According To Hoyt

 

Yesterday at church much was made of the necessity to shelter dreamers from deportation, because it’s the “charitable” thing to do.

It is, of course, the charitable thing to do to look after those who need it, but there is an epistemological confusion when one applies moral standards meant for individual humans to whole nations.

I keep running into this with the idiots that think the only time we should use our military abroad is when we DON’T have a guiding interest in doing it, too, and it drives me just as nuts.  It might be a beautiful and kind thing for a person to be disinterested in their acts of aggression or defense, (if a little daft.  You should generally use enlightened self interest) but for a nation it can be suicidal.

It’s as though people think of nations as “that guy down the street” and of course if that guy down the street is running around punching people just so everyone will be afraid of him, or even if he won’t take “nothing from nobody” in the sense that if you look at him sideways he punches you, he’s not a very nice guy and he should refrain from being a jerk.

Now, nations can be jerks, too.  But sometimes being a jerk as a nation is a good thing.  Because nations aren’t people.

In fact, I think the entire misbegotten idea of the UN is that nations are people, and people in kindergarten, and we just needed a kindly teacher, or something.

It failed, because nations aren’t people.  They’re not even groups of people.

Nations are groups of people wrapped around an idea (that is an identity) and claiming a territory.  They’re insanely dangerous things, because nations have governments and those things tend to grow out of control and get up to all sorts of no-good.  It is possible — theoretically — to have a nation without a territory, but then things get really fuzzy and metaphysical and it makes my head hurt, so let’s not do that.  I already have cough from hell.  I actually suspect that will be a new morph for nations by the end of this century, because of people’s location not having as much to do with whom they socialize with or where they work as it used to have.  But it’s almost impossible to be completely independent of territory, absent teleportation, because you’re still stuck with the physical conditions of your terrain, weather, and whatever your neighbors are up to.

In this, nations are like people: they have a body, ie. a physical location.

As far as nations are tolerable and necessary they are so to provide protection, rule of law, and several other benefits to the people living in a certain territory.

The people of such a territory can choose collectively (or singly, if it’s say an absolute monarchy) to let people in, or to provide charity, or even to go kick the nation down the street, because it’s been buzzing us with its stupid war planes, and if we let it keep doing that, then sooner or later it’s going to bomb a majority of our citizens, which would be bad.

It used to be, in less enlightened times, that nations also had very few qualms about, say, going to war to steal a warm water port, because its people really could do with one.  Or with taking more territory to expand, also known as colonies.  Actually both of these still go on to a great extent (see China and the grabbing of African resources) but now they’re dressed in ohter clothes, and are frowned upon by all the Western nations.  Most of whose citizens think of the nation as an individual.

So take the dreamers and — because this was part of the thing, and it made my eyes roll back so far I saw my brain — their families.  Say it’s the charitable thing to do to open our arms to them, their families and their hyper extended families.

Okay.  But I recall no — not one — command for nations to be charitable.  There’s a lot about individuals being charitable.  But why should the nation be charitable?  What will it get out of it?

Well, it gets to help all those poor little kids, who got brought here without their say so.  Um.  ‘mkay.  That’s nice, I guess.  It also gets to keep the parents who knowingly broke the law to bring them.  Um…. that might be charitable, but aren’t we on thin ice, here?

Won’t doing this cause more people to drag, bring or send (anyone remember Obama’s children’s crusade, with unaccompanied minors being sent on an hellish journey sometimes all across the Americas because he announced they wouldn’t be sent back) their minor children, in what is manifestly an act of child abuse (the conditions of the journey alone dictate that) in order to eventually get in themselves?  As charitable individuals, is that something we want to encourage?  And as a nation, is that something we want to encourage?  The immigration of people who are willing to exploit their own children?

And as for all their relatives coming in on the back of these poor children… my head really hurts.  How is that charitable?

More importantly, how is it charitable to the people already here to flood the country with illiterate, untrained, technologically ignorant people?  Don’t we have enough of those ourselves and shouldn’t we be more concerned with helping/elevating them, than with importing more people to take the jobs available to them?

And then it comes back to Nations aren’t individuals.  They don’t have a mandate to charity.  They have a mandate to protect their own people and make their territory as safe and prosperous as possible.  Seems to me that if you’re protecting your territory for your own citizens, you don’t want to encourage a mass invasion over the border.  Because that would be the opposite of all those things.

But Sarah, you say, we are a nation of immigrants, and many of those who came in were illegal and illiterate.

Yeah.  I know.  Though the economic effects on the people here weren’t always pretty, either.  But most of our mass immigration waves of the past came into a country at a level of technology where they could be brought up to speed in almost no time, and where most of what needed was willing hands, willing backs, and an enthusiasm for work.

We live in a far more complex world now, and as Mark Steyn asked the other day, what is the benefit to any technological nation of importing illiterates?

Also the nation of successful immigrant waves was a nation sure of itself, one that demanded immigrants adapt.  Not a nation that was so scared of its own shadows it didn’t allow citizens to display the flag in a school lest it offend immigrants.

One thing no nation can afford is balkanization: the splintering of its culture into many subcultures that lack even a common language.  Partition of territory tends to follow that.

And no nation can allow its neighbor to send over people convinced they own half of its land.  (The whole Mazatlan nonsense.)

Land is not magical.  By itself, it doesn’t change the culture of those who live in it.  Just because we are “charitable” and allow people to move here, it doesn’t make them any more prosperous.  In fact, if they keep their culture and don’t adapt, it’s likely to make all of us less prosperous.  More so for “refugees” from the Middle East where the culture has been strangling all developments for centuries.

Individuals not being nations can change their culture.  All the more so if they immigrate alone or with a very small group.

