According To Hoyt

When Robert was very little, something happened to him that was “the worst thing ever.”  I don’t remember what it was, and it’s entirely possible I never knew.  He was that small, that his explanation might have made no sense.

Lots of things were the worst thing ever at that age.  He tripped and hurt himself.  The water he was about to drink spilled down his front.  He’d started falling asleep and come suddenly awake for no good reason he could figure.

He was crying, mouth open, in absolute grief.  I remember I was in the bathroom, and this must be at the time we were potty training him, because there was a jar of candy on the toilet tank (something our friends found somewhere between appalling and amusing, but it worked.  Pee in toilet, get piece of candy.)  I sat on the tub (I think I was putting makeup on to go out) pulled him to me, hugged him, told him everything was all right, and gave him a piece of candy.

Like that, his crying went from unbridled grief to a big smile.  And I remember thinking “Ah, son, if only I could do that for the rest of your life.  If whatever problems face you could be banished by a hug and a piece of candy.”

He’s 25.  He’s gone through many things I couldn’t console him for, including illness and breakups.  Now he’s very nervous about upcoming exams, and my hugging him and telling him everything will be all right doesn’t clear it.

Younger son is worse at this sort of crisis, because he won’t tell us he’s in trouble, and sometimes he’s not quite sure what is trouble, what things matter and how to fix them, and by the time we figure it out it’s a much bigger mess than it should be.

I think there’s an instinct in humans, particularly in women to “fix everything” for someone else.  We want that magic bullet.  We want to make everything right.  But what actually happens is that when you try to fix someone’s every problem, nine times out of ten, you create another set of problems.

You see, people need to at least know what is a problem, know they need to be got out of them, and need to have some basic skills so they don’t fall into them again.

It’s very easy as a mother to insist on ironing their clothes forever, rather than letting them look like they slept out in the zoo with lions.  But if you keep doing that, they’ll never learn that there is even a problem with going out all rumpled.  Clothes become that weird thing mom obsesses about, and neatness never correlates to how people respond to you.

The same with, for instance, making them eat breakfast in the morning.  If you keep doing it, they’ll never correlate it with how attentive they can be in class during the day, etc.

It’s the hardest thing in the world as a mother.  You have to let them fall on their faces, before they figure out what they’re doing wrong and learn how not to fall.  It’s bad even with friends.  When I was young and stupid, I’d just hand out rent money to friends who were about to be evicted, we’d buy computers for friends who needed to finish a novel, even when it was going to hurt us all month, we treated friends and other relatives as though they were our minor children, in other words.

Even in adults this doesn’t work so well.  You end up with several weird behaviors, the most common of this being the people who come back again and again — we see this with several people who have become addicted to begging on facebook, it seems, and live on the verge of disaster but miraculously always keep going — or what you sacrifice to provide doesn’t get used at all (of three computers we gave people to finish novels, because they needed to sell, only one sold and that was 20 years later) or there is really no perceptible difference in people’s circumstances.

And that’s with private charity.  When you bring in government and the idea you’re entitled to never suffer hardship and never have to sweat towards anything because you were born in a time and place, then you’re really encouraging behaviors that brought people into trouble in the first place.  I think guaranteed minimum income (getting paid for drawing breath) is the sign of a serious pathology (besides never working when it’s been tried, and leading to the infantilization of the population and perpetuation of dependency and ultimately greater poverty for all.)

It’s an understandable impulse.  Few of us like to see people suffer.  But suffering, bit or small, is how humans learn.  If you don’t poke the fire you’ll never know it burns.

The trick with children and with friends, and with strangers at large, is to try to ensure the finger doesn’t go into the fire so hard it burns off the finger, but that it touches the fire enough to feel the burn.

Ultimately, no matter how much you want to protect people, at some point you realize not only you can’t, but it’s immoral for you to do so.  You’re interfering with the choices of adults, and their right to learn from those choices.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t practice charity.  I do.  There are unexpected blows of fate, unexpected expenses, and unexpected disasters, in which those of us who believe in freedom help our friends because we can do it better than any government can.

I’m saying that we need to exert judgement over when how and whom we help.  Even if everyone is crying and just experienced the worst thing ever, it’s important to think through whether this is recurrent, whether it’s a pattern of behavior, whether the person blundered ahead despite many, many warnings. Then you need to figure out whether there is some impairment that prevents people from doing what they need to do to not get in these situations.  If there is, you can’t make it worse by helping, and it’s like helping a child.  Someone has to.

But giving indiscriminately, without thinking and examining all circumstances carefully and keeping in mind “first do no harm” is as bad as never giving at all.

Which is why government is the worst instrument for charity.  And why indiscriminate compassion turns into infantilization and discrimination.

 

Guys, sorry I’ve been flaky lately, but I’ve been having the auto-immune to end all auto-immunes, and I just gained a SMALL respite with benadryl, but it makes me goofy and sleepy.  I’m going to take a nap.  Post later.

Sometimes I think the only reason I go to Facebook is to keep myself from passing out in the shower by having extremely low blood pressure.  However there is also the side benefit of figuring out how COMPLETELY insane most so called “normal” and “educated” people are.

The sad part of this is that the insanity is not natural, but the result of careful education, nurturing and indoctrination.

Take this article which I found in a somewhat different form on line (more on that later.)

