According To Hoyt

Okay, I forgot to post till now, mostly because I was doing art, I’m sorry.  Husband woke up and I remembered “oh, shoot, blog.”

But yesterday’s discussion on “why should we believe the UN on population when we don’t believe them on anything else?” made me think we have a pool of people with diverse backgrounds and knowledge…

WHAT things are generally accepted as “the truth” that are doubtful or outright wrong in your experience?  Particularly things that, like “the population is exploding, zomg,” trend to support higher government control?

I mean, not “people think the best gun is blah blah, but it’s actually blah blah, because that falls under holy wars” but other stuff, like population that you either know or have a strong reason to suspect ain’t as painted?

 

Yesterday we had friends over, and for reasons unknown to anyone but the psychiatrists we don’t have, we ended up sharing “favorite youtube crazy people” from Ants Canada (run by a Philippine from the Philippines) to Collin Furze, to someone a friend shared and whose name I don’t remember (really bad night.  Asthma) but who seems to be an African living in Belgium and commenting on… lifestyle videos on the internet with a surprisingly common sense perspective (in English, of course.)

For whatever reason the first of his videos that came up was of his fisking someone’s review of “eating ass.”  (Most aren’t that salacious.  He fisks vegan videos and such.)

First, the guy was absolutely right in fisking that video and in what he says a) why do you review something like that?  Are you selling it on ebay?  b) you can’t convince us it’s all that and a cup of coffee.  You’re lying (It was curious, watching the woman — kid really — doing the video.  Given the subject, and how much she tried to tell us not to knock it till we tried it, she looked bored and joyless, and like she was performing some sort of duty.  It made me think of the far left talking about the revolutionary nature of sex or whatever.  They honestly make sex boring, something no one else has managed, ever) c) You need help of the mental kind.

BUT what struck me was her clinching “argument” at the end of the video which was that if you were against eating ass, you should just be killed.  It went like this “The Earth is overpopulated, and if you’re not even going to try this you’re weak, and we should get rid of the weak first.”

There are rings of madness around that central, insane point of her argument, but let’s for a moment go with “The Earth is overpopulated” which the left seems to default to in their arguments on why, oh… we should support wholesale abortion for nay reason; it’s a good thing that people don’t get married; non reproductive sex is superior; we should have low-tech and the resulting deaths are a good thing; we should encourage assisted suicide; we shouldn’t spend money keeping old people alive… etc…

Yes, I know that the center of this is that they hate people, and in a more wide circle, they hate all of life.  They’re hierarchy of hates goes: oikophobia, hate of humanity, and ultimately hate of all life.  The core of their being is self-hatred which they project outward, until their ideal is a rocky planet scoured of all living things.  Only then would they be happy.

The inevitable massacres of Marxism, and the population decline and death of socialist (even soft socialist) countries comes from that place.  It’s not so much an unintended consequence as the wish they don’t even admit to.  It’s return of the repressed written in graves and rotting corpses and lost opportunities.

I know that, but they don’t.  It’s very important for them to view themselves as good people, hence the “this time utopia!”

However, they use overpopulation as an excuse.

As you guys know, I think overpopulation, ie. the numbers the UN quotes are bullshit slathered in bullcrap.  The giveaway is not only that the countries still reporting massive growth are those that are net receivers of international aid per-capita, but that they’re not countries who could count their own government functionaries and get the same count within a thousand two times in ten.

But let’s leave that aside, and pretend that the UN, in this as in nothing else ever, is absolutely right and has an accurate count of the Earth’s population on the way to 9 billion or whatever the heck their crazy estimate is.  Let’s say it’s that.

By what principle are we even remotely overpopulated?

1- Overpopulation is when an organism runs out of room.  I’m looking out my office window on 300 acres of natural preserve.  If the Earth were truly overpopulated, we would be trying to take over every last little bit of land.  Oh, and also, I’m not in a mega high rise, to take advantage of the high-priced acreage.  (I am on a third floor, but it’s MY house.)
Look, the free market and prices are the best way we’ve come up with to measure abundance and scarcity.  Abundant resources are cheap.  Scarce resources are expensive.  At least barring the government interfering.
The reason we know we’re not overpopulated is that, except by some urban areas (and that’s not overpopulation, that’s people wanting to live there for other reasons, like job market) land is NOT at a premium.
Honestly, I think Europeans buy this because they never drive to the almost-abandoned rural areas of their countries; because they imagine that America is as populated as their own countries (honestly we aren’t.  We have miles and miles of miles and miles.  They don’t.  Older countries, etc.), and that most Americans who push this line live in dense urban environments.
Out here, particularly in the west, but hell, I’ve driven rural Pennsylvania, land is not at a particular premium.  Certainly not the kind of premium if we were overpopulated.

2- Food would be scarce if we were straining the capacity of the Earth.Food is not scarce.  Even in the worst spots in the world, famines aren’t as bad as they were, and famines are mostly caused by kleptocracy and bad governance, not by a lack of arable land, a lack of food, or anything like that.  In this year of our Lord most people’s food problem is being fat, not being famished.  And not even just in developed countries.
In socialist countries, yeah, it’s bad, same as it’s ever been, because they whack the free market, i.e. the only engine for knowing what is abundant and what is scarce and when to make more of anything.  Pray for Venezuela.

3- There would be mass immigration from starving countries.  That’s not the mass immigration we have.
Immigration is not a sign the places the people are coming from are overpopulated or that the numbers they report to the UN are true, btw.
Immigration is sign that some regimes, some cultures are so dysfunctional they have nothing to offer their people; and that western regimes are so soft headed as to give everything to newly-arrived parasites.
That “caravan” from the Honduras that was coming to the US?  Yeah, I saw the pictures.  No one there was eating the bare minimum of calories, okay.  This is not a symptom of overpopulation.  It’s a symptom of crazy.

And yet, the left’s idiocies, including the “no borders” one are based on the idea we’re so overpopulated we should be killing all babies and letting people in to relatively unpopulated areas, because humanitarian or whatever.

But scientifically, by the numbers, we’re not overpopulated.  The carrying capacity of the Earth might well be double what we have (however much that is) given current technology, let alone future.

And don’t cry to me about the animals.  The whole “if we take over the Earth the animals become extinct” is another excuse to kill humans.  Animals have been going extinct since the Earth has HAD animals.

So when people tell you we need to start eliminating the weak because the Earth is overpopulated, call them on their bullshit.

The Earth is not overpopulated.  Some people just hate themselves, are too cowardly to suck-start a gun, and prefer to turn their hatred on everyone else.

The answer to their hate-spewing is and should always be “You first.”

 

Dear Madam President. . .Really? – by Amanda S. Green

I am taking a step away from Thomas Sowell’s Black Rednecks and White Liberals this week. Don’t worry. I’ll return to it next week. As I told Sarah a couple of days ago, this week has been tough, and I feel the need to snark. That’s not possible with Sowell. I started the snarkage Tuesday with a look at some of the excerpts from Sean Penn’s book. But that left me wondering what to snark at over here. I have a couple of books set aside for later commentaries. So I really didn’t want to do them. Then I remembered Dear Madam President, the newly released book by Hillary Clinton’s former communications director, Jennifer Palmieri.