So, yeah, I’m not anti-immigrant.  (It would be pretty coming from me) I just think a nation, not being a person, should choose its immigrants on the principle of “this person would be a good addition to the nation and make us all better off.”

Most nations in the world do that.  They pick and choose, and if you want an education in how tight immigration can get look at the paperwork to immigrate to Mexico.

Should we be importing people?  Probably.  At least I don’t see any way to stop it.  There will be people like me, mad in love with the idea of America; there will be people who see a better future for their kids here; there will be people who just want to come.  But the country should not treat this as a charity.  We cannot in point of fact take all the hungry of the world onto ourselves, and if we could it would work the same as any redistribution.  Once they get a fraction of what we have, and are unable to produce more, we can all starve together.

In the US, as in most western cultures, we’re fuzzy on what’s “individual” and what’s “nation” and the duties of each.  So we get this “charity” nonsense.

A nation’s individuals can be charitable.  They can reach across the boarder and help other individuals.  They can even (and perhaps should) form charitable organizations that do things like job training.

But the nation as a nation has no business in charity.  Yes, I know, we do something like in foreign “subsidies.”  We have no business in that either.  It’s a form of Marxism infecting thought and people believing if we feed the wolves a little, they’ll eat us last.  A lot of our government’s money abroad actually impairs other nations’ development and makes things worse in the very long run.  And that’s when it’s not dane geld.

As for the dreamers?  Yeah, they were brought over through no fault of their own.  And if they meet the same requirements as the other immigrants: speak English so they can transact all their business in English; are self supporting; have no criminal record, they probably should get a green card.  It’s dangerous, mind, because it encourages more of the same.

OTOH if we don’t extend our benevolence to the parents, it’s probably not fatal.  Provided they match the requirements above.  And we won’t be rewarding outright law breakers.

But at some point we must realize Lady Bountiful is a great role to play with other people’s money and other people’s security.  It is not a sane or safe one for a nation.

It’s neither charitable to encourage people to use children in this way, nor is it charitable for the people already here to be importing more people who will need all kinds of support and all kinds of public assistance, and who, more often than not, make no effort to assimilate.

It is the opposite of charity.

And religious leaders who don’t understand this, might have other moral failings.

 

 

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.

 

DAVID BURKHEAD: The Thunderer: Three Tales of the God of Thunder.

Three tales, each giving a different view of the God of Thunder:

Donner Rothskegg: When a struggling family man is mugged on his way home, a homeless drifter saves him. Strangeness follows this drifter who proves to be more than he at first appears.

In the Hall of the Giant: Thor and Loki journey to Jötunheim, the land of the giants. There, Thor faces his most difficult challenge, and his most implacable foe.

God of Thunder: In the waning days of the Viking colonies on Greenland, a young warrior follows Skraelings, raiders from the icy waste even further to the north, that had been attacking their village. He finds something even stranger and more terrifying and discovers the truth of the old stories.

(BTW, David Burkehead is in a bit of a personal pickle, and there’s a Go Fund Me.

SARAH ROTHMAN: Suicidal Samurai.

A samurai-cowboy seeking revenge.
A secret society with a propensity for murder.
An exciting adventure in Victorian Japan.

When Mori Makoto returned to Yokohama after fifteen years of exile, he did not expect to be accused of murder. But when he comes across a dead body, Makoto is unwittingly thrust into a murderous plot involving killers from his painful past. Together, with a boisterous policeman, a thrill-seeking American actress, and a beautiful and mysterious shrine maiden, Makoto will find himself up against a dark conspiracy that could threaten the very survival of the new, Japanese government.

Suicidal Samurai is the first book in an exciting new series, Meiji Mysteries.

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: STUPID

Sorry, guys, I really meant to post, but I’m getting pulled about fifteen ways, work and family, and I kept forgetting.  I’m also either having the flu or in the middle of an auto-immune attack.  (Could be either.)

So, since you guys like visual cues to stories, I’m going to give you one, from Pixabay, and then go back to pushing liquids and getting some work done.

I’m so sorry.

Yesterday, on Facebook, Larry was discussing how the liberals interpret “some teachers will be allowed to carry guns if they want it” as “all teachers will have to carry guns.”  Going from that assumption, people of course make comments about how their friend the teacher is half blind and can’t shoot straight, which Larry called a “Poor Sally who was born without feet” argument.

I can see how it would apply, from having seen liberals in action for a long time.  Look, I know we’re not the side of “more laws.”  (They don’t know that.  Since this is their modus operandi, they assume it’s everyone’s.)  But in Portugal when mom was little someone passed a law that you had to wear shoes to use public transportation or in the confines of the city of Porto.  This was partly so that tourists didn’t realize how poor the country was, but it was also a public health measure.  In my day tuberculosis was endemic.  In mom’s day it was epidemic.  And there’s a charming habit of spitting on the ground/floor all over the country.  So, shoes were sensible.

Of course, showing the limits of laws to change behavior, because the country was extremely poor, I heard about this law because mom told us how they cheated it.  You wore one shoe, carried the other, and if the police told you to put the other shoe on, you said it made your foot hurt, and they couldn’t force it.  So people wore out one shoe at a time, and made it last twice as long.  (Father’s family was never poor enough for that contrivance.)

But if such a law passed here, or even if we said “you know, wearing shoes is a good idea for health reasons, so everyone should be encouraged to wear shoes” you know and I know some idiot would pipe up with “But poor Sally who was born without feet would never be able to go out.”

There is a fundamental denial of humanity in that statement and the poor Sally with no feet argument.  It assumes two things: what is not forbidden is mandatory, and if we want people to be ABLE TO carry guns (after passing all appropriate screenings) it’s the same as requiring every teacher to be armed.  And two, people are incapable of discernment and exceptions within rules.