These Profound Photos Masterfully Turn Racial Stereotypes On Their Head.  ANYONE with even a modicum of grounding in reality looks at those and asks several questions: “What racial stereotypes?” and “Good Lord, are you a tri-plated racist?” and “Were you lobotomized at birth to think this was profound?”

But first, there is the first picture posted with these on facebook, and which my husband and I couldn’t trace after several hours of research.  From the style, I presume it’s from the same photographer, who, being somewhat sane (still) chose not to send it to the original article in O.  I also assume it was leaked and added to the facebook post by someone present at the shoot for the purpose of… I’m not sure?  Racebaiting?  Or perhaps showing how profoundly stupid people who fall for this crap are, in a sort of double reverse trolling.  (I want to believe.)

That first picture made absolutely NO sense.  And by that I mean none.  So I looked at the other pictures (and yes, I’ll explain rationally what’s wrong with them, and why my first reaction was those three questions above) just because ti was like a glimpse into a mad house, and I wanted to know what the lunatics were up to.  (I regret to say nothing good, and only something entertaining in the way that a train wreck is entertaining.)

It was this:

My husband, being a mathematician and therefore skilled in logic, zeroed in on the principal thing any normal person thinks is wrong with this picture: Why is that baby not wearing a diaper, but wearing a cap?

One of my fans was even more confused.  His comment was “So, it’s a biracial lesbian couple and their baby, but why is the white chick wearing a funny dutch cap, and why DOES THAT BABY HAVE NO DIAPERS?”

At that point I looked and brought my powerful intellect to focus on this picture like something that focuses.  And my reaction was “A nursemaid?  A nursemaid in a — from the clothes — forties nursery? WHY?  Honey?” to my husband, “Didn’t they have formula in the US?”

And then I looked at the other pictures, looking for context to understand this insanity.  Which is when I ran into the original post with hundreds of people of color saying how this reversal of stereotypes made them feel powerful or made them cry.  (More on that later too.)

At this point I decided the Mandela effect must have struck again.  Is it a stereotype in America that black women nurse white babies?  At any time since the civil war, that is?  And if it WHY is it?  I don’t think even the conspicuously rich among us would use wet nurses.  Wet nurses were always a problem.  Read any novel from before the twentieth century.  (And btw, nursemaids were usually the same race as the parents.)  You had to trust a stranger not to drink or eat anything harmful that would pass on the baby (mostly alcohol, but other stuff too) and you had to trust them to stay healthy, and you had to trust them to treat your baby nicely when you weren’t looking, and–

I imagine everyone greeted the advent of formula with much enthusiasm and joy.  And, I just looked it up, commercial formula has been available in the US since the mid 1800s.  By the early twentieth century, it was in wide use.  I dont’ think anyone sane can have a stereotype of black women as wet nurses, unless this is a thing in Arab countries (where slavery is also still a thing.)  But since this was about inverting AMERICAN stereotypes, that first picture mostly struck me as a magnificent piece of insanity, equivalent to … oh, my saying I’m inverting stereotypes by having a picture of a Mediterranean woman nursing a blond baby while a well-dressed blond woman stands nearby.  “Look, at me, look at me, I’m subverting stereotypes that no one even in my grandparents generation would recognize.  Take THAT Ancient Rome.”

This is probably why, when we started googling the pictures, because I wanted to write about them, we found only the other three pictures were published in the original in O magazine, echoed approvingly by the NYT and Puffington Host and the rest of the excreta for brains racists, (no, really.  They have to be to think these are “Stereotypes” that need to be “reversed”) and a bunch of other equally crazy publications.

I.e. that first picture is stupid enough to ring the bells of people who are so deep in their own echo chamber they think the others make sense.

And yet, I want to point out that on the post on Facebook NO ONE raised these issues.  Except for one sane guy (not my husband, but clearly a brother at arms) who wanted the baby to wear a diaper, now.

I also want to point out the post on facebook had tens of thousands of shares.  Which considering the quality of thought and self-congratulatory bullsh*t that went into the other pictures means we should be beamed up.  There’s no intelligent life down here.

I also want to point out someone at Puffington Host called these pictures profound and they weren’t mobbed by people asking them what they were smoking, ingesting or snorting.

All of which means the fight for the culture continues and also that brain damage in this country is far more widespread than you’d think. Or as I used to say when I met protesters during the Bush administration “Yeah, you have the right to be angry.  This is no way to treat the mentally ill.  You should be off the streets and somewhere padded and safe.”

Okay, so…. that first one… Is there REALLY a stereotype that Asians give pedicures?  REALLY?

Hint, before turning a stereotype “on its head” you should be aware that perhaps this is ONLY a stereotype in your part of the country/social class.

Not only I but most of the friends I showed this to asked “What is the point of this picture?” until a couple of my friends WHO ARE ASIAN blew their tops by saying “manicure/pedicure salons allowed Asian women to have their own businesses and provide for their families and climb to middle class.  What kind of bitter racists think this is bad?”

At which point I asked and was told that in some places with high Asian immigration, this is indeed a stereotype, HOWEVER the women are not slaves.  They are paid, often own the salon, and are providing for their children to go further in America than they could go.  In other words, as an example of “reverse oppression” that picture is caca.