Here’s the blurb for the book:

DEAR MADAM PRESIDENT is an empowering letter from former Hillary Clinton Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri to the first woman president, and by extension, to all women working to succeed in any field. By using lessons learned during her experiences with Hillary Clinton, President Obama, and Elizabeth Edwards–to name a few–Palmieri through each chapter creates a forward-thinking framework of inspirational and practical advice for all women everywhere–from boardrooms to living rooms–who are determined to seize control of their lives, their workplaces, and their country. DEAR MADAM PRESIDENT will turn the results of the 2016 election into something incredibly empowering for future female leaders and independent thinkers everywhere.  

As a country, we haven’t wrapped our heads around what it should look like for a woman to be in the job of President. Our only models are men. This of course was seen during the Hillary Clinton campaign, and no one knows this better than Jennifer Palmieri. While wildly disappointed by the outcome of the election, Palmieri optimistically argues in the book that the Clinton candidacy and all she experienced on the campaign trail–confusion, admiration, hate, love, acceptance, rejection–can now open the country up to reimagining women in leadership roles. And that is what Palmieri takes on in this book–redefining expectations for women looking to lead and creating a blueprint for women candidates and leaders to follow.

Wow, “empowering”. That means it has to be great, doesn’t it?

But wait, it is a letter to “all women working to succeed in any field” based on “lessons learned during her experiences with Hillary Clinton”, Obama and Elizabeth Edwards. Oops. What lessons could she have learned from Clinton? How not to take responsibility? How to continue to whine about the results of an election more than a year after the fact? How to condemn and undermine women who accused her husband of sexual harassment and worse and yet support all those who accused the current president and other men of the same thing? (Double-standards are loved by Shrillary, aren’t they?) And what about Obama? What lessons could she have learned there? I know! I know! Maybe she wants to teach these women reading her “letter” how to sell out their country and allies. But let’s not jump to too many conclusions. After all, this is only the blurb. Maybe the book actually has some substance to it.

“. . . creates a forward-thinking framework of inspirational and practical advice for all women everywhere–from boardrooms to living rooms–who are determined to seize control of their lives, their workplaces, and their country.” What? Wait! If a man wrote this about a woman’s book, you could just hear the howls of outrage. From the living room?!? How many leadership or how-to books aimed at helping men be better executives, etc., refer to how they should act in the “living room”? In fact, I don’t recall any of them talking about how a man should react or act anywhere but in a business setting. Or is the author talking about in a social setting. Even then, isn’t that sexualizing the woman or at least saying how she socializes needs to be considered in how well she can be empowered? And isn’t that something all the Feminists tell us we shouldn’t do? Or is this another example of that double-standard the Left is so good at applying?

“As a country, we haven’t wrapped our heads around what it should look like for a woman to be in the job of President. Our only models are men.” OMG. There are no words. The writer in me wants to reach through the computer to find the person responsible for writing those two sentences and shake them until their brains run out of their ears. The only problem is I’m not sure they have brains. I don’t know of many women – or men – who haven’t thought about a day when a woman sits in the Oval Office as President. Following the Feminist dogma, it shouldn’t “look” any different for a woman to sit there than a man. Then there is the “only models are men” bit. Sorry, but no. We have other models. They might not have actually made it to the Oval Office but they are models nonetheless. They might be models of what we want or what we don’t want, but they are models. Every woman who has run for office, be it for local dog catcher or President of the United States, is a model. Every man should be as well. Sorry, whoever wrote this blurb, but the sex of the candidate isn’t the main thing most of us look at when deciding who to vote for. I know that doesn’t fit your agenda or dry your tears for Shrillary, but it’s the truth.

So, what about the book?

I’ll admit I haven’t bought it. Nor am I going to buy it. This book is a perfect example of overpricing by traditional publishers. Coming in at approximately 190 pages, the price for the e-book is $12.99. Nope, not gonna buy it at that price. I wouldn’t buy it for half that price. I did, however, download the sample.

The book opens as advertised, as a letter to some unnamed future female president. “Dear Madam President” are the first words you read. Okay, other than arguing over punctuation, there’s not much to snark there. Not that I have far to go before finding something.

“I am not even sure who you are.”

That’s the next sentence. All I can say is I’m glad the author doesn’t know who “Madam President” is. If she did, it would mean she can see the future. Of course, it would also mean she should have been able to see that Shrillary wouldn’t have been elected. If so, she either enjoyed tormenting HRC by encouraging her to run – and lose – again or she thought she could alter the future. Neither is very encouraging, is it? (VBEG)

“I don’t know if you are a Democrat or Republican or something else, I just know that you are out there somewhere. And you need this book.”

Wow! She is certainly sure of herself and her so-called wisdom, isn’t she? She doesn’t know who this future president is or what her party might be but, by golly, she knows that this unnamed and unknown woman needs her book.

“I wasn’t sure how to address you in this letter. Doesn’t madam suggest you are married?”

So, she is a Washington insider and wasn’t sure how to address the “president”? She’s worried calling her “Madam President’ refers to her marital status. Hmmm, am I the only one who remembers Condi Rice? I do believe she, an unmarried woman, was addressed as “Madam Secretary” and no one thought it meant she was married. Oh, wait, I see now. This is all a set up for the author to get to what she really wants to say.

It doesn’t matter if you are a man or a woman, so long as you can do the job.

Bullshit.

It matters.

So, despite years of being told it shouldn’t matter what a candidate’s sex is, it really does matter. I’m confused. Which is it? Oh, wait. I know. It matters if the candidate is Democrat. Then we should vote for her because of her sex. That’s what Shrillary’s been telling us this past year plus. She’s harped – and like a harpy—on the fact all the women who voted for Trump were weak and couldn’t vote in any manner except how their husbands told them. They were traitors to their sex. They were jealous of her, a successful woman.

Riiiight.

Obviously, the author of Dear Madam President agrees. Worse, she wants us to listen and follow her lessons.

Nope, not gonna happen.

You will bring an entirely new perspective to the office. You will expand our nation’s comprehension of what it means to be a leader. In its best moments, your presidency will give us a more fully realized sense of leadership—one that combines the best qualities of women and men.

OMG. Pardon me while I laugh hysterically. How many years of women’s rights is this gal going to push us back? An “entirely new perspective”? Why? Just because someone does or doesn’t have a penis? How in the hell is that going to expand the nation’s comprehension of what it means to be a leader? And what the fuck is “a more fully realized sense of leadership”? Is she really telling us a woman will be a better leader simply because she is a woman?

Given all the gains women have made in the last one hundred years, having a woman president may not seem like that big of a deal. It is. Step back and look at it from the arc of human history. It is still a revolutionary concept for a woman to be in charge. All of our models for a person in power, and certainly for the American president, are based on men.

I swear, I’m glad I didn’t buy this book. I’d have already launched it against the wall and we’re not more than four or so pages into it. The above quote has to be one of the most asinine I’ve read in a long time. “It is still a revolutionary concept for a woman to be in charge.” I guess she’s forgotten about Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May, Angela Markel, Indira Ghandi, Golda Meir and Benazir Bhutto to name just a few. [And in the arc of human history everyone from Hatshepsut on down to Empress Matilda, Queen Elizabeth, Catherine de Medici on to those people you named.  These people believe the arc of history has an arrow because what they know about history is jack and sh*t.  – SAH] That doesn’t take into account female governors, members of Congress or other world parliamentary bodies.

I guess they don’t count because their very existence negates the basis for her book – that we have no such role models and need the author’s “insight” in order to become the best woman and leader we can be.

