, and not that it would be a great idea to keep pushing.

I implore you to attempt to think beyond the shibboleths you’ve been given and to actually look around at the people you live near, who are not evil ogres that need to be watched by enlightened progressives all the time.

In fact, we’re by and large decent people which is why we’ve let your crazy get to this point, while you accuse us of the horrible things that exist only inside your head.

But we’re getting very tired of this game. Because the rules aren’t applied equally.  And even those of us who really don’t want to dance are getting to the point we wonder if there’s any other solution.  And thinking no there isn’t. Unless we want to allow you to take us all the way to Venezuela.

And you know, the thing is, if you hate us so much, there’s a million places you can go to: Most of Europe (if they’ll have you. Like most socialists they’re not very open to immigration from the first world. There’s a chance, after all, you’ll tumble to the game.) Pretty much all of Africa.  China. All of America from the Tijuana border on down.  All of them live by the rules you want to bring here.  If you really believe in them, pack your bags and go.

But if you are using those rules and the ideas in your head to gain power or money, or under the delusion you’ll be eaten last, I’m telling you to stop it.

We have nowhere to go. And we’re really, really tired of your pushing.

Any minute now, we’ll start applying to you the rules you apply to us. We’re going to assume you MEAN WHAT YOU SAY OUT LOUD.

We’re going to assume you both want to be judged by what’s in other people’s heads, and that you really mean what you say when you say you want to wood-chip innocent boys who happen to wear hats you don’t like.  We’re going to assume you really believe in fixed pie economics, and therefore want to steal all the stuff we actually worked for and built.  We’re going to assume you know Che’s biography and wish to emulate him.

And then it’s on.  And you won’t like this. We’re not the caricatures in your heads.  There’s more of us than you think, and while we might not be supermen/women we’re by and large, man on man and woman on woman WAY more competent than you are.

You see, we didn’t get the liberal-privilege help to get where we are, any of us. Instead we had to climb, build and make against the background of your prejudice and the lies in your head about us.

We have built that.  And we know how to build and make and create.  Which is a tad more difficult than the shitbird destruction and whining you engage in.

Which means if we turn us to destruction, we’ll be really, really good at it.

So, think about it.  This is the game you’re playing.  You’re begging us to engage with the same rules.  It might not be what you think you’re doing, but last weekend you made it very clear it’s what you’re doing. You couldn’t have picked more innocent people to attack, nor could you have fallen behind a more corrupt “activist” unless you know, it were Che himself.

The masks are off.  This is a good thing. With the masks off we can all see clearly.

Forgot what TV, your professors and your wishful thinking tell you about how stupid we are.  Consider accomplishments.  Consider that most of us not only survive but thrive despite everything you do to hold us back.  Consider for a moment that your lovely constructs of institutionalized racism/sexism/patriarchy don’t exist.  Not here. Not in the direction you think.

Then ask yourself: Is this really the game you want to play?

Because it’s way later than you think.

Once the game starts, you can’t back out.  And there is no arrow of history. There is no scripted end. That only happens in your head, and the world is not inside your head.  You can choose to look outside your head, question what you’ve been told, engage real people.  Or you can carry on in this path with the understanding that people not inside your head get a say.

So again, are these your rules? Is this the game you want to play?

 

 

The Truths We Hold—For the People – by Amanda S. Green

Two weeks ago, I started my commentary on Kamala Harris’ new book,  The Truths We Hold: An American Journey. Since then, she confirmed what we all suspected—she is running for president. Of course, anyone reading the intro to her book would have already known it. The intro and most of the first chapter are not even thinly veiled talking points for her campaign.

“For the People” is the first full chapter of the book. I’m sure she gave a great deal of thought to the chapter title. It refers not only to her work as a law clerk, and later prosecutor, but also to her political posturing as being the people’s candidate. In fact, if you go to her campaign site, the first page you see has a video of her and the caption of Kamala Harris: For the People.

Now tell me this book is anything but a campaign tool for her.

The chapter opens in 1988 on the day Harris reported to the Alameda County Courthouse for first day orientation as a law clerk for the DA’s Office.