First, this makes obvious why they want to multiply rules and regulations till ever part of your life is scripted.  They believe rules are a kind of magical spell, and if they exist everyone obeys it.

Given that idea, banning guns makes perfect sense.  I mean, if no one breaks laws or rules, just say that no one can have guns, and you’ve eliminated a major form of mass murder. Of course, then you have to outlaw explosives, and also knives and eventually butter knives.  And perhaps frozen legs of lamb.  (Never mind.)

Also, if people just do things according to law and have no discernment, of course we have to script every little thing.

Never mind that we never heard of a single case of a transsexual being banned from the bathroom of their chosen sex (unless they announce “I have a penis” while entering a woman’s bathroom) because no one actually checks the contents of your underwear.  (Trust me, one of my friends way back when looked so masculine that my husband on seeing her picture took weeks to figure out which she was (and only because her wife let it slip.)  And yet, she would go into bathrooms without anyone asking anything, and certainly without anyone checking her underwear.  In fact, the only time I know someone protested wrong sex in a bathroom was older son who looked six at 3, and who — being three — would do things like look under our stall partition to see who was on the other side.  (Not sexual but curiosity.))  BUT if people are like programmable robots, who only act according to rules and laws, then you need to specify that transsexual people will be allowed to use the bathroom of their chosen sex, or the panty police TM will rise up and stop them, right?

This is the same thing that makes taxes THE way to redistribute and doesn’t trust private charity, because if it’s not mandatory, people don’t know to do it.  It also removes several checks for worthiness, because then people will refuse everyone.

It is at the basis of the idea that the government needs to regulate EVERYTHING about business, because if it’s not mandatory people won’t do sensible things like, oh, raise the salaries of high-performing employees in order to keep them, or hire the most competent regardless of sex and skin color, because it’s a value add.

It is in fact at the basis of EVERYTHING.  And it’s a completely consistent view, except for one thing: people are neither robots nor computer programs.  They just aren’t.  No policeman is going to arrest Sally for going without shoes, when she has no feet and is therefore not walking like other people.  (Not unless he wants to harass Sally, which is why I’m against more laws.)

People don’t need laws to say “Healthcare will pay for contraceptives when they serve a clinical need other than keeping you from getting pregnant.”  Insurances were doing that for all the decades I’ve been in this country.  I know because given my screwed up system, I needed it intermittently.  Because people aren’t robots.  “Stops bleeding for a year” is not “elective use of contraceptives.”

“Looks like a woman and it’s none of my business” is most people’s default position, and no one is going to ask to check panties.  (Note this is different from “doesn’t make any effort, has a five clock shadow and is wearing a Carmen Miranda hat.”  Because in that case, yeah, people might get worried, since someone who does that might have other mental issues.)

“Doesn’t have feet, will not ask them to wear shoes” is also most people’s default position.

Because people aren’t robots.

In fact, the left has never explained how, if people are supposed to be robots, incapable of disobeying rules and laws, we still have murder, something that has been forbidden in every society in the world, from basic tribe on.

So… why do people think that humans are robots and must follow the law?

Honestly?  First, because we’ve lived so well so long, people of middle class upbringing have no experience outside their class and group.  If they are law abiding, they imagine everyone is, and that laws are inflexible.

Second because for years now our teaching of humanities has been corrupted by Marxism.  It’s all “Great movements of history” and humans as widgets within it.

It has a certain amount of truth — all of these things have.  That’s what makes them pernicious — in that people tend to have their mental image of the world and what’s possible within their time from the culture they live in.

But it is an incomplete picture.  Sure Elizabethans might think of the universe as a mechanical arrangement of spheres, and therefore that the sovereign was untouchable.  To an extent that explains how the Tudors got away with so much.  But it wasn’t UNIVERSAL and some people thought themselves quite outside the rules, which explains why it was the years of “a plot a minute.”

Because humans aren’t robots.

The very mechanics of Marxism demands that we think they are though.  (I think Marx might have been… ah… neuro-atypical.)  It’s all supposed to be vast movements of history and people will all act like the other, regardless of what they bring to the situation.  People have to be widgets, for Marxism and its promise of future utopia to work.

Hence people being divided into classes, genders, colors, all of which are supposed to act and think uniformly.

Except people aren’t robots.  And that’s where the philosophy falls apart.  And why pushing it into people’s heads as the model for everything is wrong.  And why Marxism in any form always ends up in piles of dead, whether violent or not.  (Do you want to count the dead from the many, many socialized health systems?  How about the dead because people don’t work harder than they have to, and society stagnates?  How about the dead of drugs because there’s no hope for the future?  Piles of dead I tell you.  Some in this country.)  Because it’s designed for robots.

And humans aren’t robots.

Whether the left wants to believe it or not.

 

 

 

 

 

The End of TSAR, er Lenin

(The State and Revolution, Pt. 5)

We’ve come to the end of Lenin’s The State and Revolution. I wish I could say it’s been fun but, well, nope. Can’t say it and won’t say it. However, it has been necessary. As we’ve seen, so much of what good ole Vladimir said back in 1917 has become political dogma. No, not in Russia or Europe (although it has) but here. It slowly crept in over the years but, if you look at the 2016 presidential campaign, it is there front and center. We heard major candidates talking about redistribution of wealth. We heard the calls for the oppressed to rise up against their oppressors. There was more but it’s too early and I haven’t had enough coffee to be able to rehash them without feeling sick – and very, very angry.