I could go on. I could talk about how the author claims they tried to remove Shrillary being female from the political equation during the election and how that removed, according to the author, half of Shrillary’s humanity. Yes, you read that right. According to the book, HRC was only half-human because they didn’t let her play up the fact she was female. Funny, I don’t remember her ignoring the fact she was female. Do you? In fact, I seem to recall how she pointed out how that made her better qualified. She never failed to overlook a chance to be seen as part of Bill-and-Hill or as mother or grandmother. If you’ve read her book, you’ll see how she made a conscious effort to connect to women because she was female. So either Palmieri was taking part in another Clinton’s candidacy or she is deluding herself – or trying to delude us.

And this is the book being touted as the one we, as women need, in order to be successful in a man’s world. This book that tells us we didn’t have any control over our lives and how we were perceived until Saint Hillary took to the national stage and ran for the presidency. What an insult, not only to each and every woman who has strived to be the best she can be for not just years but for centuries but to each and every woman who ran for political office before HRC. It is in insult to Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president. It insults Geraldine Ferrarro, the first woman to run for vice president on a major political party ticket. It insults Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug and all the others who ran for office before HRC ever thought about it. Not that they care, but it also insults Sarah Palin who first ran for and won the office of governor of Alaska and who later took to the national stage. Of course, if Palmieri were to discuss Palin, she’d have to discuss how her own hero, HRC, took to center stage to attack Palin. Where was her loyalty to her gender then?

So no, I’m not going to use this as a handbook to “empower” me as a woman. A handbook should be well researched and historically accurate. It shouldn’t have me wanting to throw it through the window – unless I am in the middle of the zombie apocalypse and the book might take out one of the walking dead and give me time to reload the real weapons. Since neither is the case, I will delete the sample and go find the brain bleach. The only thing I can say is that, one chapter in, it isn’t as bad as HRC’s book. But that just means I’m damning it with faint praise.

Until later. (I promise we’ll get back to Sowell next week.)

[OMG, the reading masochist is at it again.  If you want her to do more slice and dice snarkage, hit her pourboire jar. – SAH]

She was there, in my head, without warning.

“Do you remember Lost Legacy Elsewhen*?”she said, her voice not quite my thoughts.

“I’ve never had a legacy. Trust you me, I’d know if I did.”

“No, Heinlein’s story.  The first book you bought in the US.  Remember?  Professor Huxley the professor sent himself back in time into his own mind. And lived his life differently.”

“Okay, now I’m suspicious.  You’re not the first sudden voice in my head, you know?  I keep getting that all the time. A Few Good Men, for instance.  There I was sitting on the… sitting, anyway, and suddenly there’s a voice in my head, and it’s Luce, and I have to write him.  Characters aren’t real, and you sound like a character to me.”

“I am a character,” she said.  “Because you are one too.  Cartoon character.  If someone gets turpentine near you, you’re a gonner.”

“Insults will really convince me you’re me.”

“Why not?  You insult yourself all the time.”

“Point.  Okay, so you’re my future self.  Are you going to tell me you ended up in jail and meditated yourself back to this time to warn me?”

“No.  I’m going to tell you I ended up in nothing much.  Death bed has an awful way of concentrating the mind.  I’m going to tell you you frittered away your life in the moment, and never did much.  Some people will remember Darkship Thieves a few years.  But not long because Baen no longer prints it, and you haven’t got your rights back.  The rest?  Fritt and flutter.  You never wrote the things you had in you.  You never finished series.  There was always something.

“I see you don’t answer, because there is no answer.  Besides, it seemed like a good thing at the time.”

“I don’t answer because you’re imaginary.  I don’t actually have to talk to symptoms of a dissociative episode.”

“Ah, but is it that?  Or is it real?  What if I came back today, to tell you you know very well what you need to do.  You know those books you’ve meant for indie, and never published.  You have at least ten of them needing only two days of work each before editing.  And your kids… well…  Let’s say if you’d been more yourself, they wouldn’t have–”

“Wouldn’t have what?  What happened to the boys in the future?”

“You don’t need to know.  You’ll know soon enough.  Unless you change.  Unless you do what you have to do.”

“You’re not helping.”

“I don’t need to.  Pretend you just came back from the future, to avert a terrible fate.  You know exactly what you need to do and where you’re falling down, don’t you?  You can see as well as anyone else, where your bad current habits lead, can’t you?

“Does it matter if I’m real?  You know what to do and what to avert.”

And so do all of you.  Right now, right this minute.  They say that this is the first day of the rest of your life.  And it’s true and stupid like saying we’re all naked under our clothes.

But it’s also true.

Pretend your future self just came back into your head.  It can’t tell you what happened, or how bad it was.  And it can’t give you instructions.

But you know precisely what to do to save yourself, or to improve the outcome of your efforts.  You know.

And so do I.

*I should have checked on it.  I had the wrong story/wrong character.  To be fair, they were both in Assignment in Eternity and it was early morning.  But I should have checked.

When Robert was one and a half, we asked his pediatrician if his intelligence seemed normal.
Look, I know IQ is mostly inherited, but mom’s family has some startling up and downs (okay, given the times, that might be nutrition) but also everyone and their brothers had warned us that as severe as pre-eclampsia was during that pregnancy he’d probably be mentally retarded.  And Robert was, like every high IQ (and/or Odd) kid ever given to saltational development. What that means for those who haven’t heard it, is that he lags WAY behind in a skill, then acquires it seemingly overnight. Both parts of which scare the crap out of parents.  He wasn’t as weird as his brother (Marshall, his brother is a great title for a novel) who refused to crawl like a normal human being, for instance, and crawled around the house on knees and shoulders, looking like a lizard.  Then one day he stood up and realized he could reach the chocolate on the table.  Within the week he was running.

I don’t remember what, in particular, was worrying us about Robert, but I think we’d got it in our pointy heads (look, we were young) that his vocabulary was too small.  (Mostly due to our never having met any other kids his age, at that point.)  The pediatrician looked at us like we were crazy and said “Any kid raised in your house, even an adopted kid will have a great vocabulary, and a great knowledge of the roots of western civilization.”

I still don’t know how he intuited that from just seeing us in the office, but anyway, that was what he said, at the time.  I’m still not sure it would have been true without trying.  I remember years of slog, teaching the kids the RIGHT word for the right moment.  And I remember realizing they were getting basically jack about the common roots of Western civilization in school.

I mean, I know my generation was shorted.  i was the first in my family not to have to pass at least two years of Latin in middle school.  (Which is bad, because Latin is the root of Portuguese, but also because so much of medieval culture is written in Latin.  All the way through the renaissance.) I also remember all the times I expounded on something literary and classical and my brother and dad cracked up, because as all auto-didacts I had massive holes in my knowledge.  Still do.  That I HAD to be an auto-didact is an indication of the fact that school was no longer teaching much.

But by the kids’ time, school was teaching basically nothing, except for the occasional “commandment” like “Save water because Paul Ehrlich says we ran out 20 years ago” or “glass is a natural resource we’re using up” or “you should go up to people who are smoking and confront them and tell them they’re doing a bad thing.”

Of the traditional education we expect in schools there was very little.  part of this is that immersion method of teaching languages (stupid enough in languages, if you don’t first have a time period with the rudiments and if your learning is limited to classroom time at best an hour a day) had by then propagated to other disciplines.

I don’t know if it’s actually ever been proven that anyone not otherwise dying for the knowledge learned a single thing from just being in the presence of it.  I know that it works really badly for captive children in schools.  it is, however, way easier for teachers.  Just have the kid in the general vicinity of spelling, or math, and they’re supposed to pick it up automagically.  So you don’t have to make them do anything they consider boring, and you certainly don’t have to think on how to reach them.