I had a sense that I wanted to be a prosecutor, that I wanted to be on the front lines of criminal justice reform, that I wanted to protect the vulnerable. But having never seen the job up close, I hadn’t made up my mind. (TTWH,loc. 160)

Wait, what? She is about to become a law clerk for the DA’s Office and she wanted to be on the “front lines of criminal justice reform”? That doesn’t even make sense. Prosecutors don’t, as a general rule, worry about reform. They worry about making sure the criminals are convicted and do their time. Even remembering that day so long ago, Harris can’t help herself. She has to frame it all into terms that will help push her narrative today.

But it gets better—or worse, depending on your point of view.

Alameda County District Attorney’s Office is itself something of a legend. Earl Warren led the office before becoming attorney general of California and later one of the most influential chief justices of the United States Supreme Court. He was on my mind that morning as I walked past the stunning mosaics in the lobby that depict the early history of California. Warren’s words—proclaiming segregation “inherently unequal”—had taken a long fifteen years to make it to Berkeley, California. I was grateful they had come in time for me; my elementary school class was only the second class in my city to be desegregated through busing. (TTWH, loc. 167)

Suuuure that’s what she was thinking.

Not.

Think about the first day you reported for a job you thought might be leading to your career of choice. Were you thinking about what someone else did? Or were you thinking about how you needed to make sure you didn’t screw things up and get yourself fired your first day? I don’t know about you, but I just wanted to get through the day without screwing up too badly. Hopefully, I might even manage to impress those I worked with. But considering judicial precedent and social change? Nope, not even close to the top 10 things I thought about.

As summer interns, we understandably had very little power or influence. (TTWH loc. 173)

Well, duh. What did she expect? They were law clerks, interns. They were there to be quiet, watch what was going on around them and learn. They weren’t there to be movers or shakers. But, being Kamala, she has a point to make and it is to show she was different. She wasn’t going to just sit back and do as expected. The great Kamala is more than your ordinary intern.

The police had arrested a number of individuals in the raid, including an innocent bystander: a woman who had been at the wrong place at the wrong time and had been swept up in the dragnet. I hadn’t seen her. I didn’t know who she was or what she looked like. I didn’t have any connection to her, except for the report I was reviewing. But there was something about her that caught my attention. (TTWH, loc. 178)

Okay, first impressions of this paragraph had me doing a double-take. The first is her use of “individuals” in this context. It implies the police go around arresting anyone they want, without probable cause and without concern for the rule of law. It also shows that she no longer thinks like a prosecutor and probably never did. A prosecutor would use the term “suspects” because that’ what they were.

But looks at it a little closer. Here’s this legal intern, a student, reviewing a case file. Okay, that’s done in some DA’s Office. Once upon a time, I held that same position in another office many, many miles and states away. The ADA you work with will give you cases to review, usually with some sort of assignment attached. You’re to research some point of law or follow up with a cop or witness. But Kamala doesn’t tell us why she was looking at the case. Just that something about the woman caught her eye.

She goes on to tell us about the woman, painting a picture of someone truly in the wrong place at the wrong time. Oh, does Kamala tug at the heartstrings. It was late Friday afternoon which meant the woman would have to spend the weekend in jail before appearing before a judge. Our oh-so-concerned legal intern worried about whether the woman worked on weekends and might lose her job. Or what if she had kids? Would someone take them in or would CPS be called? Did the kids know their mama had been arrested? Oh the horrors! Kamala had to do something.

I rushed to the clerk of the court and asked to have the case called that very day. (TTWH, loc. 181)

Notice the problem here? She goes straight to the court and not to the attorney who told her to review the case. Oops.

I begged. I pleaded. (TTWH, loc. 181)

I’m sure that went over really well with the clerk.

If the judge could just return to the bench for five minutes, we could get her released. All I could think about was her family and her frightened children. Finally, as the minutes in the day wound down, the judge returned. I watched and listened as he reviewed her case, waiting for him to give the order. Then, with the pound of a gavel, just like that, she was free. She’d get to go home to her children in time for dinner. I never did get the chance to meet her, but I’ll never forget her. (TTWH, loc 188)

Oh. My. G*d.

There are so many things wrong here, I’m not sure where to start. This legal intern, someone who has not yet passed the Bar, decides she knows better than the supervising attorney and decides to take action. Again, without discussing it with him or his supervisor. She begs and pleads for a judge to come back to the bench on a Friday afternoon so this poor woman can be released. Then, she proves she is the champion of the victims by getting it all done.