Here I will note that the one time I visited South Africa several strangers joked about my opening a vegetable stand.  This puzzled me completely, as not only it wasn’t a stereotype I knew of, but it wasn’t a thing any of my relatives who emmigrated did. However, in South Africa it was a stereotype that Portuguese ran vegetable stands.  Why?  Because the people who first immigrated from Madeira did, and then brought over friends and showed them the ropes they knew to integrate in their new society.  I.e. they showed them how to run vegetable gardens.  Note of the people who joked with me about it, none of them expected me to do it.  Stereotypes exist because of economic/social conditions usually for a limited time.  But only stone cold racists think they’re eternal or apply to everyone of that ethnicity.

This one made me want to go “Help, help, I’m being oppressed.”  Anyone spot what the problem is with this in terms of reverse pictures of oppression?  oooh ooh, I know.  Not finding a doll that resembles you is not oppression.  It is a reflection of the fact that people like you are a small enough minority in the market that there is no point creating dolls for them.

This is not true of American blacks, (no, they are not African Americans.  The usual suspects can take a flying leap.  African Americans is a demeaning appellation for people whose last ancestors left Africa more than a hundred years ago. While we’re at it, most Americans with darker skin are more than fifty percent Caucasian.) who are a solid 14% of the population.  Depending on which part of this vast country you live in, the toy store might indeed resemble the picture.  And the little girl in the picture is not being oppressed.  If she wants white dolls (only people without imagination think that’s a given.  One of my friends growing up had a black baby doll and was an object of envy of the rest of the group, on rarity alone.) she’s shopping in the wrong store, and her mom should take her to another.

I mean, what the heck, actually?  What do the people who think this is oppression want?  Mandate that as many black dolls be made as white, even in a country where black people are a minority (and nowhere near half) and therefore because parents and older relatives lack imagination, there’s a ton more market for white dolls?

Bah.  It must be socialism, when you want to mandate people create a product for which there is no demand, to gratify the whims of the ruling class and intellectuals. This is why socialism was supposed to be “scientific”.

First reaction “Is this a screen capture from a soap opera from Brazil?”  Second reaction, after reading some blather about how the woman isn’t even paying any attention to her maid “Well, duh.  Of course not.  The maid is being paid to do her job, not to be stared at.”  Third reaction, “you know, this wouldn’t be that out of the ordinary in Portugal, where maids are often from beyond the mountains, where entire villages are of Celtic or Germanic Stock.”

Do these people really imagine they live in a society where there are no wealthy Latins and no whites in service professions?

First question: HOW?  Second question: HOW insular are those who control our media that no one told them this didn’t pass the laugh test?

In the end, all three pictures are complaining not about oppression: real oppression would be say people’s genitals being mutilated; slaves being sold by ISIS, people being shot for having the wrong beliefs.

None of those things happen in America, or at least not in mainstream America.  (We haven’t got the message “Fit in or f*ck off” to ever recent immigrant yet.)

So they had to go with the socialist/communist idea of oppression, which could be boiled down to: people have to work for a living.  Only demented Marxists could consider this oppression.

And only demented RACIST Marxists could imagine these stereotypes are universal and inescapable and therefore reversing them will have a powerful effect on everyone, instead of causing sane people to go “And?”

Because what they’re basically saying is “People have to work for a living and therefore fulfill professions we — but not necessarily they — consider demeaning, or make dolls that we think shouldn’t be the majority of dolls bought.”

IOW they’re not at war with stereotypes, they’re at war with the voices in their heads (And they really should take Gone With The Wind off the loop on their TV.)

The people who really liked this were either people of color who have been told if they don’t see people exactly like them portrayed in a way they like, they’re being oppressed, or they are “allies” h*ll bent on proving that people of color are not all like stereotypes, and could benefit from traveling, enlarging their horizons, getting beat up abroad, maybe getting sold as slaves by Isis.  Not that I wish that on them, but they are the epitome of spoiled, rich kids (by the principle that anyone in the US is in the global 1%) who have no clue what real oppression is and won’t listen to anyone when we tell them.

As for the tens of thousands of shares and approving — often barely literate — comments, 60% of them on facebook were from abroad.  Maybe they think every white American has a black nursemaid?  They’ve believed stupider things.  But it is a call for creating some competition to Hollywood who spreads these lies about us abroad.

As for those of our compatriots who believe this…  Keep enlightening them: In fiction, in non fiction, in play and work, make sure you get them out of their deranged comfort zone.

Because if things go upside down, these poor shambling zombies won’t survive.  Their parallel version of reality doesn’t include concepts like “Root, hog or die.”  And in common charity we should save whatever brands we can from the fire.  Those that can be saved should be.

The others?

Well, there’s always pointing, laughing and making duck noises.  As Heinlein said in Stranger in a Strange Land, (paraphrasing) sometimes you laugh because it hurts too much to cry.

There will be Grant (Dark Fate MHI fanfic) before Saturday, and then on Saturday again.

This weekend we had an unexpected (well, expected, we just didn’t know when) visit from one of you — someone we only knew on line — who is also a friend of friends, and frankly a friend over my many names online.

We weren’t worried about his visiting, but we were worried about what he would think of us/whether we’d get along.