It took me a while to figure out that was how they were teaching spelling to #1 son.  He was just supposed to “pick it up”, with the result that he’s a very educated and smart young man, who periodically commits boner spelling in the highest degree.  Say Conquor instead of Conquer.  I did however give him enough spelling lists and copying duties it’s only very occasional.  I’ve met people his generation who are articulate, smart, and you need an oracle to interpret what they write.

By the time he hit French, I knew I’d have to teach him or he’d never learn.

As for Western culture, the doctor might have been right.  We just tend to get in these conversations over dinner that assume a knowledge of Greece and Rome and the history of science, and of course explained the references to the kids when they asked.  Robert was mad in love with Rome from age 2 anyway, and Marshall studied ancient Greek on his own and developed a love for the ancient epics (and the mechanisms used in Greek theater, because yeah, embryonic engineer.)

But I know how they’d have been educated except for that, and I remember their classmates, so it doesn’t shock me that, as their generation moves into the work force we’re starting to see complete ignorance in places like NPR and the NYT.  (This partly because the people they choose to hire have impeccable lefty credentials, and the left not only despises and resents all of the civilization that spawned them (with some reason, I mean, have you looked at these people?) but also are the greatest believers in “Learning just comes without effort.”  But only partly.  That generation just wasn’t taught.)

So we get things like confusing the resurrection with the ascension and NO ONE not an editor notices. Or the NYT thinks that the Trojan Horse was built by the Trojans to confuse the Greeks, and then gets in an argument that it should be called The Greek Horse.

It’s not the kids’ fault.  They just weren’t TAUGHT.  Their generation was so busy reading the assigned (not even joking) book about a Latin Lesbian who is tormented by religious people, or stories about the Vietnam war by someone who admitted making it all up, or the vomitous communist sympathizer Gabriel Garcia Marques who has written only one bad thing: everything he wrote, that they never learned, read or are even aware of the works that formed civilization.

When younger kid, in a fit of “I have to take another humanities course” tried to find a classical history course, it didn’t exist.  There MIGHT have been Chinese history, but all the other history courses were part of the victimology studies: women’s history, queer history, African history.

I’m not saying those shouldn’t be studied, mind you.  Heck, as most people who know me know, I study and read EVERYTHING, including, yeah, ridiculously biased leftist things (okay, sometimes I skim them) because if you don’t, how do you know what they’re up to?

And some of those can be interesting.  I have on myself a history of prostitution, for instance.  Sometimes you just need additional color on a period of history, and that fills it in.  But the point is that those are fragments.  It really means nothing unless you know what else was going on a the time.  For instance, yeah, sure, Tudor England hanged gays (at least gays of not sufficient status to get a pass) but they also killed Catholics and everyone who diverged from what the regime was trying to create, as a cohesive society.  it wasn’t anti-gay discrimination, it was, for the time and as much as they could make it, a totalitarian regime with no freedom of belief or thought.  If you just study gay history you come away with the impression that they have been victimized/tortured through time, with some very rare exceptions.  If you study history as a whole, OTOH you realize everyone different was marginalized/ destroyed, and some of the persecuted groups are people you wouldn’t now guess, and worse, that this happens every time a government has too much power.  Every single time.  Which is a completely different thing from “the government must protect these victims.”  (Government doesn’t work like that.)

The problem is, worse than that, that these children (a stretching of the point, since some of them I suspect are early thirties) have some reason to THINK they’re educated.  I mean, they spent their time in school.  They reaped passing grades and praise.  They know things their parents don’t know, and if south American Victim literature is so unimportant, why did the teachers assign it?  No, it must be that it’s important and the parents are bigots.  Hence they not only don’t know much, but are unaware of the they don’t know   And also — self-esteem education — they know they’re the smartest generation ever.  So these things we tell them they don’t know must be unimportant.  They’re the walking definition of Dunning Kuger and sound like it too.

Here’s the thing: still not their fault.  Here’s the other thing: the self-esteem bullshit prevents them from educating themselves after they leave school, as I and a bunch of others my generation did.

A third thing: our civilization can’t survive this.  To explain things like “why the constitution is still important” they need to have some link to the past the founding fathers came from.  They need to know that every regime that kills you for what you think and believe is a horror and ends up killing pretty much everyone in random heaps.

When you explain that Marxism is a Christian heresy, and why it doesn’t work, these children need a modicum understanding of religion (and don’t get me started on how religious education in the main churches is possibly even worse than secular education.  A diet of veggie tales and the giving tree does not spiritual guidance provide.)

Instead, they are ignorance covered over with overweening pride.  They glory in the false and superficial knowledge they’ve been given and use their present day mores and manners as a stick to beat the great people of the previous generations.  And they don’t know enough to realize some of the things they do might well be looked upon as as evil as slavery is now.  Because they don’t understand history and the “manners and mode of the time” and how they can blind even the best of us.

In other words, they’re savages, wearing the clothing of civilized people and convinced there is nothing civilization can teach them.  They are men come from the wilderness into civilization, who have no idea what created the riches of the civilization

What they lack is not technical knowledge. You can always study that as needed.  What they lack is the software in the head of a man who lives in a free society.  This is part of the reason they prefer absolute regimes, because that’s what savages do.  It’s also why they gleefully try to pull civilization apart: because they don’t know what it is or how it was built.  And why they believe cultures where women are stoned for being raped are better than their own: they know nothing of their own culture, except a few insults at the past their teachers taught them to recite “Racist, sexist, homophobic” and they certainly know nothing about other cultures, except that they can’t be as bad as ours, because they were taught ours was the worst.

Civilization might — MIGHT — be able to survive a generation like this, but it won’t survive many more.

Educate them where you meet them.  Puncture their overweening self-conceit, so they can at least try to learn.  And teach the younger ones.  If you must send them to school, make sure you know what they’re studying and supplement it at home.  You might have to learn some stuff yourself, to be able to teach it.  School has become part of the apparatus for destroying Western Civ.

As a species we cannot afford the long dark ages until civilization is reinvented (if ever.)
I’m sounding the tocsin.  There is a fire burning in the night, and it’s taking with it all that has raised MOST of humanity out of the ancient and intractable poverty of millennia.

Work now.  Make them learn.  Do not let civilization die in the dark.

 

 

 

 

Woke-ify Your Fiction

A good rule for writing science fiction and fantasy these days: If it’s not woke, it’s putting people to sleep. The key now is being socially conscious. Most people are regular conscious — reactive to basic stimuli like sight, sound, small rocks being thrown at them — but the more pertinent thing to be is socially conscious — reactive to microaggressions and the racism and bigotry that undercut all human activity. And if you want people to buy your fiction these days, it needs to reflect that social consciousness — as tedious as that all sounds.

I know some are resistant to this idea. You’ve probably heard this quote: “Why do I have to worry about all this political stuff? Can’t I just write fun stories everyone will enjoy?” You know who said that? That’s right: Adolf Hitler.

A lot of people don’t want to confront how closed and exclusive science fiction and fantasy have been throughout history. H.G. Wells spent a whole chapter of The Time Machine making explicit that in the future there would no longer be Irishmen. And when J. R. R. Tolkien ever had a woman do something useful in one of his stories, he always had to follow that with a note that this was a fantasy and would not happen in real life. And were later authors like Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke any better? I’m honestly asking; their books look very long, and I haven’t read them.

But you need to be better than that if you want to write today. You need to Woke-ify™ your fiction if you want to reach today’s readers. And I’m here to tell you how to do that.