Look, law clerks and interns just don’t do this. Not if they want to keep their jobs and want a hope of ever working for that particular office after passing the Bar.

While I can’t say she stretched the truth here, I do have doubts. As I said above, most interns doing something like this would find themselves getting a come to Jesus lecture they wouldn’t soon forget. You just don’t jump the chain of command like that. Then there’s the judge. If he did agree to sit down and look at the file and listen to her argument, the first thing he’d ask is if her supervisor knew she was there and agreed with what she was doing. Remember what she said earlier. As legal interns, they had “very little power or influence.” So how in the hell could she pull something like this off without having her supervisor involved?

It was a defining moment in my life. It was the crystallization of how, even on the margins of the criminal justice system, the stakes were extraordinarily high and intensely human. (TTWH, loc. 188)

Wait, what? She only then realized it. Had she been living under a rock until then? Had she not paid any attention in law school? She said she’d thought about former Chief Justice Earl Warren when she entered the courthouse that first day on her internship. Had she forgotten all the opinions he wrote she would have studied in her constitutional law or criminal law classes?

Or, as I suspect, was that written with her eye firmly on the Oval Office?

And I knew the kind of work I wanted to do, and who I wanted to serve. (TTWH, loc. 185)

I’ll leave it to you to decide who and what.

The rest of the chapter sets up her bona fides to run for office. Trust me, this chapter, like the intro, is little more than a campaign speech. We learn about her childhood, her immigrant parents, how their divorce impacted her. Then she tells us about her maternal grandparents and their social activism. Oh, she doesn’t miss a beat as she sets the narrative.

There is something about Harris, and this book in particular, that is troubling. I can read anything. Oh, I might want to plant the book against the far wall, but I can force myself to read it. This book is different. I found myself not just skimming but skipping paragraph after paragraph. My brain went into bullshit overload. It recognized what Harris was doing and finally said “enough is enough”.

Unfortunately, there are those who have been and will be pulled in by the emotion she evokes in her stories. They won’t/don’t look past that to see if what she says makes sense. We can’t laugh her off because she does know how to play the game. She is a master at manipulating public opinion. So we need to know what she stands for—other than herself. If that means reading this book, so be it.

Next week, we’ll look at “A Voice for Justice”, the next chapter in the book.

Heaven help me.

(Help Amanda drink enough to keep snarking the unbelievable twaddle that passes for deep political thought these days.  We’ll collect for her liver transplant later. Hit her Pourboir jar now! – SAH)

The evolution of living languages

Guest post by Nitay Arbel

The legions of Ancient Rome knew a collective punishment for particularly egregious offenses (such as mutiny) called decimation. One in every ten soldiers, chosen by lot, was to be put to death by his nine comrades.

The other day, somebody on Facebook bemoaned the fact that this or that writer had referred to a people being decimated by a plague — clearly meaning they had been reduced to a handful of survivors, rather than having lost 10% of their original numbers. Predictably, this “abusage” was  blamed on the lamentable (no argument there!) state of education nowadays.

This sounds plausible, except for two inconvenient facts:

(1) According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED; full edition, behind a paywall), said “incorrect”, and indisputably ahistorical, meaning of the word has been around in English since the 17th century (look at the examples under (1c))

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/48200

1c. More generally: to reduce drastically or severely; to destroy, ruin, devastate.

This use has sometimes been criticized on etymological grounds (see, for example, M. West & P. F. Kimber Deskbk. Correct Eng. (1957) 119 and quot. 1944), but is now the most usual sense in standard English.

(2) The above has also, for as long as I remember, been the meaning of gedecimeerd in Dutch, dezimiert in German, and cognates in several other languages. And yes, we did learn about the original meaning in HS Latin class, now almost 40 years ago.

The truth is: a living language, as actually spoken and written by people, is a living organism, and not a static construct (except perhaps in the most formal “static register” reserved for legal documents, laws, and liturgy). In particular, loan words imported from another language may undergo evolution in their meaning that takes them far away from the original.