There is one good thing, if you can call it that, to what we heard in the last election. Those candidates spouting Lenin at us are the types of socialists he hated. They are the type he condemned in the last full chapter of TSAR: the ones who cherry-picked portions of Marx and Engels and talked the talk but didn’t walk the walk. (Not that he necessarily did either, but he was different. He was the only one who knew what Marx and Engels meant and he was the first to tell you.)

He’d have lined Bernie up with all the bourgeois because Sanders wasn’t advocating the violent overthrow of the government. He’d have laughed at Clinton for being inept and nothing more than the bourgeois she condemned. The very fact they are part of the government he knew had to be violently destroyed would have painted a huge target on their backs in his eyes.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t undo the damage they, and those like them, have done with their rhetoric. They spout all these ideas that appear so wonderful in sound bite but that are, in reality, untenable and a foundation of socialist philosophy (universal healthcare, free college education for all, etc.) I know very few people who won’t admit the healthcare industry needs major reform and who wouldn’t like medical care to be affordable for all. However, putting it in the hands of the government – which universal healthcare eventually does – is a very bad idea because it will eventually put healthcare decisions in the hands of politicians. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my treatment being approved or disapproved based on what the national budget needs might be.

It is the same with education. When we start relying totally on the government for not just our primary education but for college education as well, we give the government our tacit agreement to let it tell us what we should study and what our career field should be. All those homeschoolers would get to say goodbye to their education preference. We would all be using government resources and following the government line. Nope, not something I want for my kids or grandkids. How about you?

But, whether Bernie and company are what Lenin would have called true socialists or not, they have learned from the “master”. Lenin knew what to say to not only agitate the masses but to connect with them. He recognized their concerns and played on them. Obama was a master at doing the same thing. Bernie, for some reason, was as well in the last election cycle – at least when it came to young voters and those not yet able to vote. What the liberals didn’t expect was for Trump to be able to do so as well. He simply spoke to a different part of the populace.

So, this last chapter of TSAR is Lenin’s condemnation of several well-known socialists of his time. As he’d done previously in TSAR, he took their words and then interpreted, twisted and mangled them to fit his own narrative. Specifically, pointing out how they had sold out Marx and Engels and weren’t real socialists and that, under their plans, socialism and then communism would never occur. In other words, he was setting himself up as the lone voice of not just knowledge but power when it came to socialism/communism.

He phrased it in terms of the “question of the relation of both the state to the social revolution and the social revolution to the state, like the question of revolution generally, engaged the minds of the leading theoreticians and publicists of the Second International (1889– 1914) very little.” (TSAR, p. 93) He accused them of actually evading the question or, worse, failing to notice the question. This, he wrote, led to “an evasiveness which worked to the advantage of opportunism and fostered it – resulted in a distortion of Marxism and in its complete vulgarization.” (TSAR, p. 93)

What follows are several pages of carefully chosen quotes from the so-called offending interpretations of Marx and Engels. Then Lenin jumps in with his interpretation and condemnation. “Marx, as we have seen, meant that the working class must smash, break or shatter (Sprengung, explosion, being the expression used by Engels) the entire state machine.” (TSAR, p. 96) This declaration by Lenin is based on his interpretation that others believed the socialist revolution could be successful without an “excessive revolutionary zeal when seizing power.” According to Lenin, “[a] cruder and more hideous distortion of Marx’s idea is inconceivable.” (TSAR, p. 96)

So, we’re back to his Lenin-Hulk smash, grab power! Ideology.

“The point is not about opposition or about political struggle in general but revolution.” (TSAR, p. 104) In other words, political opposition or struggle, the use of the existing political system to gain your objectives is no longer enough. In fact, according to Lenin, it won’t work. The political system – and remember, that also includes our infrastructure and corporate structure – must be overthrown and those in power must be destroyed. Don’t forget how he spent the majority of TSAR discussing how the proletariat revolution would become the proletariat dictatorship until all opposition was destroyed. Only once everyone walked and thought in lockstep with the leadership could the socialist revolution continue toward first true socialism and then communism.

“Revolution consists in the proletariat destroying the ‘apparatus of administration’ and the whole state machine, replacing it with a new one consisting of the armed workers.”(TSAR, p. 104)

The whole state machine.

Think about that. As much as we sometimes rail against our government, or aspects of it, this is all-inclusive. We’re not just talking about on the federal level but all the way down to the local level. Note also how Lenin never really answers how the gaps that occur will be filled. I’m not so much worried about in the government. There will always be politicians, even if they are good little socialists (looks in Bernie’s direction). But what about in the corporate world? Despite everything Lenin says about the workers coming together to run their factories, we know how well that went over, don’t we? The worker on the floor doesn’t know how to run the shipping department or inventory or do the books. So, managers are needed but where are they to come from?

The answer’s simple and one Lenin didn’t want anyone looking too closely at. They came from the new oppressing class and their sole job was to oppress everyone – bourgeois or proletariat alike, anyone who didn’t produce at the proper level and who didn’t believe in the correct way.

Revolution consists in the proletariat destroying the ‘apparatus of administration’ and the whole state machine, replacing it with a new one consisting of the armed workers. (TSAR, p. 104)

If that statement alone doesn’t bring you up short and make you think twice about how wonderful socialism sounds, it should. A true “people’s state” wouldn’t require armed workers. It would be cooperative. It would be supportive. It would NOT be oppressive. Yet that is exactly what Lenin says it will be, at least to begin. Note, too, he initially says this beginning phase is a passing one and then, as TSAR progresses, he hedges and hedges even more about how long it will take. Look at history to see it is such a slow progression from armed revolution to proletariat dictatorship to socialist society that 100 years wasn’t enough to move out of the dictatorship phase. In fact, if possible, we are seeing that phase entrenching itself as if it doesn’t want to erode into a true socialistic state.