Remove Anything That Could Trigger or Offend

In olden times, people would just plod away writing whatever they’d want without thinking about the damage they could be doing to the psychological well-being of their readers. They would probably plead ignorance of how their language could cause harm, but ignorance is no longer an acceptable defense — though, yes, most of us honestly have no clue what could set people off nowadays.

Well, my advice is that you consider your reader to be a fragile little mouse which any sudden movements or loud noises could frighten into running away. With each word, ask yourself: Could this scare someone? Could this offend someone? Could it be misconstrued as something offensive? Could this remind someone of some other word that could be offensive? If I were to look this up in the dictionary, would there be any offensive words on the same page?

You might think it’s a good idea to just stick to really simple language to avoid offense, but it’s not that easy. Think of one of the simplest books ever made: Fun with Dick and Jane. We’re not even past the title, and it’s already highly problematic.

Words are just a problem in general. I say don’t be afraid of leaving a few blank pages in your book. In the least, it will give your reader a nice respite before more of those troublesome words start bombarding him or her.

Be Inclusive

Now, I believe the usual habit these days is to think of every oppressed minority group you can think of, write them down, and then check them off as you include them in your story. And while that’s a great method, I think we can be even more inclusive. That’s why I say expand your horizons and try to come up with new groups that no one ever thought to include.

For instance, in my first novel, Superego, I was inclusive of psychopaths, a group still very much discriminated against. In my latest novel, Sidequest: In Realms Ungoogled (available now in paperback, ebook, and audiobook — just putting that out there), I’m inclusive of computer programmers. Computer programmers barely ever get to be the hero because they’re weird, awkward, and not very athletic. And frankly people don’t like them and say mean things to them, and it hurts my feelings.

So take a daring stand and be inclusive. It’s great, because it’s the type of daring stand where you can expect accolades for how daring you are — versus the other type of daring stand, which makes people angry at you. Avoid that.

Advocate Social Justice

To be good woke fiction, your story needs to be about social justice. But what is social justice? Well, regular justice likes to sit by itself. It’s just over there in the corner, at a table all by its lonesome, nursing a beer. Not even looking at anyone else. But social justice is friends with everyone. It’s chatting people up and laughing at their jokes and having a great time out with the gang.

Okay, I don’t actually know what social justice is. But judging from what I’ve seen described as social justice, just take whatever theme you have in your story and be real smug about it. Like let’s say your story is all about how teamwork is important. Then at the end have your character be all like, “We’ve blown your minds with our teamwork ideals, destroying your colonial ‘don’t help each other’ mindset. I bet your world has been turned upside down and you feel enlightened.” And maybe throw a hashtag in there. I think social justice requires hashtags.

Don’t Be a Straight White Male

This one is going to be harder for some than others. Sarah Hoyt has been pretty good about this, while I have always struggled. But if at all possible, when you sit down to write, don’t be a straight white male. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with being a straight white male — you were born that way, no fault of your own — it’s just that everyone hates you. So stop it.

Nix Fun

Some people are going to be resistant to this one. Isn’t fun fun? No. Fun is not fun. Fun is bad.

Think of it this way. Imagine someone smiling and laughing and having fun. Is that person thinking of all the oppressions going on in society and the racism that pervades all our interactions? No, if they’re smiling, they’re forgetting about all of that. Having fun is the opposite of being woke. Smiles are for fascists who don’t care about oppression. If you think any of your writing could make someone smile, you need a drastic rewrite so that your fiction constantly hits people in the face with all that’s wrong with society so they would never imagine smiling again.

—

Well, those are all the tips I have to help you Woke-ify™ your fiction. So go write something enjoyable and socially conscious. Or at least socially conscious. Or don’t write anything at all; it’s kind of a minefield. Plus I don’t want the competition.

 

Happy Easter and I hope those of you who celebrate it have a good Passover, and those others who are celebrating also celebrate whatever their religion dictates this time of year.

Rituals are an important thing because they bring order our of chaos and put a spiritual dimension onto the material, and puts flesh on the idea that what we do matters, that there is more to life than meaninglessness.  That some things are important enough to observe for thousands of years.  I think this is why even the religiously unattached tend to celebrate the big holidays.  After all, if we don’t celebrate Hogswatch night, what comes up is not the sun, but just a fiery ball in the sky.

So go out there, today, and celebrate renewal and life!

Meanwhile on Twitter apparently I’m being touted as the wingnuttiest of all…  Larry, MZW and even Colonel Kratman himself pale in comparison! And as for the Volks Deutsche expatriate?  He doesn’t get a look in. He can go and eat his heart out!

From my eyes on twiter: Found on Twitter, where one of this years Hugo nominees is moaning about your upcoming book with KJA: “Yeah, Sarah Hoyt is just about the wingnuttiest of the Sad Puppies.”

You heard it here first.  The chick who has no issue with gay marriage and who is mostly a “leave me the F*ck alone” libertarian is their idea of right wing extremist.  No, wait.  Their idea of right wing extremist is a religiously inflexible, morally preachy, racially bigoted (Latin people Uber Alles!), authoritarian.  They just think I’m that.  They’re right.  The resemblance is amazing.  (Ow.  Peeps up your nose HURT.)

The truth is that these people are completely politically and historically illiterate.  But I hate Marx and love Heinlein (neither of which these twits read or understand) and therefore I must be everything they hate.

No.  I’m not offended.  I’m allowing myself to break low carb today, and I almost choked on a peep laughing.  Seriously.  These intellectual infants preen and given themselves high intellectual airs, and actually convince themselves they are the creme de la creme of our intellectual life.  They remind me of when the boys would play in the backyard and claim they were kings.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: language

 

 

There is a Portuguese joke that goes like this “Could you eat a whole cow?”  “Only with a lot of bread.”

If you didn’t at least smile, it’s because you’re missing the underpinnings of the culture.  First, everyone is all about the bread.  No matter what you’re eating, there will be rolls on the table.  My grandmother used to say “Even in hell, they don’t serve soup without bread.”  (Which gave me an odd idea of hell as a very infra dig restaurant.)

Second, at least in my early childhood, the family often ended up in these all-day eating fests, a propos not very much.  Someone was back from overseas on vacation, or you had a large gathering of relatives, and the tables would be put on the patio, under the giant pergola covered in grapevines, and we’d sit there and talk and eat all day.  Sometime towards evening, women would flip the table clothes over (to the clean side) and serve dinner.  (After lunch and a whole lot of apetizer like stuff, which you eat while drinking wine or beer.)

In that kind of situation, you could eat a whole cow… with a lot of bread.  I’m not saying it would be good for you, either physically or financially (back then there is a reason we ate a lot of tiny, tastefully arranged morsels, unless it was stuff we grew ourselves.)  I’m saying you could do it.  Eat a little, drink a little, talk a little, eat a little more…

However anyone sane, or even anyone Portuguese, even of the time, if faced with a vast roasted cow and asked “can you eat that at once?” would go “Oh, dear Lord, no.”

I’ve always had trouble with this concept.  One of my first points of awe over the woman who would eventually become my sister in law was that she made these long, elaborate, HUGE crochet bedspreads.  While attending medschool.  And I kept thinking, “Good Lord, I’d get so bored.”  But the thing is, she made them in squares, while attending games, or sitting around after dinner, or whatever.  A square here, a square there, and soon enough you have a couple of bedspreads.  But if faced with the task you’d go “Dear Lord, it would take months and be impossible.”

Years later, I figured that out.  I mean, I always knew it intellectually, but I internalized it, too.  I used to have a collection of hand crocheted curtains made during writers’ meetings, and on plane trips, and long drives, and…  They were lost during the move.