Consider, for instance, a much more everyday example, “entree”. The original French word means “appetizer”, but in American English it universally means “main course” nowadays! (The original meaning survives in British English.) Does that mean everybody is using the word “wrong”?

And let me give a much more extreme example. The word ‘holocaust’ originally meant a wholly burnt [Temple] offering in Greek: holos=whole, fully; kaustos=burning. Holokaustos is how the Septuagint translates Biblical Hebrew olah, which is hence rendered by the anglicization holocaust in the King James Version.

It is probably not all that surprising that later in the 17th century, downstream from the KJV, we would see figurative use of the word to describe catastrophes, particularly those involving great fires and/or great loss of life. For example, in Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671):

Like that self-begott’n bird In the Arabian woods embost, That no second knows nor third, And lay e’re while a Holocaust.

For more examples see: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/87793 which even quotes a reference to “The general holocaust of civilised standards” in a 1940 House of Commons debate.

It is only after the carnage of WWII that the word (particularly capitalized) came to refer specifically to the destruction of the European Jews at the hands of National Socialism. This usage has largely driven out all other meanings, and indeed has been transferred to the deliberate genocide or democide of other groups.[*] (I myself generally use the Hebrew word Shoah [=“catastrophe”].)

The infamous “N-word” is another example. Etymologically, it refers to the Latin word for the color black. However, centuries-long derogatory use for people of Sub-Saharan African ancestry has ensured the word has no other meaning than a racial slur – with the notable exception of “linguistic reappropriation” by black people. “Qu**r” used to mean just “strange”, but nowadays is only used as a derogatory term for homosexual, or (again through reappropriation) as self-identification by a militant subculture among same-sex attracted people.

Such appropriation is itself one of the more amusing mechanisms by which language evolves: people who are being called certain pejoratives and decide to reclaim them as battle flags. “Tory”, “Methodist”, “Yankee”, “Redneck”, “Impressionist”,… all started this way. More recently, many proudly are calling themselves “deplorables”. (Dutch and German even have names for such terms: “geuzennaam” and “Geusenwort”, respectively. I have blogged about this phenomenon before: https://spinstrangenesscharm.wordpress.com/2017/01/20/deplorables-as-a-geuzennaam-linguistic-reappropriation/ )

Another amusing (or exasperating, depending on one’s point of view) mechanism is what Stephen Pinker has termed the “euphemism treadmill”. After a certain euphemism has driven out the original taboo term, it becomes itself taboo and a new “euphemism for the euphemism” needs to be invented, rinse and repeat ad infinitum. Thus, for instance, bog-house or outhouse -> privy -> toilet or lavatory -> bathroom -> restroom, WC, washroom.[**]

When foreign loan words get imported into English and the meaning does get preserved, the spellings may change inexplicably: for instance, the original French bataillon becomes, inexplicably, battalion in English (possibly via Italian battaglione).

Or — English is notorious for this — English pronunciation of the loan word may be mangled to the point native speakers of the source language don’t even recognize the word anymore. The first time somebody tried to tell me she owned a “Cay Shunt” I had no idea she was talking about the Keeshond dog breed (pronounced case hond).

Are all of these accepted contemporary usages “wrong”?

Actually, all of the above are examples of a broader question: whether language standards should be prescriptive (language as it should be spoken/written) or descriptive (language as people actually speak and write it).

French, Hebrew, Dutch, (Peninsular) Spanish, and (to a slightly lesser extent) German  are examples of the prescriptive approach. These languages have official, government-sponsored national language academies whose permanent mission it is to set the correct standards. (The Rat for Deutsche Rechtschreibung, literally “Council for German spelling”, has a more narrowly-defined mandate than the others.) Correct usage is whatever the language academy deems correct and publishes in official reference works. From the very beginning, national language academies have been watchful of “contamination” by other living foreign languages (through loan words or loan translations): recently, this has focused particularly on the struggle against franglais in French, Denglish in German, etc. For instance, French, Greek, Hebrew,… language academies have invested great efforts in coining neologisms for all sorts of scientific and technological terms from English. So a computer, software, and a printer in proper French become ordinateur, logiciel, and imprimante, respectively; in modern Hebrew machshev, tochna, and madpeset, respectively; in Standard Modern Greek, ypologisti, logismikou, and ektypotis, respectively. https://spinstrangenesscharm.wordpress.com/2018/08/04/language-registers-diglossia-and-the-greek-language-struggle/