Gee, who would have thought? (Yes, sarcasm is high here.)

Revolution consists not in the new class commanding and governing with the aid of the old state machine but in its smashing this machine and commanding and governing with the aid of a new machine. (TSAR, p. 104)

So, rise up, brothers and sisters, listen to my promises. Just don’t look too closely when my armed forces place their boots on your necks after you’ve helped us overthrow the government. Trust us, brothers and sisters, you’ll learn to love it. It is for your own good. I promise. Some day – possibly in a far away galaxy – the true socialist state will evolve and you will have been the first step toward it. Honor your role and listen to your betters. We are one, brothers and sisters, but some of us are more equal than others. Bow down to the new state and apparatchik. I – we – know what is best, comrades.

Gag.

But we shall move on to a break with these traitors to socialism and shall fight for the complete destruction of the old state machine in order that the armed proletariat itself should become the government. (TSAR, p. 107)

Wait, what? The proletariat becomes the government? So, he confirms one class replaces the other as the ruler. Hmmm.

This isn’t new. He’s been saying this throughout the book. However, he usually didn’t say it quite as openly or without a great deal of lawyer double-speak. It is a reminder that this book was never meant to be a handbook for the average person and especially not the average Russian in 1917. Think about how those without college educations would have reacted if Lenin spoke this plainly when stirring them into revolutionary fervor. The faults in his plan, in his view, would have been much easier to spot. Would it have stopped what had already started – and the revolution had been coming for decades – probably not. But it might have altered some of what happened in late 1917 and early 1918 when it comes to the Russian/Soviet governments.

But we shall move on to a break with the opportunists; and the entire conscious proletariat will be with us in the fight not for a ‘shifting of the relation of forces’ but for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, for the destruction of bourgeois parliamentarianism, for a democratic republic after the type of the Commune or a republic of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, for the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. (TSAR, p. 108)

“Conscious proletariat”, “democratic republic” and “the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat”. Riiight.

What part of “dictatorship” is hard to believe? And what part of human nature not wanting to give up power is so hard to understand?

This is why it is so important we, as conservatives and as libertarians, understand what Lenin and others promoting socialism and communism wrote and what they meant. We have to have a knowledge of history and an understanding of why things happened. We have to be able to not only discuss our beliefs but be able to point to source material to show the fallacies in our opposition’s point of view. If we don’t, we have zero chance of convincing them they need to rethink their position.

Note, I’m not saying we have to go in and tell them they are wrong. That is the surest way of getting them to dig their heels in and refuse to consider anything we say. No, we have to take a page out of Lenin’s book and convince them. That starts with them looking at their position and possibly recognizing there are weaknesses to it. We point out alternatives. We show them current or historical trends that undermine their points. In short, we avoid the knee-jerk reaction and we force them to do the one thing they haven’t been doing – think.

We have a perfect opportunity to do so right now. The Bernites of the world want us to sink into socialism because they feel it is the perfect world. We’d all be beautiful and equal and sit around the fire and sing Kumbaya while manna falls from the sky because none of us would know how to operate the factories or plow the fields, etc. Yet, they avoid looking at the reality of what socialism and communism have done to those countries that have “embraced” it.

For those with any memory or knowledge of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was the great evil. Even if Stalin was long in his grave by the time we entered school, the threat of the Soviet Union was very real. The media today paints Russia as the greatest threat to our nation after our president. How often have we heard Putin – another Vladimir (maybe it’s something about the name. Think about it. Vlad the Impaler, Vladimir Lenin, Vladimir Putin) is doing everything he can to corrupt our elections, etc? (And nothing about how Obama tried the same with one of our own allies.) Yet, that same media and those politicians advocate the socialist principles Putin represents.

But be prepared. The other side will say Putin isn’t a true socialist/communist. Then they’ll point out they want the “good parts” of socialism but not the bad. They want universal healthcare and government paid education. But they have no clue how to pay for these – or what the potential consequences of them are. They will tell you with one breath they want less government and then, in the next, they are willing to turn their health and education over to Big Brother.

So, ask the hard questions but have your own answers – and facts – ready. Hit them in the face with not only the reality of where socialism and communism are in today’s world when it comes to that “withering away” of the state. Make them think about what their heroes – Lenin, Marx and Engels, among others – actually said. Don’t argue and don’t make them dig their heels in. Remember, these folks are the ones who want safe spaces and who don’t understand the concept of consequences. We have to educate them and, even if we fail where they are concerned, we have our children and grandchildren to worry about. We educate them and we give them the best weapon of all – the ability to think for themselves and recognize bull shit when they see or hear it.

Lenin was, if nothing else, a master manipulator. But he was one in the right place at the right time, at least for his own purposes. Our challenge today is not that we will face another Lenin, especially not here in the US. It is that the socialist ideas have been slowly infiltrating our government for years. Our job – our duty – is to recognize them, stop the slide and repair the damage to our country. I’m willing and ready to take up the challenge. Are you?

[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 -SAH]

Your most basic right is the ability to defend yourself.  The ability in fact, to preserve your life.

Every animal fights to preserve itself.  And every human does too, whether it’s legal or illegal.

Any society that violates that right is prioritizing savagery over civilization, and lawlessness over law.

Why?  Because criminals don’t obey the law.  So while it’s illegal to attack you, the criminal will still do it, and if you don’t have the right to defend yourself (as is true in many places in Europe) then you’re devolving to the criminals having power of life and death over law abiding citizens.  This is a recipe for the law to become dead letter and for everyone ignoring it.