About 12 years ago, the wheels came off that, mostly because I couldn’t remember a pattern long enough to execute it, which sounds stupid and is.  But that’s not how I experienced it.  I experienced it as “I am bored.” and I kept starting things and not finishing it.  The same applied to novels, and it turned out it was hypothyroidism affecting the white matter in my brain.

I used to go running forth along a thought line, and suddenly hit what felt like a hole.  Turns out it really is a hole, where connections are cut.  Your brain knows!  (This still happens sometimes, late at night, when it’s been a long day.  Yesterday I struggled in vain for the word “neurologist.”  Which you must admit is funny.)

Anyway, perhaps predictably, this threw all my habits of life and work out the window, until all I could do is finish novels by running at them full tilt and writing them in as short a time as possible (after fighting myself on writing them for sometimes months.)

It also threw other things out the window.  When the thought of getting up, showering and getting dressed seems like overwhelmingly difficult, you kind of let housekeeping things go, too.  And of course, when you try to get help everyone thinks “depression.”  And you’re doing all the things to get out of depression, but you can’t (though some of them help a little, because anything helps a little) because it’s organic and you’re very, very ill.

I’m now recovering — I have a disquieting feeling I’m still not full me, but dear Lord, it’s hard to conceptualize where I was.  It was hard to perceive it too, because when your brain is malfunctioning, your perceptions are off — and trying to establish habits and thought patterns and … well, all that again.  As well as kick my life back into order, starting with my surroundings (hence as much as you’ve heard about house keeping around here.)

Because see, whatever you think of yourself and your personality, living in confusion and chaos much less in filth, hurts you and limits what you can accomplish.

There is the illness and allergy issues, but there’s also never being able to find what you want, spending hours of your day looking for something, and just generally feeling like you’re slumming.

However most of us have jobs, and the time to accomplish “keeping the house in a semblance of clean” (I’ll never be an immaculate housekeeper.  That’s full time. I don’t have full time) is never there.

Reading people like the flylady (and her daily hints never arrived, and I’m not going to bother.  At any rate, all I wanted was the general concept) reminded me of how I used to clean the kitchens, at parties.

Okay, I probably should have realized I was an introvert, no matter how much I can “put Party Sarah on.” because when my parents had massive parties (late seventies, most of the eighties) I’d choose to be in the kitchen, dealing with the dishes before they became intractable (We didn’t own a dishwasher and mom would cut off her own feet rather than use paper for guests.)

That first moment you enter a party kitchen, still littered with pots, pans etc from the cooking (which might have taken two days) all in complete confusion (mom has a bizarre habit of not even throwing away trash, while cooking.  She makes piles of it in sink and counter, and then puts dirty dishes on top.  EW) is daunting.  You look at it and go “OMG, I never…”

Then you think “I’ll make order in this little corner”  then the next, then the next, and next thing you know, you’re standing in the middle of a completely clean kitchen, washing each dish that comes back and setting it on the rack to dry.  (And avoiding the party which was rather a thing.)

I’d forgotten that lesson.  The flylady, at first reading of her site, reminded me of that.  “Do what you can right now” and also the basic (which ties in with my readings of Peterson too) “respect yourself” (in flylady’s case “dress to shoes.”  I always dress to shoes, because that’s how I found out I could get ANY work done.  Wake up when Dan does, dress for work, etc.  BUT over the years I’d started interpreting “dress to shoes” as “cover all the relevant bits.”  I’ve been trying to work on “Dress as if you were going to work” with my hair up, and maybe jewelry and a touch of make up.  I know it sounds stupid, but it makes an actual world of difference.

So I’m not getting her full daily stuff, but I’m doing what I once did and “doing what you can where you are.”  While having breakfast and writing this blog post, for instance, I did a bunch of laundry that was cluttering the laundry room.  Just… you know, a load at a time, five minutes to fold that, return to post.

Can I sustain it?  Probably, since I really am better.  And just two weeks of this has made a marked difference.  There are a couple of foci of mess that I have to deal with, but a vast amount of it is cleared up, and the house looks like a human dwelling again.

Now, there will be stupid days.  Wednesday and Thursday last week were bad, leading to the house looking like a tornado had gone through and taking me more time to do the once a week on Friday.  BUT even that was less than in the bad old days.

Is this turning into a housekeeping blog?  Of course not, you know that.

The same applies to politics and our current cultural cold war.  We’re way behind.  The country is the equivalent of that kitchen with the sink full of disgusting, greasy pans, with food burned on, and under that all the entrails of the animals mom cooked, and butter wrappers under the pile of bowls in a corner.

And you look at it and go “Burn it all down.”  Which, to be fair, I often thought about our kitchen, as a party started.

But you know if you burn it, it will take the house with it.  So…

So you start in a little corner.  You do the little thing, in whatever time you can manage, even though it seems like it’s worth nothing.  You throw that pebble in the ocean and trust the ripples will do something.  It might be something you never see, never have anything to do with, but it also might be pivotal.

I’ve said before I owe my political conversion to whomever sent me a subscription to Reason way back in 92.  (Yeah, I as anti-communist before, but I was ‘European right’ which is to say left.) I didn’t even know anyone who would have done it at that time, and honestly, what they thought they were doing sending that to a mother of one who had never sold anything, I don’t know.

And yet, the ripples have gone rather far.

You do what you believe will make things better, one tiny, incremental microscopic thing at a time.  And you trust.  Maybe you’ll get lucky and see the results in your lifetime.  Maybe not.  It doesn’t matter.  You’re bringing order out of chaos.

You’re eating a metaphorical cow, with a lot of bread.  And maybe, yeah, nothing is sure in this world, maybe it will all be for nothing.  After all, a meteor could hit and wipe out life tonight.

BUT you can’t bank on that.  You can bank on doing what you can, as hard as you can, while you can.

And having faith it will mean something.

Because that’s all human life is: a shout against chaos and entropy.

Go shout as hard as you can.

 

 

For those of you who heard the New Testament story of Martha and Mary, she who did the housekeeping and served the unexpected guests, and Mary, who chose the sweetest portion of listening about the kingdom of heaven, it won’t surprise you that we all have a bit of both, of course.

Most of the sermons about that portion, at least the ones I’ve been privileged to listen to, emphasize the sweetness of Mary’s calling, the importance of spiritual life, and all that.  Partly, I suspect, due to professional deformation.  It is preachers, priests and ministers given them, after all.

But also because that’s the part people have trouble seeing.  Except in politics, world-changing, the secular stuff like that.

So, leaving the spiritual behind, let’s look at the Martha/Mary dichotomy in the world.

I was going to say I’m by disposition a Martha, but that’s not true.  Novelists, and world-creators are by avocation Maries.  Mary builds these great systems that all interlock and are so perfect and shiny. You need to be a Mary to write (good) novels.

But in the real world your Mary side sees these big movements, these big plays in history.  She abstracts the minor stuff, and leaves the whole theory shiny and beautiful and self coherent, and seductive.

Yes, Marx was a Mary.  (And other sentences you’ve always dreamed of writing!)

And his theory was, like all those great, self-coherent theories, a lie.  Because they are.  Because reality is way more complicated, each individual human gets a say, and things are changing even as we formulate the theory.  Believe in your theory, and you end up thinking history comes with an arrow.

It’s important to remember this.  I write lies for a living (at least in fiction) consciously, and I know where the holes are and why my stories probably wouldn’t work in the real world.  I try to patch them over, but truly, you can’t create something wholly coherent that is ALSO realistic.