 

In contrast, English has no such prescriptive body. Contemporary English has two major descriptive standards: the Oxford English Dictionary for UK English and Merriam-Webster for US English. The historical prescriptivist movement for English (spearheaded by, inter alia, the immortal satirist Jonathan Swift in this 1712 pamphlet: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/proposal.html ) met with limited success at best. One of its legacy is arguably the UK English spelling of Latin-derived words, where, for example, Elizabethan –ize endings were turned into –ise following the Latin source words. (This development never took place in the USA, and hence the divergence into two competing spelling standards.)

Now where it comes to accommodating foreign loan words, I cannot think of a language more promiscuous than “our magnificent bastard tongue” (as John McWhorter’s book of the origins of the English language is called). There is, after all, no official body out there with the authority to say words like bungalow or coolie are not proper English: once the loan word becomes sufficiently widely used, it will show up in the major dictionaries just a few years later.

Which is better, prescriptivism or descriptivism? I must admit: I find the faddish millennial abusages [sic] of “like”, “awesome”, “literally”,… as grating as the grumpiest old man among you (perhaps precisely because English is not my mother tongue) — but this is the price we pay for the descriptivist tradition of English. Prescriptivist languages like French and German evolve more slowly and elegantly, at least in the formal register — at the expense of a widening gap between formal (particularly written) and informal usage that may eventually reach the point of full diglossia (the coexistence of separate “literary” and “street” languages, like Classical and Vulgar Latin, or Classical and Koine Greek).

“Pick your poison,” as the expression goes. English, for better or worse, has made its choice.

 

 

 

 

[*] On a related note, post-WW II German avoids certain words and phrases which are perfectly correct German but have forever been tainted by their use in the Third Reich. You would not speak of the Endlösung of a technical or mathematical problem, for instance, or the Sonderbehandlung of special cases, or the Selektion thereof. There even is an entire dictionary devoted to this phenomenon: https://www.perlentaucher.de/buch/thorsten-eitz-georg-stoetzel/woerterbuch-der-vergangenheitsbewaeltigung.html

 

 

 

[**] Relatedly, in Middle Dutch, “kloot” used to mean “globe” or “spherical object”: hence you have Vondel’s “zo draait de wereldkloot” (this is the way the world turns). In modern Dutch, however, “kloot” only means “testicle”, and “klote(n)” is in fact used as an all-purpose expletive much like the F-word in English. Good luck convincing any Dutchman he’s using the word wrong…

 

Humans are funny creatures.  Particularly now.

I think the biggest difference between us and our ancestors is not that we’re living way longer, that very few humans are actually starving to death, that we can talk to people around the globe in the blink of an eye, or that we don’t need to feel the changing seasons, if we have even moderate wealth.

Sure, those are MASSIVE differences, but the difference I’m talking about is bigger than that because it gets in the head and into what makes us humans.

It’s entirely possible that at some point, after much pondering, an anthropologist will define human as “The ape who makes up and believes stories.”  All other things that distinguish us from our relatives are a matter of degree, but at least that anyone can figure, lacking language they can’t package experience as story and story as something that changes how we interact with the environment.

Which leads us to two things: like anything that helped us become us it has two sides, the good in which the stories helped us build civilization (look, okay, without persuasive stories we’d not even be tribes as such. Even those were and are welded together by origin stories, most fictitious.  We’d be family bands if that.  And there would be maybe a one millionth the number of humans in the world.  Ad we’d be… slightly better apes) and the stories that take it apart.

The problem is the second type of stories is getting too much of a foothold.  And it’s getting it because stories have been so successful AND BECAUSE STORIES ARE EVERYWHERE NOW.

No, seriously.  You see above, where I mentioned that very few people die of hunger now, worldwide? Even fewer people go without story.

You might think that this is a silly thing to say, but it didn’t use to be like that.