So, last week was “fun with dishwashers” (we’re getting a working one installed on Wednesday) which ate up our time, both trying to fix the problem and then shopping for the new one, followed by a visit from a friend (I’m not saying who it is, because I’m not sure he wants me to, though some of you know who it was.)  Which meant I spent Thursday and Friday trying to make this house look less like the house of people where two are working three jobs, and one is studying for medical boards (you have NO idea.)

Turns out we like each other (or at least we like him!) as well in person as on line, so there were talks till all hours, and very little got done.  Including posting here and writing, either in books or for PJMedia (I’m working for them again.  Long story.)  Which means I’m now playing mad catch-up because Guardian is late and I need to deliver some columns.

Also, since I’d announced the first-Saturday-Hun-Meetup at Pete’s Kitchen in the diner before I knew we were getting a house guest, yesterday I went out and hung out with eight of you (well, it was a beautiful day, so people were out having fun.  Mind you, meeting was fun too.)  This means I spent today suffering from what I’ll call “introvert flu” which is kind of like con crud, but with fewer physical causes/symptoms.

All of this to tell you why the dog ate my homework.

What I’m going to do about it: Catch up and work like a demon, of course.

But FIRST I’m going to bed early tonight, so I can actually function tomorrow.

So, see you tomorrow, and this week is going to be AMAZING. I promise.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

There will be post (probably Grant) later.  However I want to remind you that the Hoyts senior (the boys are busy, so the two of us) will be at Pete’s Kitchen today from 4:30 to around 8 pm, if enough of you show up early enough to hang out with us, otherwise we’ll leave at six or so.

Anyway, there will be cover cards TM to sign (suitable-for-framing) and probably ten copies of Darkship Revenge to give away.  And of course, our sparkling conversation.

Not even a state of the writer post.

So, I’m going to leave you with a couple of questions to debate:

1- Is it fair of a publishing house to weaponize a woman’s cat against her, so that he screams and gives her the claw if she isn’t writing?  Other annoying behavior includes “herding to writing desk.”

1-a-Is Greebo a cat?  Or is he a clever Robot designed to replace the feral we fed in the other neighborhood?  I mean I’m suspicious because we always thought he was more attached to the house than to us.  Also, how many cats can raise their eyebrow?

2- If fish were the normal weapons of war, how would you write specifications for them?

Minnow?  Trout?  Pike?  What would they be employed for and what would be their calibers?

Yes, it’s that sort of morning.  I’ll be back later.

Long standing commenters here will remember when I had a zombie dishwasher.  We thought it was dead, it thought it was dead, and then suddenly it would lurch to life, work for a week and give us the impression that it would work.  And then it would die again.

I’m not sure if this is a disguised state of the writer post, or a regular post disguised as state of the writer.

First the state of the writer: I am a little past my nostrils in work (I’m drowning, I’m drowning) which of course home appliances sense, and that’s when they strike.  But not just appliances, of course.  The whole house is alive with the sound of stupid stuff to distract me. First the past my nostrils: I’m now writing Guardian, though every time I do two pages another something happens in the house and yet I need to send Larry 20k words by tonight, because this has dragged on long enough; I’m trying to finish the fourth Dyce book (A Well Inlaid Death, title supplied by Cedar Sanderson); and I’ve accepted a gig with PJmedia again (yeah, I know, but do you know the state of my wallet?) to whom I owe a couple of posts I was supposed to write by yesterday.  They’re in my head.  It’s just a matter of time.

Older son is on the last week of studying for his boards (prayers appreciated.  With exams this massive, there’s always the question of what material will be on the test.  It won’t be ALL of it, so it could be the one he’s most prepared on or not.  And for those who took the test more than a decade ago… you have NO idea.  They now have to memorize crazy stuff like genetic pathways for obscure diseases. I don’t think it’s possible to read let alone memorize the whole thing in two months, and son is a speed reader.)  This means he’s touchy like a beaver with toothache.  He tries not to be, but it means after about 10 pm we try to stay quiet so he can go to sleep.  He lives in a basement apartment, but the insulation is not as great as you’d expect.

So–

Convenience.

Except for a brief period when Dan was making a ton of money (he gave up that job because it was a traveling job and it was adversely affecting our kids) our normal modus operandi for appliances is “appliance broke.  Run off and buy the cheapest possible.”  We did this with my writing computer which is dying by inches.  There was a memorial day sale, we ran out and we acquired the cheapest that will do what I want it to.  Because time.  Now we need to find time to ACTUALLY move the files over.

But… dishwashers.  That time when Dan had a great job and we were very short on time, (the kids were toddlers.  I was just starting to break in.  He was traveling five days a week) we ran out and said “Show us your most expensive diswasher”.  We then bought that.  And it washes with NO problems for six years.  And it washed really well, not our current machine’s version of distributing the dirt.  Then we sold the house and moved, and got a “give us your cheapest dishwasher” and a year later, after multiple breaks we got another, and then two years later another, and then–

So now we’re similarly very busy.  Technically we each have three jobs, and Dan keeps not doing his third job (writing) because no time.  We’re not making the kind of money he was, or rather it will be close if I can keep all the gigs going (we’ll see) but you know, it’s 18 years later, so it’s not worth the same.  Enough for our needs and to start making repairs to the house (not a ton, but we bought it as a short sale, so there was neglected maintenance) and changes we need (like rip all the frigging carpet out, because I’m not living another winter like that.)

That’s fine.  We need the money, see.  But to get the money, we must spend time.  And then time becomes at a premium.  I’m putting as much wood flooring down as I can this month and beginning of next (while keeping my schedule going, yes) which is going to hurt physically and time wise.  BUT it must be done, to purchase me convenience later.  I.e. I’m putting down unfinished hardwood and giving it five fricking coats of polyurethane, so I can MOP the floor if needed.  Our oldest cat is 17, our youngest is 9, and at end of life all cats forget where the box is.  So, wood floors, besides keeping my asthma down, are going to mean I don’t spend my life cleaning carpet (which is ratty and end of life, anyway.)  I’m investing time to save time later, you could say.

Sort of the same with the dishwasher.  We’re probably going a little higher than I like (no, not the most expensive, because we don’t have THAT kind of money while we’re helping the kids through school) because I want one with a disposer and a filter.  Because I don’t want to have to rewash washed dishes, because there’s grit all over them.  Also, I want one with heated dry, which a lot of brands (I’m looking at you Samsung) are discontinuing, in favor of popping the dishwasher open and air drying.  If I wanted cat hair on my dishes, I’d physically open it and put Havey in.  Thank you.

It’s a balance when you’re actually making money from way too much work (eh.  I’ll live.  Grandma said no one ever died from work.  Not true.  But certainly not from sit-down desk-work in the warm) you have to learn which one you’re going to sacrifice for convenience.

You always have to sacrifice one.  It’s the old “buy good boots up front so you save money (and time) by not having to rebuy them every year.”  Unfortunately that means you have to invest up front.

Oh, and btw, I was telling Dan I wish I’d had all these jobs/been selling my work both fic and non fic like this twenty years ago.  Heck, even ten years ago.

But the truth — he didn’t say it, but I said it — is that even ten years ago I couldn’t have kept up with all this work and done it to professional standards.  I’m reaping the dividends of thirty some novels and keeping a blog every day for years.  None of those paid a heck of a lot, but they were investments, so now I’m better paid (somewhat) I can keep up with the massive load of work.

It’s all investments, and long distance planning, and sometimes eating a lot of toads on the way to where you can start reaping benefits.  If you’re lucky and you planned well, and your health holds up.

Let’s just say I’m very grateful for human ingenuity and human progress that allow me to be relatively healthy and strong in my 50s and to work this hard, so I can reap benefits.  I’m also thankful we have domestic conveniences, which have freed people — though mostly women, since we tend to do the boring jobs indoors — to achieve more in other fields by taking the boring drudgery of housework off their hands.

People who complain about “machinery stealing human work” didn’t grow up with two hours carved out of the day for hand-washing dishes and clothes, and the clothes outside, on a stone water tank, summer and winter, with your fingers hurting in winter like they were going to freeze and break off.  I enjoy physical work, actually, but now I have the OPTION of doing it.  I can decide to wash something by hand and hang it in the fresh air to dry.  Or I can get machines to do it for me, while I reap the benefits of my experience and expertise by doing writing for pay.

My mom whose work had much the same trajectory didn’t have that option.  By forty she still had to keep up with deadlines, while doing all the drudge work by hand.  (Dad had a more than full time job, and anyway, in Portuguese culture, his generation, men just didn’t DO that.)  She had cleaning ladies when she could get them, but there as here that’s not a reliable thing.  So she ended up having a cluster of heart attacks and being medically retired and never reaping the fruits of her artistry and experience.

I’m glad I’m sitting here while the dishwasher (yes, crappy and leaking.  We put a plastic underneath, until we can get a new one) does its thing, and the washer washes a massive load of clothes.  Later on I have to dust and vacuum because we have company this weekend, but even that beats SWEEPING the carpets, and hand cleaning.

So I’m glad I live today and hopefully will have time to reap the benefits of my youthful learning and work.

People who mock others for first world problems have never lived elsewhere.  Sure there are first world problems, like broken dishwashers, and stupid ratty carpets.  Identify them and change them.

Embracing convenience and not feeling guilty for that which frees us to do what we’re best at is what MAKES us a first world nation.  And I intend to take advantage of it.  All the way.

UPDATE: I’ll post this again tomorrow, but as a heads up — two Hoyts (Dan and I) and possibly our house guest (?) will be at Pete’s Kitchen on Colfax in Denver, in the Annex on Saturday between 4:30 and 8 pm or so, unless no one shows up before six and we get bored.  Look for us in the Annex.

 

 

*I swear for the first time this week I was supposed to be on time with the blog.  But then this horrible monster Leaking Dishwasher attacked and ate yesterday evening and this morning.  We have it patched up and (crosses fingers) not leaking, which means we get time to shop around for a replacement.  We’ve been meaning to replace it because it sucks, badly but… And I’ll try to get you Grant by midnight tonight, but it MIGHT be tomorrow.*

It is a truism to say that fish don’t see the water they swim in.  I’m not absolutely sure about that, you know?  I’ve visited the Denver Botanic gardens and looked in the koi ponds enough that I suspect the fish see the water when it’s a lovely shade of green, just like we see the air, when it has a bunch of sand and stuff in suspension, and we certainly feel air-currents on our skin, smell the scents in the air, etc.