The human mind is a machine for extracting meaning, logic and chains of action-consequence out of the chaotic soup of reality.

We do that, because, evolutionarily the over all pattern applies.  Like, you know, if you’re a person who doesn’t randomly attack your tribe mates, you’re less likely to get thrown out and eaten by a tiger.  It doesn’t mean you’re safe from psycho-Ogg deciding he has a hate on for you and throwing you out to be eaten by a tiger, nor that a tiger will lurk in your hut, warming himself at your fire, and eat you when you go back for a snooze.  Those can still happen.  But perceiving action consequence chains makes you less likely to be eaten by a tiger in sufficient percentage that you’ll have more kids who also perceive action and consequence.

Reality, OTOH, is full of psycho-Ogg and happy-Ogg and a million other crazy Oggs.  Which is why it’s impossible to control your life in minute detail.  And once you multiply your life by 6 billion (Bah, I know what the UN says.  Since when do you believe the UN?  I’d be shocked if we’re that many, really) it leaves History and any other big system as a game of Calvin ball, where the rules, the tech, the state of life is changing so fast no one can predict it, much less assign an arrow to it.

Part of the problem of those who follow Mary-Marx’s so shiny vision, is that they’re being driven insane by how reality persists in deviating from the beautiful self-consistent system.

I’d say that our side is more Martha and theirs more Mary, but that ain’t true.  At least, a lot of their loudest ones are Maries now.  (A lot of ours too, think on.) But the beauty (in terms of process, even if results are schrecklish) that was the long march through the institutions was a thing of Marthas.  They came in, they did the work well enough that even if their proclivities were suspected the old guard didn’t want to kick them out.  They were bright efficient and hard working.  And hired ONLY people of their political color, despite abilities.  That’s when the Mary interfered.  They started mistaking the shiny vision for both intelligence and competency (which explains the Sandra Berhard’s of this world) which in turn led to skinning the institutions they took over, and wearing their skin demanding respect while actually being unable to perform any of the functions of those institutions.  Because it comes to that.  BUT they got there, and to a major control of media, education and entertainment which allows them to continue pushing their shiny vision at an innocent new generation by being Marthas.  By doing thankless work, ceaselessly and well.

The Maries on our side are just as loud as the left, but because they look at the mess things are in, and how they don’t fit their mental shiny, they insist the only way to fix it is burn it all down.

That’s Mary for you.  I bet she never dipped her hands in a basin of greasy water to wash a dish in her life.  No.  In her perfect world, dishes come pre-washed and shiny, and why should she corrupt herself with the grease and the muck?  And why be Martha, who does all this over and over again, and what do you see, for it?

You see change.  You see incremental, tiny change.  Takes a long time.  We’ve only really started fighting maybe 38 years ago, if you date it from Reagan’s election.  Before that the growth of government and government as a good thing had been unquestioned by everyone, yes, even Republicans (we still have fossils from that time, guys.)  And at first the fight wasn’t so much for principle but away from fricking Jimmah Carter and his ineffective governance.

It’s very slow.  It’s very, very slow.  You wash dishes more, and even though the rest of the people living in your house are slobs, you see fewer rats.  Not that anyone else will notice, which is both beautiful and dispiriting.

Yeah, in many ways the left is still in charge, but we’re starting to see their power fail, because Marthas work ceaselessly and in a small way, here and there.

As Jordan Peterson put it, you’re not powerless.  You know what, 100 people?  Even if you write a blog post, or a novel, or a story, or a book about economics, and only twenty people read it, each of those twenty people can take from it an idea, that in turn they pass on each to another twenty people.  In ten years, your idea will be accepted as fact in the backs of millions of minds, and it can change things.  Maybe not in a big way, but little by little, one intellectual dirty dish at a time.

Do we have the time for that?  Who knows?  But barring total extinction, we do.  The Founding Fathers and their miracle constitution had deep roots, some of which probably went back to people talking, just talking, in a tavern in England.

We have a long way to take over the culture.  But unless our hand is forced and we go to weapons, which is more a thing of Mary, of course, big actions on big thoughts, we also have a long time.  And we can turn this around.  No intellectual climate is forever, which is something else the Maries tend to misunderstand.

Go wash a dish today.  Talk to a kid, write a blog post, set your life in order, fight chaos.

All life is a fight over chaos and creation.  We build.

Go be Martha.

*The lateness of this post is not the author’s fault.  I’m exceptionally derpy and couldn’t finish reading it in any sane amount of time.  But here it is, and sorry to be so late Amanda.  On the bad side, she’s going back to reading masochism with the next book, at least from what she told me — SAH*

BRAWL – Internal Cultural Differences and Historical Realities – Amanda S. Green

If you were to ask most anyone how African-Americans first came to the United States, you’d be told they came as slaves. Thanks to our schools and public misconception, we are not taught about those who came as indentured servants. Of course, we aren’t taught about the whites who came over in similar circumstances. To be honest, it is something I learned the hard way when I was in school too many years ago to count. I made the mistake of asking about indentured servants in a history class and being told such things hadn’t existed here in the States, at least not for whites. Funny, I have the original handwritten advertisement that had to be published notifying the people of New Jersey that my own ancestors had fulfilled the terms of their indenture and were now free persons.

That is a part of our history, be you speaking about black or white history, we have chosen to forget. Unfortunately, that has led to more than a little “confusion” about our nation and problems we still encounter today.

The first misconception that needs to be shattered is that blacks first came to America as slaves. That’s wrong. The first Africans brought to Colonial Virginia in 1619 came as indentured servants, a status shared by a number of whites. (BRAWL, pg. 41) This status of being “indentured” meant they could work off their indenture or buy it out. Once they had, they became free persons. The first law recognizing perpetual slavery was passed in 1661 in Virginia. (Note, this is part of the “red neck” sector of what would become the United States. More on that later.)

Once you accept this, you have to accept that slavery isn’t a uniquely “American” event. It originated under British rule more than 100 years before the colonies gained their independence. It also raises the question of why those clamoring for the removal of Civil War memorials (be they statues, street or building names or other forms of public recognition) honoring members of the CSA aren’t doing the same for not only our Founding Fathers (which some of them are) but also those British ancestors, both here and in England, who not only allowed slavery to be established here but promoted it. But that wouldn’t fit the narrative, would it?

In fact, the “size of the free black population increased after the United States came into existence as an independent nation, as the ideology of freedom associated with the American revolution led most Northern states to abolish slavery, and even in the South, enough white slave owners freed their slaves to cause the free black population there to nearly double and then redouble between 1790 and 1810.” (BRAWL, pg 41) Wait! What? That doesn’t fit the narrative.

As a result of this, there was an influx of freed blacks moving north. Even so, it is no surprise that, in 1860, there were more free people of color living in Washington D. C. than in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia combined. After all, who would want to remain in the area where you had been enslaved. However, this mass immigration caused problems, problems that we would see repeated a century later.