Heck guys, I grew up in a strange land and time that was still hypersaturated with story by historic standards, but which was, by our standards, perhaps 1/3 as saturated.  And being a bookish kid who lived mostly in her head, I starved for story.  I used to make mom buy me tiny little books (about half the size of a paperback, but maybe 4 pages stapled together) they sold at the grocery store. They were printed with stripped down versions of traditional fairy tales.  That’s where I encountered stories like The Drunken Soldier.  The Goose Girl. Etc.  But most of them were better known. And I knew them already, but the chance to read a slightly different version made me beg and whine till mom bought it (think kids with candy bars.)  The whole thing read and re-read was over in minutes (at least after the age of 6) but it was still worth it.

Though even in my teens the plot made me roll my eyes, I used to time my walk from the bus down the village street so I could hear the currently playing soap opera (broadcast on the radio. TVs weren’t universal and only ran in the evening, anyway) in snatches through the front doors.  Because, heck, it was story.

Books… I bought all I could, but I still read most of the books I wanted to read standing up in bookstores.  Seriously. I’d read till someone noticed and chased me out, then walk to the next bookstore and resume. Then the next.

And yet, even with all that there were still VAST amounts of time where I was left bereft of story.

Then there were the lean years when we were first married.  Our TV broke down shortly after #1 son was born, and we decided to save for a better TV, but then the money was needed for something else.  So we re-read the books we had, bought when we could, and only bought another TV 8 years later.  (And currently, technically, have no TV, as we watch stuff on the computer.)

But in the wake of a move to CO and getting rid of all non-essential books (the ones I was less fond of, or which weren’t research.  I.e. all but about 300 of them) AND being broke as heck (technically but not really. Sigh. Part of the thing, see, is that if we were willing to live on credit we wouldn’t be so pinched all the time. But not only do we refuse to, but because we know my income fluctuates, we try to save when times are high. And then if we do fall through — I suspect will happen this year, just because of a concatenation of circumstances or to put it another way, everything went to hell at the end of 18, and indie is going to take me six months to get going — and have to borrow, we go insane and live like the refugees of story until we pay it back. That particular year from hell, we were paying back about 30k, between older son’s birth (on COBRA! Emergency caeserean with three surgeons) and being unemployed for 6 months, and moving expenses.  Yes, we paid it back in two years, despite the fact that it was about what Dan made at the time.  We lived as you expect.) story was really had to come by.  Sure, we subscribed to the daily paper and we got some story that way (no? Think about it.) BUT other than that, I was starved for story.  Yeah, we went to the library twice a week, but there were things I couldn’t even read, and… Yep, like a junky in search of a fix, I hit all the free books outside bookstores. ALL OF THEM. I read a lot of — heaven help me — gothic romance, which until then I didn’t even know was a genre.  I read old chemistry and biology school books.  You have no idea.

And sometimes I had to go without story.

But even in that state, I had access to about a million times more “story” than say your well-read medieval person, who might own MAYBE 12 books.  And these weren’t, in general, your goat gagger books, but relatively slim volumes.  I probably had access to more than Elizabethan readers, and they could buy books in stalls in the market (well, pamphlets, and chap books, anyway.)

Go back further than that, and you realize how scarce story must have been.

Which is why we’re wired to pay attention to it. Because the stories that got told (mostly oral) and retold and passed on were if not factual important.  In fact, a lot of the non-factual ones were vital: from welding together tribes with origin myths to convincing your warriors they were invincible, to getting rid of socially counterproductive habits like, say cannibalism, to convincing people to fulfill their roles in society, mythological or just-so stories were VITAL.

The problem is that story has taken the bit between its teeth. Ever since literacy became a thing — about at the level of Elizabethan England, say — we’re surrounded by story, some of it utterly persuasive and completely not only false but counterproductive.  As in “Some stories are against civilization.”

And with broadcast of stories, we can now soak in story even the vast illiterate and “don’t care to read” majority which before got their story second hand through some guy who’d talked to some guy who’d read it.  In fact, it’s easier to become addicted if you don’t read and don’t question.  And story is now served up in song, in movie, in broadcast TV, in (mostly unfunny) comedy every hour of the day to everyone within reach of civilizaiton.

You might be homeless on a sidewalk in a major city, but you probably have a charity-phone on which you watch movies/tv/youtube.

And our school has long ago stopped teaching just the basics and now teaches story.  One of the most prevalent is the story of “humans destroying the planet” and “America is guilty of all ills.”