The truth is that it is more accurate to say that fish don’t know the water they’re in is different from any other water.  Having had my adventure with fish-keeping (RIP Agile Antelop Betta Version, aka my beloved Derpfish) I can tell you though that changing the water for another kind of water can make a huge difference on your fish’s health and well being.  Even if the water you’re changing it for is technically better, it will make your fish out of sorts and can kill him.  (This is why we were stuck with a particular and increasingly rare brand of bottled spring water, because it’s what we had in the house when I set up Derpy’s first aquarium, on account of being the water Robert used for his leeches tank.  [You’re NOT going to ask, right?])

So, what is this all about.

Culture.

It’s not just that the left believes culture is genetic — witness the isle in Walmart marked with “multicultural hair care”, which I don’t think has dyes used by people from Papua New Guinea and the songs of hair washing of the natives of the Solomon Islands — it’s that the right is starting to believe it too.  And that’s a very bad thing.

Only today on this very blog, one of you was saying that there might be a genetic component because look at how the Indians weren’t that far off the Europeans who invaded, but it never occurred to them to create muskets or…

Guys, this is SUCH a fundamental misunderstanding of culture — yes, culture, having bloody nothing to do with genes — it made me want to dent my desk.

So, let’s go back to culture being like the water in an aquarium.  Most people aren’t blind to their culture.  They know what it’s like and where it stacks in comparison with other cultures, more or less, relatively.

For instance, Portuguese are well aware of being very unorganized — and weirdly proud of it.  No, really — and know they stack above Brazilians in organization but below powerhouses of organization like France and Ireland.  What they don’t know is how their disorganization/disregard for times/disdain for details affects their prosperity, their security and every level of life in the country.

They don’t know this because they’ve never lived anywhere else.  Going shopping will take an entire afternoon because the buses run more on suggestion than schedule (and if you drive, the traffic rules are also suggestions, which means sometimes bizarre traffic jams because someone didn’t find a parking space and thought he might as well park on a lane on the road.)  Also, the stores might or might not have the same products they had last week, and besides, if the shopkeeper came in late, and then had a really difficult customer, you might have to wait an hour.  And on and on.  I often say I spent most of my teenage years standing on street corners, fortunately reading science fiction and not going “oh, hai sailor” because I got so neurotic about being late for an outing with friends that I got there ten minutes early.  And then waited an hour for the first of them to show up and two for the stragglers.  This type of thing, over time, eats people’s time and their mental and emotional resources.  Frankly, it’s amazing the country works as well as it does.

And yep, they know they’re unorganized — they view it was free and not rigid — but they fail to take into account everything it touches, because “it’s always been like that.”

I suspect in the US people would bodily move a car that parked blocking a lane of a two lane road “while I go over there to the post office.  It’s just a minute.  What are you so uptight about that you object?”  In Portugal it’s the way it works.  (Though I understand if you park on the tram lines and are driving a smart, you will get moved.  The occurrence is so common trams have really long poles to assist this move.  You should have seen my kids’ faces watching this.)

Not ragging on Portuguese, really.  They’re at worst a second world country.  I’m only describing them because it’s a culture I have a lot of insight into.  The culture as in all Latin countries, has all the stigmata of Rome, from bribery as a way of life, to nepotism as the oil that lubricates society. Which is not entirely compatible with modernity, and therefore means that Portugal isn’t one of your leading lights of technological creation and innovation.

In fact, excepting Israel of course, no other nation does much in the way of innovation.  Modernity, except for small touches, came straight from America, and they live in it by using American inventions.

Now you can argue that it’s genetic, but I’m going to look at you really funny, because a lot of the people who created those innovations were less than three generations removed from elsewhere.

In fact, it is a truism in Portugal that when Portuguese go abroad, they usually do very well.  Depending on the level of society they’re prepared to enter, of course, they are financially successful, innovative and above all insanely hard workers.

So, how come Portugal is not an economic powerhouse, you ask.  You see, it’s that the water is gelatin.  Between Roman and Arab culture remnants, anyone who wants to accomplish anything in Portugal is a tiny fish struggling against a tsunami wave.  When freed from that, we find it almost ridiculously easy to succeed.

Portuguese who never leave Portugal or even who never leave Portugal and live outside a Portuguese community abroad, aren’t aware of this.  They have a vague idea they’re being held back and that it’s unfair, but they don’t know how.  And that’s where we get on fish, and the water they’re accustomed to.

Yes, moving to another culture is a huge shock.  Yes, most people prefer to do it with a few thousand of their closest friends, which is why you find Italian or Irish or even Portuguese enclaves in the US (and in the case of Portuguese in French and Germany too.)

I was very lucky, at the time, because there was no Portuguese enclave in Charlotte, North Carolina when I first immigrated.  Or if there was, I never found it.  Which means I was on my own, in this strange water.  I’ve talked about how difficult it was, even when I WANTED to change.  If there had been a community to “ease” my way, I’d probably have embraced it, which means I’d never fully acculturate and never fully become American.  Fortunately by the time a Portuguese community found me (in Colorado Springs.  I got a phone call) I had realized that I HAD acculturated and, frankly, if I wanted my kids brought up in Portuguese culture, I’d have stayed in Portugal with all the advantages of family and connections.

So yeah, I lied and told them they had the wrong number.

But many if not most of the Portuguese who immigrate go live in Portuguese communities.  So do other immigrants.  Which means that even if western culture weren’t actively fighting against the CONCEPT of assimilation, these people wouldn’t assimilate.  Sure, schools, shows, etc, but it takes a good three generations and maybe more.

Which is why, once you add in the additional filter of the culture encouraging immigrants to hold on buckle and tongue to their own native culture (a nonsenssical idea.  What is the point of, for an example, importing Muslims who are escaping a toxic culture if we want them to bring their toxic culture with them?  Is it so we can observe dysfunctionality in our very midst?  This concept of humans as zoo is disgusting.), most people assume culture is genetic.

It’s not.  It’s almost impossible to change overnight as a whole, in a group, though, whether the group is an enclave in the middle of another country, or the whole country.

Not IMPOSSIBLE mind.  I’ve watched Portugal change a lot since entering the EU, though IMO in many ways not in the greatest directions.  The things that they really shouldn’t be going crazy about, like minor regulations, are of course the things they obsess about.  The country where, when I grew up, if you could toddle up to the counter you could order wine, is now horrified if you let your seventeen year old taste your Port Wine.  And don’t get me started on how Festas or at least the sale of homemade toys and food at them, have more or less been abolished.  The country has gotten pasteurized.

However, as little as I like the change, it has changed, and in fact they have rewritten history retroactively and my parents will swear on a stack of bibles they never gave me wine before I was eighteen.  (I remember causing a minor furore when, having heard about wine killing brain cells in school, I went abstemious at 8.  Mind you they gave me half wine and half water before that, but they thought it was a bad bad thing to go on water only.  Only to hear them it never happened.)

So, culture can change, under pressure.  The pressure in this case is, I think, not being uncouth for the tourists. (Shrug.)  But not everything is going to change and not overnight.  That’s not how groups operate.  See how Portugal still has remnants of Roman and Arab culture.

Which doesn’t mean it’s genetic.  Sure, some things are genetic.  I suspect over time cultures select for traits that work best in them.  For instance a mouthy teenage girl has a lifespan of minutes in an Arab culture.  But the thing is that selection and evolution work slowly and most cultures aren’t stable long enough (like 4 or 5 thousand years) for that to make a difference.

Sure, some regions have (on average) higher IQs than other places in the world.  Is it genetic?  Unless they’re highly inbred, probably not.  We have no way of measuring IQ in the raw and humans are AWFULLY adaptable.  Plastic even.  Which means if the payoff is to be stupid and lazy, people are going to learn from infancy to be stupid and lazy, and the intelligence they might have had is as completely lost as if it had never been.  Also, note that “average.”  The “average” human doesn’t exist and every culture produces morons and geniuses.  It’s all on how they use it.  Or not.

The fact is that the more we know about genes, the more we realize the human race is — broadly speaking — incredibly homogeneous.  What I hear is that there is more difference between two lions of the same litter, than between two humans of long-separated populations.  Or, to put it another way, under the microscope, you can’t tell an Englishman from a Zulu, from a Chinese, from an Aboriginal.

And humans are REALLY plastic.  Humans raised in a different culture than the one that gave birth to them will conform not to their birth culture, but to the culture that raised them.  Heck, humans will even conform to animals who raise them, to the point of walking on all fours and never developing anything resembling speech.

Most of the obvious, marked differences you see are culture, not genes.  Which doesn’t make the problem any more tractable, but it makes it POSSIBLE to solve without genocide.

So long as we keep in mind that there is no such thing as a genetic culture, and that “multicultural haircare” means singing traditional songs while combing.

If the left were right about cultures being genetic, then we’d have to assume that it was cruel to even require someone to change languages.  (And anyone watching anyone else in the throes of acculturation might very well decide it’s “cruel” to require people to change.  Or even impossible.)  If the left were right, it would be logical to call people racist when they want immigrants to assimilate.

The left is profoundly wrong, on this as pretty much on everything else (even the things they claim to want that I agree with they want for the wrong reasons.)  Humans are not born with language and culture permanently attached and under the microscope, race doesn’t exist.

Which means to have people immigrate and not require they assimilate is an exercise in futility.  It just means they’ll bring everything they think they’re escaping with them, and continue to be miserable on our purse and as a drain on our nation.  (Let alone the myriad ancestral hatreds that will turn our streets into killing fields.)

People who stay in their country provided they don’t bug anyone else, are entitled to have as dysfunctional a culture as they wish.

But once your water has changed, you have to adapt and learn to swim in it.  Or go back.

Fit in or f*** off.  You want the better life?  Acculturate and create it.  Otherwise, what are you doing here?

 

 

 

 

There is a funny thing that happens, when you find out that everything you have ever known is a lie.

I’ve watched friends go through this when they found out they were adopted, or that their parents really weren’t their parents (well, okay, usually the father) or that their parents weren’t the people they thought they were (by which I mean, say, discovering that one of their parents had a criminal record, or even that their parents had never actually got married.)

I’ve never had a revelation of that magnitude, or that personal.  I’ve had a lot of small ones over the times, as I discovered that things like teachers’ interpretation of history were not “true.”  They were usually just someone’s interpretation, filtered through what was fashionable at the time: and given the time I was in school, that was usually Marxism.

Of when I started correlating things in my head and realized that things like Chariot of the Gods couldn’t be true.

All my revelations came in slowly, on a drip, and not on matters closely related to me.  This means that, though you could look at me and see where most of my opinions and interests (not all.  I’ve always been a bookish person) have changed since my early twenties, there was never a break, a moment where I wasn’t myself.  There was a continuum.  It just so happens that I started out as an indoctrinated socialist twerp, (even though I was always anti-communist, and suspicious of socialists, I didn’t realize how much of their philosophy permeated everything I was taught in school.  Heck, I’m still having these realizations and I’m past fifty), and ended up wherever I am now, I guess the party of “leave people alone, don’t hurt them and don’t take their stuff.”

Therefore there was never a period of acting out, rebelling against everything, and generally being a crazy woman.  My friends who had their reality “ripped” from under them and rebuilt, sometimes in minutes, usually had one of those periods: a “I’m going to go to India and learn Yoga” or “I’m now a Vegan and my assumed name is  zityhgmn, pronounced John.” And sometimes, btw, they would hysterically deny what they’d just found.

In the end, they returned to being more or less the people they were before.  But sometimes there were very odd years, there in the middle.

Why this is is important: mostly because it can help us understand what society is going through and what lies ahead.  It’s an imperfect analogy of course — all analogies are imperfect — mostly because people aren’t cultures.  And yet, if you kind of squint and abstract to the highest points, people and cultures are remarkably similar, though most cultures blame like crazy teen people, and some — I’m looking at you Europe — are remarkably emo, sitting in their rooms with the lights off, having bad relationships, and engaging in self-harm.

The point is that all cultures change all the time.  The idiots on both the left and the right who think culture is genetic have issues with this concept, but if cultures didn’t change, all the time, very gradually (just like people change all the time, very gradually) we’d all be hunting gathering and living in small family groups/tribes.  (Actually most of us wouldn’t exist.  The lifestyle wouldn’t support it.)

But some cultures change suddenly and traumatically.  What we did to Japan, ripping out everything they ever believed in, and substituting an arguably far less toxic (or at least dangerous) culture is one example.

This seems to have very weird effects, as it does in people.  On Japan, it seems to have had the effect of such civilizational loss of confidence that they might go extinct from lack of procreation.  If they don’t, at some point they’ll return to something like what they were before, though the details will be wildly different and integrate the change.

The same thing goes for WWI, which sort of ripped the ideas that Europe had of itself in itty bitty bits, and remade them as something else wholly different.  Europe is in that emo funk because of it, and exaggerates its crimes and embraces anything different, because everything different must be better.  It seems to be wearing off though — not very clear, yet, but there are rumbles — and if it does, it will be suddenly, as it is in people, and Europe will become more or less what it was before.  Maybe more so, in fact.  It might embrace previous versions of itself with a fervor it never had before, because the emo phase has been so bad for it.  If this does happen (and again, it already seems to be) there’s going to be a shock (and awe) heard around the world.

But the same thing applies to groups within a culture.  All of us, (except maybe the very young, here) started out living in a world where there was a single integrated media, and the media companies were more or less controlled (by choice, I want to emphasize) by a group who all thought the same, and who had become decidedly Marxist early on.

Since the entertainment companies were the same, the… lie, for lack of a better word (it wasn’t so much a lie because most of the people propagating it weren’t conscious of lying.  They were simply watching the world through a distorting political theory) came at everyone as a seamless whole.  For instance, the ideas that capitalism was inherently bad for people, or created mental illness, probably first dreamed up in USSR think-tanks, was propagated through slants on news, through story lines in movies and books and even through songs.  One of the times I remember seeing the story line was a soap opera where a worthy character who has done everything right kills himself for lack of money, and his son becomes a “righteous communist.”

This “unified voice” has started to break down.  In fact, the propagators of the “universal truth” that isn’t, are getting fairly drowned out, and, in their despair, sounding more and more obviously biased and crazy.

To most of us this is funny to watch, because we came of age under the unified lie, saw something that we couldn’t ignore and popped us out of it, and this led to little by little emerging from and rejecting the vision behind the lie.

It was so gradual that we changed without fracturing.

This isn’t true for people who are right now exposed to dissonant “truths” and consciously or not starting to realize there is no one thing “all right thinking people believe.”

A lot of the behavior we’re seeing right now is the result of that dissonance.  They’re starting to suspect everything they know is a lie, and most of them are embracing it with twice the fervor and also acting more than a little crazy.

Some of them are already in the advanced stages of this, and landing on the other side with their opinions flipped, but their behavior exactly the same, and just as tiring and annoying to sane people.

And some think their world is coming apart, don’t want to admit it and propagate myths of prison camps and genocide, just to justify their horrible feelings of anxiety that they can’t admit is based on the shattering of former beliefs.

This explains why it feels like everyone (including people most of us thought were sensible) seems to have lost their minds.

It doesn’t help to either get to the other side, or stop the crazy.  This thing is a process, and takes its time.  Also, the news is never going to be unified again (though many seem to want it) and the trickle will continue.  Only believe it or not, that trickle was too rapid for most of them.

We’re just going to have to let them scream and slam their room door till they come out of it.

But perhaps having a comparison and a handle to the situation will make it easier.

Be not afraid.  And carry on.