I know this is not the reason that the founders gave us the second amendment.  Or it mostly isn’t. So much of the Constitution is defined as “protecting yourself from the government” and of course, that’s just one form of protecting yourself from the government.  The horror-regimes of the 20th century would have fared very differently with an armed populace.  Which is why the first act of any would be tyrant is to grab the guns.

So, you say, what do we do about things like school shootings?  You already know what you do.  Mostly, you stop warehousing kids all together like sitting ducks.  Also, persecuting violent people who are known wolves would help.

But how do we prevent them?

Well, preventing them is much to ask for.  Kind of like the idiot women who want to make sure there is never rape.  Men can’t make sure one man somewhere isn’t a wrongun.  They’re not a hive entity.  In the same way, even the best police force in the world can’t make sure there are no crazy people who want to shoot up schools.

This is particularly difficult if you include in it gang warfare that happens to take place in schools.

So, if you can’t prevent school shootings, how can you prevent their being mass shootings with a lot of casualties?

There’s only one way. Let people defend themselves.  Sure you might not want to arm every student, because teen hormones and stuff…. but then again, if everyone is armed, what is the payoff in a shooting?  You’ll just get nailed by your classmates.  Sure, some people will do that, to kill the ex boyfriend/girlfriend, but you know… that would happen anyway, by poison or bomb, or whatever, if they’re that determined to die for it.  The fact that they would DIE for it will deter any number of them. Even teens have a self-preservation instinct.

“But then people will just shoot at each other every day.”  Yeah, I know the left will say that.  That’s because the left has never met an actual, living human being.  They’ve met human beings that live ONLY in their own heads.  Hence trying to tell #yesallmen they’re responsible for every single crazy person who happens to have a penis, as though they could somehow send out penis-mind-rays and control every male on the planet.  Or you know, the charming idea that if there only are some more laws, people will stop committing violence.  Because, you know, we’ve had laws against murder since… ever… and that’s why there is none.

No, of course, people wouldn’t just shoot each other every day over minor stuff.  That has never happened in any armed group, or even in shall issue states.  This, btw, is a big problem with your movies, leftists, when people get a gun and just can’t help shooting people left and right, like it’s some kid of magical weapon.

A gun is a tool.  You can kill people with a dozen different tools.  I can kill you with a shoe, my handbag, or the handle to my office door.

A gun just makes it easier.  At least if you see clearly more than about two feet away.

Because it makes killing easier, criminals and psychopaths will have it.  They will have guns, regardless of what the law says.

The only people who believe that the way to prevent violence is to disarm the law abiding people and leave them at the mercy of psychopaths are children and idiots.  The ones using this to disarm the populace are neither, but would-be totalitarians like the disgusting Soros who is a Nazi collaborator and quite literally a race traitor. (The left caviled at Pope Benedict having belonged to the more or less obligatory Hitler’s Youth, but they’re okay with Soros selling out innocent Jews for a cut of their fortune.  Go figure.  It’s almost like they have no moral compass, and only standards of convenience.)

I’m not about to let a coalition of would-be totalitarians chomping at the bit to repeat Stalin’s body count, and the idiots who think if only there’s laws against it, it will never happen, strip me of my natural right to self-defense.

You can’t force people to stop defending themselves.  The most you can do is destroy the rule of law.  So you can stop the histrionics.  We’re onto you.  And you cannot have us this time.

If you get rid of the rule of law, I doubt it will go the way you expect, either.  So whether you’re an idiot or a would be Stalin, ask yourself what you’re likely to get from this nonsense.

It’s not what you expect.  We have had enough.  You got to make the 20th century a vast grave.  You’ll have no more from us.

You shall not pass.

Standards  by Michael Hooten

In my day job, I’m a test engineer.  Specifically, I create electronics to test other electronics.  At work recently, I have had an ongoing… debate.  Yes, I think debate is the right word.  Because my boss told me to look at a test and think of some ways to improve it.  And my initial response was, this is a horrible test, and you need to rethink it entirely.

That was not the answer he wanted, of course, but he’s a good boss, and an engineer, so he asked me to explain.  Without getting technical, the short answer is: you are using the system to test the system.

From a test engineering standpoint, this is not only wrong, it invalidates the test.  You cannot verify that a component works by saying that it works in the system, because the next question is usually, how do you know the system works?  And the answer is, because it works with components we previously tested.  With the system.

There are several reasons why this is a dangerous way to approach testing.  First, you have no outside verification.  There is no external standard that you can point to and say, “When I test it this way, I get the same results as when I test in the system.”

But you also have the issue of verifying something is good because it hasn’t really failed yet.  Not enough to notice.  Oh, sure, the whole process may have drifted over time, but it still works, right?  We just want to verify it works.

Now imagine your customer starts complaining that their system isn’t working correctly.  You bring in the defective device, and you test it against your own system, and it works fine.  How do you determine where the fault lies?  What authority do you appeal to?  Your system works.  Theirs doesn’t.  But you are also saying the systems are the same, because they were tested in the same way.

This is circular logic.  I prove that x=y because y=x.  The sky is blue because blue is what we call the color of the sky.  It doesn’t tell me anything in the end.

The product manager said, “Well, we’re doing a qualitative analysis, not a quantitative one.”  And that’s fine, but you still haven’t shown me how you determine your quality.  What is your standard?

So what does this have to do with anything?

If you want to know how well something works, you have to tell me how you measure success.  Larry Correia is famous for saying that the only measurement of a book’s success if how many dollars people give you or it.  But we have the whole Hugo debacle claiming that books are measured by the gender/race/sexuality of the authors and the characters.  Who is correct?  They both are, because they’ve set up different standards, and then they test against those standards.