That last one slots neatly into the entire crazy of the noble savage.  The noble savage is a myth as old as time.  No, seriously.  There are traces of it in the first preserved fables.  Perhaps humans felt some regret at leaving animality behind (some people think that’s what the garden of Eden is about. I don’t buy it, but people do) and tat is embedded in our mind forever.

But no “noble savage” became as noble savagy as the Amerindian.  Particularly in Europe, as far back as the seventeenth century, the tribes in America were invested with all the virtues of upright and exemplary Christianity.

If you read — I do — factual accounts of the frontier you see a different picture. One of my areas of fascination is the meeting of the west with other cultures, and the true tragedy that often ensued, which was a tragedy on both sides, btw. If you read it you can’t help see people with such divergent stories in head that massacres and destruction are inevitable. It’s not, as the Marx story overlay leads most of the world to believe civilized man exploiting/destroying native cultures.  “Civilized” when the cultures met was a matter of degree, and not far. Weaponry etc. were close to each other. The west tends to win because it has a story in the head that goes beyond tribe.  And the “noble savages” tend to commit atrocities and horrors because their story in the head is TRIBAL.

In tribal societies not only are those outside your tribe not quite human but — and this is important — the way to survive is to meet other tribes’ encroachments with the most horrific massacre you’re capable of.  That scares the intruder away and stops the bloodshed. And your tribe survives.

This led tribes like the Zulu or the various Amerindian tribes to commit such horrible massacres that Christian, post tribal, even well-intentioned Westerners wondered IF THEY HAD SOULS AT ALL or if they were beasts in human form.

That is what a true cultural clash is.  We are kind of in the middle of one with Islam, too, and refusing to understand that’s what it is (which is part of the tragedy of a cultural clash.)

Anyway, the real stories, first hand, written down, of what happened are… appalling.  And true tragedies in that it was going to happen no matter how people of good will tried to avert it.

But by the time the story got to Europe we had the noble savage.

Now go back and look at the original Covington footage, the one that had serious minded, supposedly literate people calling for the massacre… of the boys.

In your mind make old Chief Spinning Bull a blond woman.  Make the young man standing there black.  Not ghetto. Not disheveled.  Just a nice, self-contained middle class young black man (the idea those don’t exist is another story. Ignore it.)

Would anyone have seen that as anything but an adult being crazy at a kid who behaved admirably?

Ah, but this involved an Amerindian, the original Noble Savage of modern age (TM) and therefore everyone’s sympathies were instantly with him, and no one even questioned things like “so he was blocking you.  Why didn’t you stop beating the damn drum and instead elbow him gently aside?”  Look, I’m a woman in my fifties and not in the best of health (though the problem right now is JUST a bad cold) and I could politely elbow my way out of that IF the kid had been blocking me.

Of course, the kid wasn’t blocking anyone.  This whole thing was footage designed to hook into the now old story-in-head of the noble savage. And they threw in “Vietnam vet” to get the right. THAT WAS IT.  (True fact, if everyone who claims to be a Vietnam vet had served in vietnam, the human wave tactic would have been ours. Also, probably, our troops could only lie down on alternate days, when the other guys squinched against the trees. It’s another story in head, for complex reasons.)

Stories are insidious and sneaky like that. They get in your head and make you perceive things wrong.

The main reason many industries are rolling left and dying is not because people who run them want them to die (some do, but that’s something else) it’s because the stories in their heads are so dense and thick that they don’t let them see reality anymore.  And they’ve distorted what they’re supposed to do, so they think their job is changing the world, or speaking truth to power, or…. instead of selling entertainment, stories, facts, or razors.  Or you know, teaching kids to do jobs.  Just off the top of my head.

Marxism is a really powerful story in head.  I might have yelled at a few of you about that, in the comments to yesterday’s post.  Sorry. Part of the reason I yelled is that it has taken me so long to see through the Marxist indoctrination I thought I had completely rejected.  But it infects everything, including the way we perceive the world.  Partly because it hooks into the really old noble savage myth.  And partly because it is already old. The older a powerful story is, the more it has infected other stories.  Even those of opponents.

So, people in the western world tend to think of the Noble Savage or the dispossessed or whatever in Marxist terms, in noble savage, les miserables terms.

Perhaps it is the fact that I’m “racially indistinct” (as in, now the incredible pallor of extreme hypothyroidism is falling away, I can be perceived as anything depending on how I dress.  My friend Bill is the same, which is a bond between us) and the fact that — see above — I’m really insecure about spending money and hate to use credit which means our entertainments tend to be cheap, which means really high brow (museums. They’re good value) or low brow, like diners and cheap amusement parks and therefore I see a lot of “the poor”.  Or perhaps it is that I grew up “poor but honest.” But let me tell you that most things people in general believe about the poor — heroic or despicable — are the myths of the Noble Savage and Les Miserables.  Neither is correct.  Nor are even Dickens scrappy, slippery poor.

The poor right now are mostly lower-middle-class and people working jobs that don’t pay much.  In America it tends to be a transitory condition. (We’ve been there. Several times.) People either rise, if the stories in their head tell them things like “If I work hard I’ll get better” or they fall, if the stories in their head tell them things like “You’re special, and the world is against you, and the man won’t let you improve your lot. Here is a government check. Indulge your worst tendencies and uncle sugar will keep paying.”

I mean the left is convinced most of the “poor” have been “left behind by progress” and can’t do more complex jobs.  You don’t need to be smart to rise in America.

How smart do you have to be to show up on time, look clean, operate a cash register?  When I was working at that level, if you did that for a couple of months and wanted to, they’d lift you up to manager so fast.  And even that doesn’t require a ton of brains. Just check who’s supposed to come in, count money, etc.

Smart doesn’t come into it. You don’t need to be able to repair the register or the calculator. JUST run it.  People who say people are being left behind due to low IQ just betray how highly they think of themselves and also that they never worked a starting job, ever, in their lives.

Do you know what the main problem we had when I worked retail? Getting people to show up more than two days in a row. Getting them to pick up the paycheck THEY’D EARNED.  My main problem working retail? BOREDOM. Seriously, it was unrelenting boredom. I became “Super housewife” straightening and cleaning shelves, just not to go stir crazy. IQ? Oh, please. And yes, if you went manager you could make decent living, enough to support family.  No, not enough for two cars and a yacht and a condo on the weekend, so if that’s your measure of “living” yeah, it was brutal. But since I’ve never made that yet, I think of living as something more modest.

Ah, but the myth. “We must help because most people aren’t smart enough for modern society” is really big on the left. It powers most of welfare and make-jobs bureaucrat boondoggles.  And yeah, it’s racist and sexist. (Though probably not homophobic. I’ve never seen any leftist claim that gay people are dumb. Though I presume they, like straight people, have the usual distribution.  But it’s just not part of the myth.)  As the left and Marx have always been.

The vast underclass in America are not noble savages (dear left)or the dispossessed (dear right.)  They’re just people who are very human and have found they can live easy by exploiting the myths in other people’s heads.  Only after a couple of generations, it’s impossible to break out of it.

Looking at the footage of the Covington thing what occurred to me is that Phillips was in fact hemmed in.  Oh, not by the boys, who behaved admirably and who, my bet is, will grow up to be decent productive members of society.

He was hemmed in by his own stories.  Noble Savage. And “Great bad things were done to me.” (Which they weren’t. They might or might not have been done to his direct ancestors, who probably gave as good as they got. Some were done to “people who look like him.” but the possibility that either one of the Covington boys’ ancestors, or Phillips ancestors or anyone was involved in the true horrors of colonization are… minor. It’s a story. A pernicious one.) and of course the Marxist idea that class must fight class, and the neo-Marxist idea that race must fight race and that anyone who wears a MAGA hat and therefore declares he/she doesn’t believe in socialism is an oppressor.

That man is a prisoner of poisonous stories. Everything I’ve read about him shows him to be bitter, mean and full of anger towards… well, everyone.

The stories have him and they won’t let go.

As a purveyor of stories I tell you: Enjoy them. Use them when they’re helpful. Learn to discard them before they eat you and make it impossible for you to lead a joyous, productive life, or really do anything good or build anything that lasts.

Tearing down is easy. But it destroys everything.  And you too.

Most of our opponents are bitter, hopeless people, caught in the hell of their own vision of the world.

Don’t be like that.