Many of the issues caused by this mass migration to the North came about because of the differences between the “free people of color” native to the North and those moving there. The northern “free people of color” were more literate and more urbanized than their Southern counterparts. In 1850, most free people of color in the North were literate while most slaves were not. It would take 50 years for most people of color to become literate or, to put it into context, two generations. Urbanization didn’t really occur until 1940. As Sowell notes, the “size of the free black population increased after the United States came into existence as an independent nation, as the ideology of freedom associated with the American revolution led most Northern states to abolish slavery, and even in the South, enough white slave owners freed their slaves to cause the free black population there to nearly double and then redouble between 1790 and 1810.” (BRAWL, pg. 41)

Among the consequences of the extreme range of education and acculturation within the Negro community has been the larger society’s erection of racial barriers provoked by black rednecks, which barriers then deeply offended those individuals at the other end of the cultural spectrum . . .That internal social barriers within the black community became more pronounced at the same time as white barriers against blacks in general suggests that more than coincidence was involved, since both occurred in the wake of the mass arrival of black rednecks from the South. (BRAWL, pg. 44 -45)

These barriers prevented the “cultural elites from separating themselves as much as they would like from the lower class blacks”. It forced them to live close to those they wanted to be set apart from. It forced them to share schools, churches and other institutions essential to their way of life. This led to a hypocrisy Sowell notes – one where these elites protested against the social and economic barriers raised by the whites while, in turn, wanting to erect those same barriers between themselves and the lower class blacks.

Another thing Sowell points out is that it took more than a light complexion or money to become an elite in this society. There was a behavioral aspect as well. One illustration of this behavior is the more stable family life the black elites enjoyed. Stable families with few separations or divorces marked this black elite society, unlike its counterpart.

So what changed? What curbed the social freedoms the “free people of color” enjoyed in the North prior to the Civil War?

The growth of this largely unacculturated population—“fugitives in the rough,” in the words of black historian Carter G. Woodson—in Northern cities during the first half of the nineteenth century brought both social barriers and discriminatory laws barring black children from schools and black adults from equal access to public accommodations.

Yet, as these black communities grew more acculturated over time, and began to rise economically, these laws and practices began to be relaxed in many Northern cities in the latter part of the nineteenth century. (BRAWL, pp 45-46)

“As these black communities grew more acculturated” is the key phrase. These immigrants from the South adapted to their surroundings. They adopted behaviors accepted not only by the free persons of color from that area but of the white citizenry as well. That adaptation, or acculturation, led to many of the restrictions to be eased.

This ability to become acculturated was severely tested in the 20^th Century. For example, there were approximately 30,000 blacks living in Chicago in 1900. By 1920, that number grew to 100,000. By 1940, there were 277,000 living there. In 1900 Detroit, there were approximately 4,000 blacks. That number grew to 149,000 by 1940. New York City’s black population came in at approximately 60,000 in 1900 and exploded to 450,000 in 1940. (BRAWL pg. 47)

Anyone who studied history could see what would happen. The exodus of blacks from the South to the North in the early 1800s led to restrictions on their way of life – where they could live, work, worship, shop, learn, etc. That is exactly what happened again.

The sheer numbers of these new black migrants from the South not only overwhelmed the relatively small black populations in Northern cities demographically in the early twentieth century, their very different behavior patterns shocked both blacks and whites at the time, as witnessed by adverse comments from earlier black settlers and the black press, denouncing the new arrivals from the South as vulgar, rowdy, unwashed, and criminal. Nor were these conclusions without foundation. For example, a study in early twentieth century Pennsylvania found that the rate of violent crimes by blacks who had migrated there was nearly five times the rate of such crimes by blacks born in Pennsylvania. In Washington, the rate of births out of wedlock more than doubled with a large influx of Southern blacks during the late nineteenth century. (BRAWL, pg 47)

It is difficult, if not impossible, to become “acculturated” to a new community when you outnumber it. That was the situation the Northern enclaves faced and, as society had done 100 years earlier, it reacted negatively and laws, written and unwritten, were passed to try to control this new, red-necked majority suddenly taking up residence.

But, with the passage of time, things began to change back to the better, just as they had 100 years earlier. Sowell contends this improvement has its foundation in more than just the passage of time.

“Nor can these advances be attributed to the civil rights laws that began in the 1960s, for the advancement of blacks antedated any serious civil rights legislation by years and was in fact more dramatic in the years preceding such legislation.” (BRAWL, pg 50) In fact, the number of black families living below the official poverty level fell from 87% in 1940 to 47% in 1960. That precedes the Civil Rights era. According to Sowell, the “principal factor that raised black incomes during that period, both absolutely and relative to white income, was migration—from low-income areas to higher-income areas.” (BRAWL, pg 50)

So, as Sowell points out, this mass migration North, and later West, put Southern blacks into a much better situation than they had been before moving. They were now in places where their children could go to better schools. Adults could get better jobs. Even if the migration negatively impacted those blacks already living in the North or West, it improved a greater number simply because of the infrastructure of the areas they moved to.

And, with the passing of years, the “black rednecks” slowly integrated into the existing society, “as minority groups tend to do in countries around the world.” (BRAWL, pg 59) As this happened, racial barriers once again began to drop. This happened after World War II and before the 1960’s. Illustrations of this include not only the increase in salaries blacks enjoyed but also things like Jackie Robinson breaking the barriers and joining MLB. Then you have President Truman working toward ending segregation in the military.

Yes, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 dealt a number of blows to racial restrictions, especially in the South.

Economically, however, the upward trends in black income and occupations that had begun decades earlier simply continued, but at no accelerated rate. The rise of blacks into professional and other high-level occupations was in fact greater in the years preceding the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than in the years afterward, and was greater in the 1940s than in the 1950s. Behind such developments was the fact that blacks were closing the gap between themselves and whites in years of schooling during this era. (BRAWL, pp 50-51)

So, despite all the back slapping and self-congratulations we hear from the liberals about how they’ve been champions of African-Americans, the libs haven’t done nearly as much as they’d like us to believe. In fact, by saying their actions are why African-Americans now enjoy a better life is to denigrate the actions taken by that segment of our society on its own behalf. It is to deny history. It is, in fact, to show the libs truly do believe African-Americans are incapable of improving their lot on their own.

What was improving their way of life were the major social transformations within their community. Blacks that had moved from the South to the North or the West (during WWII to find jobs) began integrating into their new communities and taking advantages of the better possibilities their new lives presented.

It would hardly be surprising if it also had an impact on how whites viewed blacks, as had happened in the nineteenth century. The civil rights legislation of the 1960s may well have been an effect of the rise of blacks, rather than the sole or predominant cause of that rise, as it has been represented as being, by those leaders—black and white—with incentives to magnify their own role in racial progress.

The difference between cultural explanations of changing race relations and explanations based on political acts or swings of the pendulum in white public opinion is not just a matter of intellectual preference. There are wholly different implications, not only about the past, but especially about the future. The question is whether the advancement of blacks is helped or hindered by promoting a black “identity” built around a redneck culture whose track record has been largely negative for both blacks and whites. (BRAWL, pg 51)

Think about that. “The civil rights legislation of the 1960s may well have been an effect of the rise of blacks, rather than the sole or predominant cause of that rise, as it has been represented as being, by those leaders—black and white—with incentives to magnify their own role in racial progress.”

That most definitely doesn’t fit the narrative of the Left. Not only does their stance deny not only facts but historical trends, it downplays the abilities and capabilities of a large segment of our society. Isn’t it time to fight the narrative and call them out on their BS? More importantly, isn’t it time for that part of our society to realize just how well they’ve been played by politicians and, as Sowell calls them, “those leaders—black and white—with incentives to magnify their own role in racial progress?”

[For raising the tone of this blog — ATH is culture! — and helping me with the exposing of the roots of the current mess — in her case with more facts! — if you decide to  send the woman a drink–  And her Amazon author page is here –  Also, she has a new book: Light Magic, under her Ellie Ferguson pen name. SAH]