An SJW does not care how well a book does in the market, because that’s not how they determine value. Likewise, Larry doesn’t care about what the authors or characters look like, he just wants to know how many people are buying it.  And it’s not like those are the only ways of looking at it.

But with everyone talking about different things, it makes it very difficult to communicate.  We see it in politics all the time.  “Socialism takes care of the people that fall through the cracks!” And that goes up against, “Socialism causes widespread economic collapse!”

Both can be true, you know.  And we have some proof of both.  But which is the standard you want to use?  Which outcome has more value to you?

We struggle with this question every day.  I see a homeless man begging on the street.  I have a $20 in my pocket.  But I need to put gas in my car, too.  What do I do?  Your answer depends on a lot of things, but no matter how you choose, someone will always say you were wrong.  Because they judged you by their standards, not yours.  And on an individual basis, we agree to disagree, hopefully.

But what if I believe my standards are so important that I will force you to follow them?  Then we get political parties.  Or regulations.  Or marches, riots, and yelling matches disguised as debates.  Again, your standards will determine your response in a lot of ways.

What does it mean for the country?  Well, America was founded on the idea that we could create a system where everyone could follow their conscience, as long as they all agreed to a few simple rules.  We call those rules our constitution, and they are mostly guidelines for the places where you can’t tell people what to do.

You can’t tell someone how to practice their religion, or to follow a religion at all.

You can’t tell people to house soldiers.

You can’t force people to provide evidence against themselves.

And then the tricky ones:

You can’t tell people what they can or cannot say.

You cannot keep people from owning guns.

But what if someone says something you don’t like?  Well, it depends.  How do you respond?  The Constitution forbids you from silencing them.  But you can say whatever you like in return, even if it offends them.  What if they vow to kill you?  Well, you are not allowed to kill someone (not specifically in the Constitution, but still generally accepted), so it starts getting into a gray area.  Depending on where you live, threatening someone can get you anything from jail to a restraining order. A lot of times it depends on how credible someone in authority finds the threat.

And guns?  Well, the Constitution says you can own them.  We have clarified how you can use them.  And legally, you can go through all the hassle of buying pretty much anything you want.  And if you don’t want it legally, for whatever reason, then it doesn’t matter how many laws you pass.  In this case, you test the effectiveness against your standard.  Legally, you may not kill someone with a gun.  Of course, legally, you may not kill someone at all, with a few exceptions.  So what does the gun control laws do, exactly?  Restrict how guns may be purchased legally.  But no one ever expresses gun deaths in terms of deaths per legally owned guns.  Which is the only standard that tells you how effective your gun control laws are, at least for preventing gun related homicide.  Even the guy in Las Vegas, having purchased his guns legally, took them someplace it wasn’t legal to take them.  So even before he fired them into a crowd, he had broken a law.

In a perfect system, you could control all the variables to get the result you wanted.  But life, real life, is a system that has so many variables that you have to figure out if the one little thing you changed had any effect.  But let’s say you want to lose weight, so you change your diet, and let’s assume you stick to it pretty well.  But your weight doesn’t change.  Do you stick with the diet and just keep watching the scale not change?  Or do you try adjusting something else, like your activity level?  It depends.  What is your real goal?  What standard are you testing to?  Because if weight loss is less important than sticking to your diet, you can complain about the former while still feeling that you are succeeding in the latter.

Pick your standard.  Stick to it.  And be willing to admit that what you value, what you test to, is not the same as someone else.  You can both be right, you can both be wrong.  Just be honest about what you really want.  And please express it clearly.

Maybe our first standard should be to agree which dictionary to use.

Monday Promo

*Note from admin: I have no read these books, I simply collect them and assemble the post.  This is just a way of showing you releases you might not otherwise see. Read the blurb and as always, if not KULL, download a sample. And if you want your book in this showcase, email bookpimping at outlook dot com.

DAVID WELCH:   Tales of the Far Wanderers

To Gunnar of the Tarn life is wandering. A half-breed with no home to return to, he has escaped the endless wars of his father’s people to drift through the vastness of a land once known as North America. Slow to trust and swift with a sword, he had resigned himself to a lonely, itinerant life. That all changes the day he meets Kamith of the Red Horse. The last of her kind, Kamith barely escapes being sacrificed and joins Gunnar in his wanderings. Together, they will try to build some sort of life in a wild and brutal world. Mad priests, crazy fertility rituals, roving slavers, land-hungry kingdoms, desperate sieges, sprawling civil wars, and deranged warriors are only a few of the challenges they’ll face. Their only reward? To survive and live another day by each other’s side.

Inspired by the sword-slinging pulp heroes of old, this story cycle tells the tales of two vagabonds spurned by the world, and forced to fight off it’s madness at every step. But they’re nothing if not tough, and find in each other much to fight for, and to live for…

MACKEY CHANDLER: Neither Here Nor There

This is a stand alone story unrelated to any of my other books or shorts.
So many scientific discoveries have been serendipity rather than a goal to which someone worked as a logical progression. Instead, it was a spill or a misplaced item.
An ingredient measured out in error or from the wrong bottle. Often, a mistake over which someone was bright enough or curious enough to say: “Oops, but that’s interesting, isn’t it?” Uranium ore left next to photo plates, adhesive that wasn’t as permanent as hoped for, but still usefully tacky, or foreign growths in a Petri dish acting strangely…
A major revelation could be a blessing indeed, or if it was big enough to be a life changing development, one might have a tiger by the tail. Wouldn’t that be interesting?

J. M. NEY-GRIMM:  Fate’s Door

Secrets, like troubles, come in threes. When you possess one of either, two more arrive to keep it company.

Nerine, a sea nymph of the ancient world, knows too much about both.

Each morning, in the chill before the sun’s rising, Nerine and the three Fates stand under the mighty branches of the World Tree, gazing into the depths of the root-girdled Well of Destiny, watching the dooms that must come to pass that day.

When the dawn’s visions show Nerine’s lover—shipwrecked and drowning—all her renounced yearning for him rises anew.

Surely, as handmaiden to the Fates themselves, she might tilt the odds to give her beloved a chance.

Somehow—this day, this morning, this time—Nerine must subvert destiny or lose the companion of her heart forever.

Love and coming of age in a mythic Mediterranean where the gods and goddesses of old shape history.

JEB KINNISON: Nephilim.

Mt. Hermon, Utah, is the ideal small town—until forces of darkness from deep beneath the mountain lead its people astray.
Sara is the new kid in town — moved with her divorced mother from a wealthy Long Island suburb, her Jewish roots are no help when a relentless angel comes calling. Jared has lived there all his life, and his addiction to online games and porn has his grades tumbling and his Mormon family worried. Together, Jared and Sara fight the battle of their lives against spirits from the Underworld.

 

“Sophisticated YA (some mild sex, high school setting) Mormon Gothic (with introduction to Mormon history, doctrine, and mythology), paranormal (demons and angels) romance and adventure.”

ALMA BOYKIN: In the Vliets: A Steampunk Adventure.

Hamburg’s half-buried canals, the vliets, hold a secret and a key.

The Prussians conquered Hamburg in 1865, adding the city-state to their new German Empire against the city’s will. Jakob Timmerman fought in that war—as a mage-soldier called Jaeger. Twenty-five years later that war resumes among the waterways and hidden channels of the great port city of Hamburg. Imperial mages and their klankmänner—armored men condemned to half-life for treason or murder—stalk the city.

Jakob accidentally discovers the Imperials’ secret. Now his only hope for safety, and for justice, lies in the vliets among the very men who hate his kind the most.

LAURA MONTGOMERY: Mercenary Calling.

Exoplanets. Terrorists. Lawyers…

Calvin Tondini has his first client, but he may be in over his head.

It’s the twenty-second century. Humanity’s first and only interstellar starship returns safely. Its mission to discover a habitable planet succeeded beyond all hopes, but there’s one problem. Captain Paolina Nigmatullin of the USS Aeneid left an unsanctioned human colony behind and now stands charged with mutiny.

Despite a somewhat spontaneous approach to his own career, life, and limb, Calvin intends to map a more cautious path for his new client. Captain Nigmatullin, however, shows an unnerving penchant for talk shows—appearing on them, that is—and otherwise ignoring her attorney’s sober counsel.

How can Calvin ensure his client’s freedom when death stalks the Aeneid’s crew, and Nigmatullin herself hides secrets from everyone, even her lawyer?

BLAKE SMITH: Test of Valor.

 

Alain de Kerauille wants to be a knight more than anything in the world, to win as many jousting tournaments as he can, become wealthy and famous, and gain the hand of the fair lady Emma. As a squire in a noble household, he’s well on his way to success, and when he’s chosen to joust in a celebratory tournament, all of his dreams seem within his grasp. Until his rivalry with a fellow squire reaches the boiling point, threatening to destroy everything Alain has worked for and send his future crashing down around him.

Nah King, Nah Queen

Kings are not preservers of liberty.  Regardless of how much they even try to be, and how much they are pictured as such in fantasy stories.  When some magical whatsit talks about the king as a preserver of ancient liberties, unless the king is also a magical whatsit, the best that can be hoped for is that the liberties of noblemen, magicians and other important people will be preserved.

The vast amorphous people, the “little people” of the kingdom.  Well, those might be used in an alliance against noblemen, if it’s needed, but respecting their liberties is almost impossible, because there are so many of them and from a king’s pov they don’t often want what they should want, which amounts to the stuff he wants, relating to foreign relations and trade, and all that good stuff.

Presidents are of course different from kings.  They hold the honor for a short time, and are supposed to preserve our liberties.

Note supposed to.  The problem is, of course, that form follows function, and when the presidency concentrates too much power onto itself, inevitably, it becomes a kingship.  And listening to all those small people who don’t want to do what you think they should becomes an annoyance.

It’s time to make our constitutional presidency less powerful, the ability to affect our daily lives less concentrated on one fallible man.

The alternative is to resign ourselves to monarchs, and I for one ain’t gonna.

Happy President’s day.  Let’s make it small.

 

 

 

 

Um… it was a long trip and I’m sleepy, but it was fun.  A lot of fun.

I’m not well enough, yet, to actually socialize all the time, but a lot of my fans were there, as well as people like Law Dog and his lady and Dorothy and Peter Grant, so pretty much every time we stepped out, we ended up taking an extra hour to get back to the room.

There were fascinating and interesting panels, but again, I was not yet up to attending most of them.  Still, I’ve done a lot of cons, and this one seemed to have the most useful panels.

Under “inexplicable” I was in a panel on writing children.  NOT quite inexplicable, as the program director is a fan of Dyce, but of course the panel morphed into writing FOR children.  I kept getting asked how to vote for middle-schoolers.  Er…. I don’t know.

I got to hang out with Brad and Larry (and of course Bridget.)  And Larry and I talked Guardian.  It was fun.

More when I’m more coherent.

Am going back next year if I have money, time, and they let me. :)

I simply don’t have the time to organize the promo post, so it will be tomorrow.  There will be a con report whenever I make it home today, so probably late.  It was fun.  I don’t want to leave all my imaginary friends and go back home.  OTOH books to finish.

So…. More later, promo tomorrow, even though I know it disturbs the OCD among you.

If you must have a writing prompt use the below: