Equality is a wonderful thing.  Everyone agrees.  Every little kid born in the US should be able to aspire to becoming president or the head of a company.  Every little kid born in Europe should be able to aspire to becoming a head of its country in the US.

I think this ties in with the monkey brain (but not, mind you, the Monkey brain.  I make no representations about the functioning of Dr. Monkey’s brains, which apparently involves sharks and gratuitous danger, sometimes underwater danger with sharks.) because when you had small bands of hominids or hominins or other things started with hom that were ancestral to us, equality was a good thing — at least once you got past the “big man/head of tribe.” — if Ogg was eating all the fat off the mammoth carcass, and leaving Mogg to chew the little bits of sinew off the bone, Mogg would either die or bean Ogg with a mammoth bone, thereby starting trouble in the band and weakening it.

Okay, that’ half-assed (more like quarter assed) speculation.  But the one thing that’s true is that there seems to be a category for “fair” in our brains.  Dr. Monkey who should know — because he’s a biologist and for the unitiated Dr. Monkey is my friend, Dave Freer — says that even chimps try to establish “fair.”

We all like to see fair play.  We all get incensed when the game is rigged in someone’s favor.  And Americans have a mile-wide love for the underdog.

But let’s talk sense, shall we?

Life isn’t fair.  I was going to say the only place life is fair is kindergarten, then I thought about kindergarten.  Yeah.  Try for instance, judging a dispute between a grubby, overlarge boy and a cute, perfectly coiffed and dressed little girl.  Who do you think the teacher will think was being the bully?

Right.  There ain’t no justice.  Pretty much never.

Take my kids: because Dan and I started off on our own, with minimal to no help from either family, and because both of us struck out into fields where we had no friends, no family, no acquaintances and frankly didn’t even know how the game was played (particularly in my case, since I changed countries, languages and cultures) our progress has been difficult and hand over hand, and sometimes by the edge of bleeding fingernails.

Our progress would have been infinitely faster, given the same ability and level of effort if Dan had taken good care to be born to a family with contacts in his field, or I’d had the good sense to be born to even a minor science fiction writer.  If I’d been born to Robert A. Heinlein, it would have been an instant move to the front of the class (or heck, even if the spheres had aligned and Robert and Ginny had decided they needed a Portuguese exchange student back in 80-81.)

So? Life isn’t fair.

But more importantly, it is impossible to make it so.

A lot of our government’s more insane interference into realms in which it frankly has no business is in the realm of trying to make things fair, trying to level the playing field, and in general blundering about like a bull in a China shop.

Right now you’re about to tell me that affirmative action has done a lot of good.  Has it?  Has it really?

Because from where I stand, what affirmative action has done is erase the idea of a meritocracy.  It has forced employers and universities to take an interest in things other than “can you do the job I want to hire you for, and can we come to a mutually agreeable agreement?”

Sure, you’ll tell me, but it was necessary to overcome institutional racism and–

And we should talk about what caused that institutional racism, which was a series of laws designed to keep the two races apart and the black race subordinate.  These didn’t arise spontaneously from the way people behaved, no.  It was laws created to make it happen.  There were people — black and white — who’d have acted quite differently, long before the civil rights struggle.  (Note to pussy-hatters, the civil rights struggle was about removing unjust laws, not about screaming you’re discriminated against because …cheese. Not about claiming a patriarchy where none exists.  Note to the clueless, for what a patriarchy really means, go study Saudi Arabia or Iran.  I know what your Marxist professor told you, but no, covering women in sofa slip covers is NOT a mark of respect, unless getting whipped by the morality police is also a mark of respect, and if you, unspanked child that you are, really need to be whipped, there are bespoke clubs, that don’t involve enslaving your whole country.  Get your head out of your rectal cavity and start thinking.)

Anyway, the government swung from one side to the other, and suddenly its purpose was to make the races (and sexes) equal. This is laudable, I suppose, at least by comparison to keeping 14% of the population subjugated.

Except that instituting — or even promoting — equality via the federal government is akin to performing brain surgery on the kitchen table with a wooden spoon.  The intent might be laudable, or even life-saving, but the patient is going to die.

The patient — our public life, our culture, our industry — is not dead — yet — but it’s limping badly.

This lurch for establishing equality by fiat, and from above, has created a culture that no longer believes in meritocracy.  You’re seeing the end result of it in science fiction “powers” being more interested in the color of the author’s skin and what’s between the author’s legs or where the author puts what’s between the author’s legs than in the written story.  Now imagine that where it’s more important, like… managing companies, and you’ll start seeing the shape of the problem.

A technical/scientific civilization cannot possibly survive on less than competent managers, no matter how tanned they are, or whether they’re female, or whether they like to sleep with octopi.

I’m not saying all of these are incompetent.  I’m saying we’re not picking them for competence.  We’re picking them for “interesting side characteristics” (which btw keep multiplying) which have nothing to do with competence.  Given equal competence between all populations, this method will still lead you to pick less competent person of favored characteristic x than more competent person of no particular characteristic, (don’t believe me? Model it.)  and when the pool of talent is as narrow as say “technical ability combined with managerial ability” is in the human race, you’re going to get some very incompetent people in.

But beyond that, it is poisonous to the “favored group x” itself.  I know.  I started down that path when I first came to the US.  I hung out with mostly minority people (see where apparently people identify me as Latin more than I identify myself) and it was very easy not only to make use of your “race” to get what you wanted (and this attracts a certain number of grifters, too, particularly in the US, see Dolezal or her counterpart in SF/F) but also to be really insecure about anything you got.  No more joy and pride in accomplishment, as you were never sure “is that because of my skin?”  And then you started seeing discrimination under every bed.  Look, you knew that your skin color/country of origin/whatever mattered enough to get you a position.  So even if it didn’t matter to you, it obviously mattered to other people.  From that to assuming every slight, every snub, every even vaguely unpleasant interaction was the result of discrimination was a step.  That road lies the “micro-aggressions” madness and the “The US is a white supremacist patriarchy” paranoia.  Because every time you’re thwarted and can’t get what you want, it MUST be discrimination.

Or you can choose to assume there are racist/sexist assholes — like the time I worked for a store where I and the black girl were the only ones not given the combination to the safe, but the first questioned about missing money — but the majority of people aren’t racist/sexist assholes, and you’ll make your way the best you can with what you have, thank you very much.  Then when you fail, you study what went wrong and improve your strategy.  Did you fail because of discrimination?  Maybe.  But eventually you’ll get SO GOOD you won’t fail.  And at least you’ll know you did it yourself and not be looking for racists under every bed.

The problem with the government promoting equality is this: the government doesn’t know you.  The government can’t read minds.  The government can’t even balance the odds between individuals.

The best the government can do is make broad ‘protected’ classes, like people of a certain skin color/ancestry, people of a certain (okay, female) gender, and people of certain orientations.

But classes aren’t people.  I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that whatever the relative performance of Portuguese Immigrants and Black People in the US (I don’t know.  Haven’t looked it up) the Obama daughters have WAY more advantages getting where they want to go in life than my kids.  Even if on paper my kids belong to a more privileged “class.”

Or take my friend Kate, an immigrant from Australia, and me.  Our journey into publishededom (shut up, totally a word) has been about the same, if you take in account she started ten years after me and as the field was starting to collapse, and the rational manner of making your way up no longer existed (It’s Kate’s fault.  Ask her.  She does this to every field she enters.  That’s why she has like 4 degrees.)

She’s blond and blue eyed.  I am a certifiable mutt with an accent that doesn’t trigger “oh, how smart” among American born people.  (No, seriously, they confuse Australian and British.)

Does our skin color have anything to do with success?  No, see, they don’t paint-chip authors.  Or at least real publishing houses don’t.  We’ll leave the unreal publishing house alone.  Heaven knows that they do.

HOWEVER make one or the other of us the daughter of an sf/f writer, and it would be completely different, irrespective of our particular skin color, or frankly talent.

This is the thing.  What determines success for a human being might have some component of race/gender/orientation.  Certainly in truly racist (vast portions of the world outside the US) or truly sexist countries (see most of the middle East, and vast portions of the Mediterranean) one or the other of those can be a huge handicap.  Certainly being gay in Muslim countries can cause you to be crushed under a wall or hung from a crane, which, strangely, puts an end to your striving.

But absent extreme circumstances, is that the whole picture of a human being?

Oh, hell no.  Human beings are not widgets.  Let’s start with external circumstances, like affluence at birth or the relative knowledge of the field you’re entering, or even your parents’ achievements and your relationship with them: those can make huge differences between people who are externally alike.

Let’s continue with what’s inside the person, and which can be much harder to quantify/understand and into which the government FOR SURE has absolutely no insight: intelligence is probably the lowest in importance when it comes to success.  Drive, personality, capacity for work and what we’ll call, for lack of a better word, charisma and the ability to create connections, count for more than raw IQ.

Once you take external and internal circumstances into account, and absent the government’s thumb on the scales, what does skin color, sex or orientation have to do with success: bloody little.

Worse, the government’s arbitrary rules have caused the not-inconsequential lunacy of having girls treated with kid gloves in primary school, which means they’re badly prepared for science in high school, where they’re also treated with kid gloves, until they hit college, where they can’t be treated with kid gloves.  My younger son, in engineering, has seen all his female class mates drop out leaving what he calls “a sausage fest” which he — as a male who likes women — finds disturbing.  And most of it? Bad preparation because no teacher wants to be thought too harsh to girls.  Except good teaching involves being harsh and demanding.  Some of my best teachers chased me all over the map, testing for smaller and smaller flaws. I’m not as conversant with race, but I’m fairly sure that kind of “discrimination by making life too easy” is going there too, combined with hiring teachers for “diverse” schools by “diversity” not competence.

By itself, on its own, government -imposed equality is enough to destroy western civilization. It can be argued to be doing that.

I am not a racist (unlike our government’s bureaucrats) and at any rate in the US it would be laughable to be a racist, given how mixed the populations are.  (Quoth older son “I’m often taken for black in the US, which is only possible because US blacks are so pale.) I believe left to their own devices, the races would have equalized long ago, and done so without the resentment/self doubt/paranoia now plaguing race relations.

Oh, it would have been grossly unfair to the first generation after the racist laws were removed.  Sure.  There had been after all legal discrimination, and those people would have lacked the ability to reach their full potential.

But the thing is, who judges full potential? The government?  HOW DO THEY KNOW?  We come back to “from each according to his ability; to each according to his need.” WHO decides?  Every time governments try to figure that out it turns out your ability is sorting caterpillars by touch and your need is 50 size 30 shoes.  For the left foot.  Which is what made the USSR happy and prosperous (people of Brutopia.)

The government functionaries are humans too. (Probably.  Most of them.  The story my friend Rebecca Lickiss wrote where the IRS was staffed by vampires is fiction.  PROBABLY.) They don’t know the inside of anyone’s head.

We’re back to kindergarten.  Faced with a boy who weighed a good 90 lbs in kindergarten (I wish I were joking.  #1 son was always oversized) and a little blond girl who weighed 30, who would you think was bullying the other?  And yet the boy had been trained not to even think of bullying anyone.  And the girl was a conniving little Livia Drusilla-wannabe.

And that’s with kindergarten students, just starting on their life journey.

Or take my son’s first grade teacher who every year selected and made the life miserable of a child she judged to be “half breed.” (Took us forever to figure that out, because we don’t think of our marriage that way.)  She thought she was helping, she really did.  Given prejudices that she probably couldn’t see, she assumed all such children were less than normal, and she interpreted every sign (such as our son being bored out of his gourd, since he was reading YA books for teens) as a sign they were struggling with the material.  And she tried to get them into special classes, to equate odds.

But she was a racist, you’ll say.  Sure.  though not really, as what she seemed to get exercised about was MIXED races.  But insofar as she was making decisions based on race, yes, she was a racist.  And yet I’m 99% sure what she was trying to do was out of good intentions.  And nonetheless, she made my kid’s life a living hell (and the life of his elementary school girlfriend a living hell.)

Because the people judging what’s needed to equalize the field are humans, and humans by definition come with a whole set of assumptions and prejudices of which they’re not conscious.

It doesn’t make it any better to codify that into law, where, say Obama’s daughters are considered a down-trodden group but, say, Amanda Green’s kid who is red haired and who grew up with a single mom in middle-middle class isn’t.  Or even better, Rebecca Lickiss’s sons, who grew up with the financial drain of their father fighting cancer, and now have to make their way without him, are on paper much better off than Malia and Sasha or even my kids.

Humans aren’t widgets.  Widgets can be equal.  In humans, even identical twins have differences.

The equality guaranteed under the constitution is not the equality of the Jacobins, which can only be enforced with the guillotine, and which, by creating paranoia and insanity ALWAYS leads to the guillotine or its equivalent.  The equality in the constitution is equality under the law.

We can’t make humans equal.  No one can.  For those interested in leveling the play field a little, such things as scholarships for the DESERVING children of the poor or first person to go to college in a family or such SEEMS like a worthy endeavor, and if I ever win the lottery I’ll do those.  Will it make everyone equal?  Oh, hell no.  Doubtless, circumstances being sometimes deceiving, it will help some people who don’t need it and pass over some who do.  BUT that’s… well… neither here nor there, in the end.  It’s at least a finer comb than “race/sex/place of origin/sexual orientation.”

But the government should get out of the business of discrimination for or against any given group.  Sure, this will lead to some injustices.  It will also, in the end, lead to a far more functional world, one where people can actually look past external characteristics.

The world I’d like my descendants to live in.

 

*If any of you is a member of Audible, A Few Good Men Audio Book is on sale for 4.99If any of you is a member of Audible, A Few Good Men Audio Book is on sale for 4.99

Also, while on that, Kim du Toit is back to blogging and in fine form.*

 

 

 

For the first time in a week, I slept through the night.  The last echoes of the flu seem to be a massive auto-immune attack that left me coughing and having asthma issues at night.  So, yes, you’ve been listening to the ramblings of a woman with almost no sleep.

This weekend I need to finish the collaboration with Kevin Anderson — well, my parts of it — so I don’t kill his schedule.  It’s going to be tough, and my mind is already on it and not on this blog.

I haven’t had any promo posts, and I’ve asked Charlie Martin to create a widget to send your books url to my associate account, so that I can run whatever people send through it, and not be dependent on our ambulatory mollusc’s very fraught time. Only for now I don’t have it.

I didn’t forget the vignette contest and if I owe you a mailing for various things, be patient for now.  I have to finish this novel and possibly the other collaboration, before I can turn my hand to stuff like that.  As usual, work with other people must take precedence, because I hate to be late on things and impact other people’s schedule.  (I also hate verbifying nouns, but I haven’t had enough caffeine to look for another word, just now.)

I’ve resumed work for PJM, with the proviso that a) it will be done around my fiction work, meaning they might at times have a bit of famine and glut, depending, and that I won’t be caught in an endless rewrite cycle.  My first post, on how we nuked the moon with Trump is up.

Yes, I know you have complaints about their interface, but honestly it’s much improved, and also I’ve never known any site that people don’t complain about.  Including my own.  (And heck, I complain about it too.)

Part of the reason I MUST do the collaborations ASAP and then probably sit down and write like a mad woman is that my ideas keep stacking up.  Those who’ve read From Out The Fire or Where Horse and Hero Fell probably know I have a “magical legion” thing in my head.  It’s lately gotten very loud, and I’d like to send it to Baen after the collabs.

Not that I’ve forgotten the dragon war and all the rest.  It should all be coming relatively soon. I only intend to take a few weeks off this year, and they’re not off from writing, just writing from a different location.  So–

Provided the health holds, and hopefully it will — this horrible flu was horrible for everyone and three and a half weeks to recover is NOT unusual or bad, actually.  And before I get the usual admonitions in the comments, yep, I had a shot in December.  There just was no covalence between it and this year’s strain, or at least this year’s strain in CO.

I’m going over page proofs for Dipped, Stripped and Dead, but I might not put it up this wekend, or at least not the paper version, since that takes at least 3 hours.  OTOH I could find myself fried around Monday (it is a three day weekend) and put it up.  Who knows.

Okay, that’s about it.  Now I go shower and have coffee and work.

The thought police strike again – Amanda S. Green

Recently, a story hit the media in the DFW area about a local high school student being disciplined by his high school for “racially insensitive” comments made in a group tweet. The comments are alluded to but the context in which they were made remains a mystery. (At least I have been unable to determine what they might be.) I have seen nothing describing who might have been taking part in this group text, whether the student in question sent the tweet while on school grounds, while taking part in a sanctioned school activity or while representing himself to be a member of or representative of an organization associated with the school.

Then there was an earlier incident that took place in the same school district – but at a different high school. In that case, students at a pep rally held up a large sign which said “colleyville is going to TRUMP trinity tonight.” It also said, “paid for by Trinity” and had been designed to look like a wall. Few looking at the sign could mistake the message. The more affluent Colleyville Heritage High School students were throwing down on the more racially mixed, lower income Trinity High School, a major football rival, from the neighboring Hurst-Euless-Bedford School District.

Then there was the situation that arose when a 19-year-old student from TCU in Fort Worth was initially suspended from the university and who later had his suspension lifted but was still placed on disciplinary probation. Why? The student had tweeted comments about Islam that the university deemed offensive.

On the surface, each of the cases appear to be similar and, in some ways, they are. They each involved students, whether they be high school or college students. They each took place in the DFW metroplex. (This isn’t something that is exclusive to DFW. If you do a google search, you can find similar situations occurring not only throughout the country but around the world.) They each have led to either new rules or to disciplining of the students involved or both.

So what are the differences and why am I up in arms?

Let’s start with the TCU case first. For those of you not familiar with the university, Texas Christian University is a private, religious-based university. That means it can set rules about how its students behave that publicly funded institutions might not be able to get away with. It also means there is a student code of conduct which will be much more restrictive that you will find with most public universities. A code of conduct that is enforced. So, while I applaud the university for backing off of the suspension, I can’t argue too much about it keeping the 19-year-old student on probation. He had violated the school’s code of conduct.

Now, that doesn’t mean I agree with the code of conduct but the student chose to go to TCU. That means he agreed to the code of conduct and either didn’t read it or didn’t think the university would enforce it.

My issue comes with public schools, especially junior and senior high schools, that become thought police. I’ll admit that schools have the right to enforce rules of conduct when students are on school district property, when they are taking part in officially sanctioned activities or when they are representing the school in some “official” capacity. By that, I mean I have no problem with school districts disciplining band members on a trip to a competition who trash their hotel rooms or cheerleaders in uniform caught drinking alcohol or football players hazing new members, etc.

My issue comes when school districts start trying to police what students say or think when they are NOT representing the schools. In the latest case, yes, the student was foolish for posting a tweet that contained racially “insensitive” language. But, if he wasn’t representing the school or wasn’t on school grounds at that time he sent the tweet, does the school have any right to discipline him?

In my mind, no.

Let me give another scenario. When my son was in elementary school, there was another kid who kept picking on one of my son’s friends. His friend was a great kid, lots of fun, but he was smaller than some of the others in their class. This other kid took to picking on the friend, trying to get him to throw the first punch. But, my son’s friend was smart and remembered the zero-tolerance rule.

However, the day finally came when my son’s friend had enough. This time, however, the bully wasn’t smart enough to pick the fight on school grounds. They boys were almost a block away from the school. He pushed and picked at the friend one too many time and the friend wound up wiping the floor with him.

That should have been the end of it but nope. The school had to get involved. Why? Because an assistant principal had seen the fight happen. It didn’t matter it was well off the school grounds. It didn’t matter that the friend didn’t throw the first punch or that he – and his parents, as well as other students – had reported the bully time and again. Nor did it matter that the school had done absolutely nothing to stop the bully. Oh no. Punches were thrown and the bully’s feelings got hurt and his nose bloodied.  So the friend was even more at fault than the bully was.

And remember, this took place off school grounds.

The administration immediately took action against both boys, giving them in-school suspension. For an action that took place off school grounds and under absolutely no conditions that could tie what happened to the school or the administration. It took the friends’ parents threatening to sue not only the district but the administrators involved to have the kid’s suspension lifted. Even then, they were told it would be best if they moved their son to another school.

That’s right. The kid who had been the victim and who only stood up to protect himself, was being told to leave the school. For something that took place off school grounds. And for something that could have been avoided if action had been taken before blows were thrown.

The only reason the admin wasn’t able to get away with it was because the action took place off district property and at a time when the students weren’t taking part in anything associated with the school or the district.

So, getting back to the policing of thoughts and words by schools, I also have no problem with Colleyville Heritage disciplining those students who put up the “wall” sign at the pep rally. Why? It was an officially sanctioned school activity. It took place on school property. Except, well, there is one little problem. At that time, there were few, if any, rules in place in the school or the district governing what signs could say. There was no official committee with guidelines that had to approve signs before they could be shown at school activities. Therefore, if the students received anything more than unofficial counseling, the school and the district overstepped.

What about the tweet?

This is where things get a bit more difficult to come up with a firm response. There have been few details about the context given. We know it came after a basketball game. But I haven’t seen how long after the game or, as noted earlier, where the student was when he made the tweet. We don’t know if there is anything about his Twitter handle that associates him with the school, etc.

Where do we draw the line? If schools are going to start disciplining students over what they post on Twitter, etc., are they also going to patrol their parking lots and make sure students aren’t listening to “offensive” music? Can you imagine the uproar if there were monitors going around, telling students they can’t listen to rap music because it has the reputation of using “offensive” language and for denigrating women? The uproar won’t come from the students, although they will be sure to let you know how they feel about it. Nope, the uproar will come from adults who will be screaming racism because most rappers are not white, Anglo males. Yet, if you are disciplining students for tweeting racially insensitive comments, why are you allowing them to sit in the parking lot, blaring out music that does basically the same thing? (Not all of it but enough that the genre has that reputation.)

Are schools going to start policing what is said or done in the privacy of a home? (Remember, there has already been at least one school/district that had the laptops sent home with students set so video ran and teachers could check to see what was happening in the home.)

What I’m seeing is an attempt to police what our kids are thinking and saying. It isn’t teaching them anything but how to resent authority. It is an attempt to quell free speech. Does this mean I think students, or anyone, should go around spouting racist comments? Hell no. But I also don’t believe it is something school should be trying to combat when students AREN’T AT SCHOOL.

One of the strengths of this country is that we have the freedom to say or think pretty much whatever we want. However, that is quickly eroding and that scares the hell out of me. I may not like what someone says but I have the option of either walking away from them, ignoring them or trying to have a discourse with them. That was easier back in the days before social media. Maybe that’s why we see more and more about schools and employers, etc., taking steps to make sure people associated with them don’t do bad think.

However, where do we draw the line? Sure, an employer has the right to protect its brand. But does that give them the right to punish an employee who says something offensive even if the statement cannot be associated with the employer? For example, say a person is at a football game and gets caught up in what was going on and shouts something about a player that comments on race, religion or sexual orientation and that comment is shown on the jumbotron. That person is dressed in team colors for the home team. There is nothing about them that identifies them as working for Company X. They aren’t high enough in the organization that no one outside of those they work directly with know who they are and who they work for. Does the company have the right to punish the worker for what they said, especially if there is no company code of conduct in place?

I say no. Again, if the company is really worried about it, an unofficial counseling might be called for. But even then, it isn’t any of the company’s concern – as long as the person involved doesn’t act that way when doing their job and doesn’t act that way in such a manner that it calls attention to the company.

The same thing applies to students, in my opinion. In fact, there is something else we need to consider here. Do we really want to stop our younger generation from speaking its mind? Sure, some of the stuff coming out of their mouths will be objectionable. But how do they learn if they don’t make mistakes. Believe me, they will remember the lesson a great deal better if they are told by their peers why what they said crossed the line than they will if an administrator lands on them with both feet. It’s called peer pressure and it goes to what matters most to a teen.

Schools need to remember that their role is to educate and not indoctrinate. Parents need to remember that their role is to parent and guide. Somewhere along the way, too many parents forgot that and schools, with approval from the local, state and federal governments have become more indoctrination camps than institutions of learning. It’s time we either turn that clock back or we find alternatives. Otherwise, we are going to find ourselves having to wonder what new unwritten rule our kids – or ourselves – have violated and how that will impact the student’s ability to get into college, etc.

I may not agree with what someone says but, as long as they aren’t yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater, I’ll fight for their right to say it. Everyone has the right to make an ass out of themselves and to learn from it.

Yes, I do know nice people don’t talk about money, and also that it makes the world go round, though I don’t remember anyone quantifying the amount of money necessary for 365 days and nights of Earth-rotation.

If you’re looking at that paragraph and wondering if I’ve lost my mind, I assure you, it’s still here, in the little jar by the bedside table where I keep it.  And that none of those statements are nearly as crazy as the idea people seem to have about money nowadays.

What idea?  Well, it apparently, like other things that the left fails to understand, is now called “A social construct.”

No, seriously, someone tried to make that dog hunt on my post about the minimum wage.  He informed us that it didn’t matter if we paid more to people, and it didn’t necessitate the raising of prices, or replacing of human workers with robots in order for the business to survive, because “money is a social construct.”

Now to an extent he was right.  Put a bunch of children alone in the wilderness, and let them grow up in ignorance of all other human civilizations and culture, and they don’t spontaneously start making currency out of leaves, just like they don’t spontaneously start to talk in a complex language, modern or ancient, and they don’t spontaneously start writing.

What they will do, though, is almost for sure start engaging in some form of exchange: my freshly hunted meat for your bowl of berries, my interesting rock for your flower.  It’s just what humans are.  I don’t think we have ever come across a society so primitive that people didn’t trade with other humans.  Just as we’ve never come across a society so primitive that humans didn’t communicate with each other.

Sure individual languages are cultural constructs, built by cultures over millenia.  And sure, individual systems of currency are social constructs, built by usually modern governments.  The governments of the past, though they coined, often were not very good at controlling the currency used in their territory.  In Elizabethan England, you might find French, Dutch or Spanish currency in circulation alongside the English currency.  This makes perfect sense because the important part of such currency was the metal it was made of, and not the figures stamped on it.

Perhaps it was easier to associate value with the precious metals, but the fact remains that then or now, money was worth what you could acquire with it.  That is, that same chunk of gold might get you a chicken in good times, but when chickens weren’t doing well, and the population was booming, it might not even get you an egg.

The value of an object is what is someone is willing to pay for it.  Conversely, the value of currency is what someone is willing to let you buy with it.  Clear as mud?

You see, money is a language, in the end, a system of information.  It allows people to decide what is valued and needed in society and what isn’t.  Or at least it would be, absent varying kinds of government interference.

If I sell my chicken for two bits of gold, or a pretty picture of George Washington, and then go across the way and convince a guy to take that same currency for a cow, it means that I either found a prize idiot or chickens are so rare in that society that they are worth the same as a cow.

Things like rarity, desirability, need, want, get fed into the system, and decided by human beings who need, want, have trouble finding, or are drowning in a given thing and a currency value is set.

That is, in principle, the idea.  Social construct?  Not so much.  Or only because it is impractical to walk around with a cow, a chicken, or a month’s worth of compute work, to trade with any stranger who might be interested.

It would be impossible for a computer to decide and set a value to things, the same value that is set quite easily in a series of myriad transitions.

The economy is just a way of referring to this system of ordered chaos by which most of us make their living.

But make no mistake, at the bottom of it there’s that “we make our living.”

If you read as many biology books as I do, you’ll come across sentences like “The flyspecked toadswallower makes his living by hunting tadpoles in the shallows.”

Whether you’re raising chickens or cows, writing books, programing computers, or breeding prize angora cats, what you are doing is making a living.

Money is the system we use to be able to have a complex society in which NOT ALL of us need to get up every morning and go find a chicken for breakfast.  That is all it is.  But as such it is a brilliant invention, without which society would never have attained the sort of complexity in which people can be so detached from reality as to say money is a “Social construct” as though that meant it is made up, wholesale, out of air.

And I don’t know about you, but I’d rather use my money as I please and make contracts as needed, than to have a government bureaucrat interfere in the system and tell me what I must pay for goods or services.

Because that is the denial of what money is FOR.

Money is neither good nor evil, neither despotic, nor liberating.

It is a tool.  use it advisedly.

 

*Francis Turner had a previous post about money on this blog and makes many of the same points: Something About Money (and Cake.)  Because it’s a complex subject looking at two different approaches at explaining it might help.*

The Real Resistance – by Orvan Ox

Racist! Fascist! Nazi! Misogynist! Xenophobe! Homophobe! Thank you!

 

Recently $HOUSEMATE and I were dining out and our server had the curious habit of saying “Thank you” during every interaction, whether it made any sense or not.  This is likely not a quirk of the server, but of a current trend in customer service. A local store suddenly has a “Thank you” policy for every customer interaction as well. Evidently they got severely dinged on a secret shopping rating of late for not having that, so now they have the policy in place. The idea is understandable: promote the idea of gratitude and polite customer service. There is a problem, though. And you’ve likely already figured it out. That “thank you” happens whether it makes any sense or not, and happens at every interaction. Thus it is both misused and overused. Misuse and overuse lead to resistance – that is, it loses the desired effect and becomes useless at best. Here, the worst is that it might be a joke shadow of itself.

 

The other words in the title are not as polite, nor used for the same purpose as “thank you” yet they have the very same issue: misuse and overuse. Racist once meant someone had an automatic negative reaction to those of some other race. (For this purpose, assume that ‘race’ actually exists and can be determined by trivial observation of skin color, even if that might not really be true). This was, and in a few cases still is, a problem. Racism lead to racial discrimination, unfair testing at polls, and all the other various Jim Crow laws. A society that does this is denying opportunity to some, and thus reducing its own potential. It wastes available manpower and brainpower to its detriment.

 

Fascist and Nazi are related to each other, Nazism being a particular brand of fascism. And back in the 1930’s and 1940’s they had a set meaning for a particular style of governance. While fascism is decidedly Not Good, the Nazis took to it with a horrifying efficiency that resulted in things so evil that it was truly unbelievable for many until newsreel footage showed things really were that bad. This didn’t merely waste potential, it destroyed manpower and brainpower.

 

Oh, manpower? In the sense of people available to do things. It’s not misogynist, it’s simply the right English word. Genuine misogyny is just like racism, only aimed at women instead of those of a particular race. This is another one of those “brilliant” ideas that permits a society, if it chooses, to artificially limit brainpower and, yes, manpower even if it is ‘womenpower’.

 

And then there are all the -phobes. Xenophobe for ‘fear’ of the other, the foreign. Homophobe for ‘fear’ of the same sex (or gender, if you must). There are likely many others, but one needs to stop staring into the abyss sometime. How much real fear is there? Almost none. There are almost certainly a few people who really are genuinely fearful of members of this group or that. A few. Not a majority. Not even a sizable minority.

 

The idea that these words apply to nearly half of society is breathtaking in its absurdity.  If discrimination truly allowed lower pay for equal work, what sane business wouldn’t be rushing to hire the cheaper labor wherever and whenever it could? Seen any “Men need not apply” or “No Caucasians” or “Non-citizens only” help wanted signs? Me neither. Maybe it’s this bubble I’ve been living in. Oh, wait, haven’t seen the furious cries of outrage that would accompany any of those, either. Hrrmmm.

 

But if you expose a population to something over and over and over, a tolerance builds up. A resistance, that protects that population from the something it is being misexposed and overexposed to. That is how new antibiotic resistance comes into being. The surviving germs survived… and then the next set will be all from those survivors, and a higher percentage will survive the same treatment. This repeats until the resistance is so effective that the antibiotic is ineffective.

 

It’s not quite the same for people, as ideas tend not to be immediately fatal – even the astonishingly bad ideas. Systems can develop resistance as well, and society is system or a collection of systems. There is a new theory of Type 2 diabetes emerging, that the problem is insulin itself. The current standard treatment deals with one symptom – high blood sugar, which is more than just a symptom and is a real problem, but doesn’t address the immediate (yes, something else has to start the initial insulin resistance) root cause. “Insulin resistance protects the cell against… insulin.” is how at least one doctor sums it up. More insulin leads to more resistance, which means yet more insulin for treatment, and yet greater resistance in a vicious cycle. Some new treatments are being tried that reduce blood sugar without increased insulin. There is hope that this might break the cycle and have better outcomes – but it’s not common practice, nor the “received wisdom” yet.

 

Resistance protects the population or system from whatever is being resisted. In that theory of Type 2 Diabetes, the population of cells uses insulin resistance to protect itself from insulin. The cells are stuffed full of glucose and here comes insulin insisting they take in yet more. What to do? Bar the doors and increase the resistance. In antibiotic resistance, germs develop protection from antibiotics. And in our society, we are developing resistance to words that once meant things, but their misuse and overuse has robbed, or is robbing, them of power.

 

Consider that in the 1970’s and 1980’s an accusation of racism was a potent thing, a near nuclear attack on character. In recent years the end of the power of the word wasn’t the election of a black President, at least not directly. The end of the power was the stimulus-response accusation by many that any disagreement with that President was purely and only racist and not a genuine disagreement on policy. If everybody is a racist, nobody is a racist.

 

Other issues also happened. Gamergate. Sad Puppies. And perhaps others still, but each had nasty accusations that bore no relation to the actual issues being raised. And the result? Immunity, resistance develops. It’s not much at first and it’s rough going, but the result of wave after after wave of misuses and overuse is that more and more see that is indeed misuse and overuse.

 

And now we have many using the terms xenophobe, misogynist, sexist, fascist, and Nazi. The result is that those words, too, will lose their power as the targeted population becomes ever more resistant to them and regards them no longer as a danger, but as meaningless drivel, or even a joke. “That’s racist!” has already been used as a joke and is its own punchline. The R-bomb has been defused by its very wielders. To them, I have only this to say: Thank you.

 

There is another problem. That is that having rendered the words powerless, what happens should the actual evils they originally described truly manifest? As some abuse one linguistic “antibiotic” after the next, they each become impotent in turn. The overused and abused tool dulls.  The disease can then run away, controlled or contained only by whatever lingering immune response society has left. Despite hysterical claims, that is NOT the case right now. Yeah, to those doing this and making future problems much harder to solve, thank you – for nothing. Great job, throwing all the antibiotics around for something not even a cold. There should be a statue to your stupidity, for it is monumental. Thank you!

The last day I’ve been going “Argh” as I realize the barriers that have been put to thinking and expression thereof, as well as the continuous blast of “this you must think, this you must celebrate” (more onerous than even “this you must not think” and “this you must not do” that Heinlein cautioned us about) just in the last ten years or so.

The first occasion of ARGH was my going over page proofs for my mystery, Dipped, Stripped and Dead (under pen name Elise Hyatt.)

It was supposed to be out in December, then the collapse, and then January turned into “bursts of insane working, punctuated by the worst flu I’ve ever had.”  That extended into February.  Yesterday Dorothy Grant (BTW, her first book is out) pointed out if I didn’t try to use the treadmill desk the first day I feel up to it, I might not relapse again.  It might have been too late for that warning, though this relapse feels less awful than the last.  I should have pointed out to her that sanity is for sissies, but she might be able to slap me, even from Texas.

Anyway, in going over Draw One In The Dark, I came across a character I’d forgotten was in the book.  First I should point out the furniture refinishing mysteries are where I put most autobiographical details, to the point of older son making me change a thing because he uses it as a password.  Both boys refer to this series as “selling our childhood retail.”  As in, E. the little boy character in the book, is a composite of my sons at that age.

The character I had forgotten was a Marine, who was a carpenter and six foot six or seven, whose other “personality” was a female who liked to dress in extremely high heels.  He was completely harmless, and a very nice man, except for a tendency to think my wedding vows didn’t mean much.  THIS part was goofy. (Though he took his rebuff with grace.) And hitting on me in my own kitchen, while wearing women’s clothing was very very creepy.  His other goofy idea was that he passed as female.  (OTOH best line to guys who were making fun of  him in a bar was “How would you like to have your ass kicked by a guy in a dress?”)

Anyway, I use a version him in that book, and gentle ribbing happens.

It occurred to me that I couldn’t get that book traditionally published today for the thought crime of “laughing at the transgendered” (which I wasn’t.  I was laughing at a very specific person whom I actually liked, but who had some odd quirks in his brain, as who doesn’t?)

And I went “ARGH.” Because this is an area in which we must now think that someone’s cross dressing name/persona is as valid or more valid than his male personality/person, and we’re supposed to call his occasionally liking to dress as a woman “genderfluid.” We MUST also not find it funny that he thinks his female persona is beautiful.  (He is/was — we lost touch and he was older than I– a gorgeous man, of the “craggy type” which does not translate well to female beauty.)

In a way, this type of enforcing of what we MUST think of people’s little quirks is less tolerant and makes us less free.  I mean, I honestly don’t know if my friend viewed this other persona of his as a whole other “person” or just as a hobby, i.e. something fun he liked to do/explore.  And that was fine.  I mean, we didn’t hold our noses up at him, and it was none of our business what he chose to do.  But now, by the dictates of the politically correct church, he and I and all our friends would have to think of it as very serious indeed, a “genderfluid” thing that meant he wasn’t the same sex his body was for at least part of his time.

How is this helping? Sure, if you really are a person who thinks he/she shifts genders occasionally, you now have reinforcement/support.  But what about everyone else?  What about the vast spectrum of people, from guys who think women clothes are fun, to guys who just want to explore that side of themselves? WHY must there be only one correct way to be a guy who periodically dresses/thinks he passes as a woman?  And isn’t labeling every other view of it as hateful… rather hateful?

My other moment of Argh was occasioned by younger son.  No, that doesn’t mean younger son did something wrong.  He didn’t.  It’s more that younger son told me about something.  (Oh, dear Lord, why does he do that?) and what he told me about was that some show introduced the concept of “Galentine’s” on the 13th.  This is a day for “ladies to celebrate ladies.”  What was driving younger son bananas (with a side of kiwi) is that he seeing all his female friends fall into this.

The idea is frankly loony.  Valentine’s itself is highly commercialized, but most of the time, my husband I circumvent it by having walks together, or just watching a movie together.  However, a day to celebrate being a couple is useful (and it wasn’t proclaimed by some government.  In fact, I’m fairly sure what it is in the US grew organically, because it’s not the same anywhere else.  In Portugal it’s considered “boyfriend/girlfriend day” but it mostly amounts to some kissing and maybe flowers.  Or it did in my day.)  Trust me, in the years of raising toddlers, any time to remember yes, you’re in love, and what brought you together is important.

But Galentine?  What the actual heck?  It’s not bonding, and it’s not building a relationship that is a cornerstone of society.  No.  It’s … putting up lists of your friends who are female and celebrating them BECAUSE THEY’RE FEMALE.  This is something they were born, and can’t help being, and… what are we celebrating, precisely?

It’s not that I object to “ugly/awkward girls get a day too.”  No.  it’s the undertones of it.  It’s the “It’s just as good to be a woman as a couple (you know, the future would beg to differ) and how being a woman is something you should celebrate because… because… because….  I don’t know?  Because we have vaginas?

Picture guys saying that being a man is something to celebrate, because… they have penises?  Mind you, I’m a big fan of both men and their ah implement, but seriously? It would be laughable.  And celebrating because you’re a woman is equally laughable.

Mind you, I’m probably the voice crying in the wilderness in the days of pussy hats and women marching around with signs painted with vulvas or proudly proclaiming they have a vulva, but it seems to me if what makes you special is the non-thinking thing between your legs, you’re doing life wrong, you’re doing equality wrong and MOST importantly, you’re doing SPECIAL wrong.

I have friends who are female and friends who are male.  Not only do I not care what their equipment is, but frankly I don’t want to think about their equipment.  The only person whose sexual organs matter to me (other than myself) is my husband.  It’s the only one whose sexual organs have an even remote effect on our relationship (I maintain if we lost the capacity to have sex tomorrow, love would go on, so, yes, remote.  But it would be less fun.)

What makes my friends special are the things we both enjoy, the things we like to talk about, their fascinating minds or their generous personality, or their kindness, or their enthusiasm or all of those and more.  None of them, though are “vagina” or “penis.”

Celebrating my lady friends is goofy.  Celebrating my gentlemen friends sounds like I’m having affairs.  I love all my friends, and wouldn’t even be opposed to giving non-romantic valentines, the way elementary school kids do it.  (Only not to everyone I know.) BUT I don’t think of my friends in neat little groups.  A couple of my best-male friends are gay.  I don’t have them in a group for “my gay friends.” I only think of them in those terms when refuting some idiocy from left or right about “all gay males” or when the subject — usually a joke — is one they’d enjoy.  In that sense it’s like thinking of my “writer friends” a fluid group who will appreciate some jokes/situations more than my other friends.

Putting people in groups, some of which are to be celebrated and some reviled is a trick for “governing” and controlling people, which has been used since machiavelli.

What burns me is seeing people willingly cooperate in this, seemingly unaware that any group that’s uplifted can be cast down when policy demands it.  It’s all a game to control people.

They can pipe all they want.  I’m not dancing.

Happy valentines to all my friends, male and female, all of whom are loved even those I’ve never met but who make this blog interesting.

You are loved, all of you, you fascinating individuals.  Now, go be you.

 

 

My family has a complex relationship with food.  Judging by my waist line, so do I.

When I got married I didn’t know how to cook, as in, at all.  This came about for two reasons, the first being that no one in my family expected me to ever marry (“I pity the man who’ll take you” was mom’s favorite exclamation) and if I didn’t marry, culturally, I probably would never have moved out of my parents’ house, where mom cooked.

Except by the time I was fourteen or so, they were starting to suspect the good and dutiful daughter who lives with parents all her life would not work, but then another factor intervened, as I had the grades to go on the college track, and very few people with college degrees need to cook, beyond some simple dish for themselves.  Which meant that other than frying something and making popcorn I needed no lessons in cookery.  And mom was — still is when I visit — jealous of her kitchen, and won’t let another woman in it without force majeure.

So when mom realized I was about to get married, she freaked and tried to give me a crash course in two weeks — as I WAS PACKING to move to the States.  As you can probably surmise, this didn’t work too well.  Which led to my being left alone in the house my first day as a married woman (post honeymoon) when Dan went back to work and finding the house contained a package of spaghetti and a thing of minute steaks, neither of which did I know what to do with.  (Yeah, we went out to eat.)

I’ve come a long way, baby, guided by two things: for my wedding my brother’s wife gave me a book of Portuguese cookery WITH PICTURES, and my MIL gave me The Joy of Cooking, back when it wasn’t the “joy of pushing vegetarianism and low fat cooking of dubious scientific provenance.”

I learn well from books.  It’s kind of what I do.  And I wanted to TRY stuff.  Over the next three years, I never repeated a dish twice, except by special request.  This meant we gained a lot of weight, since Dan likes new food, and also since I had no clue of portions (still don’t.)

After three years, we’d established a repertoire of favorites, but I branched out into “cuisines of the world.”

Here is where I burst your bubble about Portuguese cooking.  The North of Portugal has the LEAST Latin cuisine in the world, except for the fact that you use garlic for everything except deserts (and now that I think about it, there’s probably a Portuguese desert involving garlic) and wine for EVERYTHING including some deserts.

Note though that garlic is considered not merely flavorful but very hot.  In the North it is used sparingly last the food be labeled “sharp.”  My mom used to buy 2 oz envelopes of pepper that lasted her forever, and she bought her salt in little containers that lasted forever also.  She complained grandma (dad’s mom) made her food so salty it was like “licking a battery.”  I liked grandma’s food.  And I ate olives as a snack all the time.  It is probably worth noting that the English are a great influence in the North of Portugal and also that, given the associated family names that have intermarried with mom’s family forever, there is some indication they were kicked out of England after the doctor’s plot.  I’m not sure what this means, since Elizabethans thought camphor was a spice, but perhaps the Elizabethan cuisine from which English bland cuisine descended did a parallel trajectory in mom’s family.  Or perhaps there is a certain taste that’s genetic.

The indications for this are the following: I still don’t like overly hot food, though I like FLAVORFUL food (and the only herb used in cookery in Portugal, in the North, is parsley.  In the south it’s cilantro.)  Younger son, too, is not fond of really hot dishes, and his definition of “hot” is south of mine.  His older brother OTOH was eating fire-alarm chili at very little past one, and has special arrangements with Thai restaurants who know him to make the food as spicy as the one of them who REALLY likes spicy food can take it.

Curiously, while pregnant with Robert I craved spicy Indian food.  It’s practically what I lived on.  With Marshall I craved fish.  The curious thing here is that I don’t LIKE either food.  And that these things are the boys’ favorite foods, even now.

So, there is surely some genetic component.  And all the Britishers in the North of Portugal made Northern Portuguese food more bland than otherwise.  But even the South isn’t crazy spicy, which you’d think for people who traded all over the world it would be.

When I got older, we got a lot of refugees from Portuguese African colonies, and they ate spicier food, particularly piri piri.  I found I could tolerate a bit of it, if was what was on offer, but it was still not my favorite.  (Same reason I don’t ride roller coasters.  I find the sensation unpleasant — possibly because of a middle ear defect.  I also get vertigo when looking up — and I don’t voluntarily seek unpleasant experiences unless they produce something needed.)

Now, because my husband and older son, who are who I cook for most of the time now, like spicy food, I often make it.  I will also make a pot of unspiced vegetables which I mix in on my plate, so I can tolerate it.

Which is how I came to make vindaloo last night, and post about it on Facebook as a joke about cultural appropriation.  The last thing I counted on was having someone come on to tell me all the edible foods came from Europe, including Vindaloo, because it started in Portugal.

I’d never heard of this theory of “racial superiority by food” and I was stunned, mostly because a) food palate is learned (however much one has the inclination to like, say, spicey food) and b) ANYONE who has ever eaten vinha d’alho (a dish made by marinading meat in wine and garlic overnight and then stewing it in olive oil, with a dash of pepper and salt) knows that vindaloo might start with the meat, might have garlic and a dash of wine vinegar, but has otherwise bloody all to do with a cuisine in which cumin is considered a bit racy.  (Used in the South, but not in the North of Portugal, much.)  (And before you go racing through the net and coming back with all sorts of Portuguese recipes using high spice, let me tell you that’s as great a bit of nonsense as people who discover a Portuguese recipe from Azores online and ask me if I ever had it.  Or people who think Portuguese and Brazilian cuisine are the same.  Portuguese cuisine has changed an awful lot in the last thirty years, mostly as people traveled more, but also as they catered more for tourists.  Also a drive to reduce salt in cooking has led to the use of herbs.  But I’m telling you what I grew up with.  A cuisine in which Vindaloo would be considered so spicy as to be inedible.)

The thing that shocked me about this assertion of the superiority of European cookery, besides the stunning levels of ignorance on display, is that there is no such thing as “European cookery.”  Tell French and English that their cookery is alike, and you’ll get killed.  Even Portuguese and Spanish cookery aren’t even close to similar.  H*ll, in the Portugal I grew up in, cookery varied over a twenty mile radius, because the culture still hadn’t adapted to CARS and there were no highways or convenient roads.

BUT the ultimate error of this thinking is the belief that all culture is genetic.  This is the error of the SJWs in which name we are enjoined to not make people assimilate here because that’s “racist”.  It is the error of believing that speaking a certain language, liking certain foods or a preference for a certain type of music — or governance — are genetic, inborn and unchangeable.

This is the veriest nonsense.  Sure, there are inborn preferences.  No mother who ever birthed a child believes in tabula rasa.  From birth Robert had certain, definite preferences.  Maybe before birth if there’s a mechanism by which kids influence what the mother craves.  And by age three he liked really spicy Indian food and was a fiend for Greek food, even though neither of which were things I cooked regularly.

But any mother who has had two kids knows that such preferences vary much even within a family. And don’t say it’s because my kids are mutts.  We’all mutts. The same weird preference for highly spiced foods runs in my family.  As in, my brother loves it.  I don’t think anyone else in the family does.

To ascribe a preference for hot foods to “European blood” would be crazy, as would be to ascribe a preference for any foods.  I’m sure there are Britishers who adore hot food without ever having tasted it as children, but I know growing up in the same sort of blandish diet, that it took me years working up to even mildly spicy which I can now enjoy.  My genetic preference is PROBABLY for bland food (I remember as a child thinking onions were spicy, and I watched younger son do the same) but this was exacerbated by not being exposed to much of it early on.  Younger son who genetically seems to be much like me, has a much higher tolerance and even enjoyment for foods I’d have considered unbearable at his age.  And his brother, no matter how much he was predisposed to eat hot food and like it, had this characteristic exacerbated by growing up in America where he could go to a Thai restaurant at eight and convince them he really liked it “Thai hot.”

Now where the commenter was “right”: I don’t think there is any food in the world that hasn’t been influenced by some form of “European” cooking, because Europeans went all over.  So, of course, Thai cooking has French influence.  And Indian cooking has Portuguese influence.  But that’s where things get confused.  I grew up with a solid… well… jam would be a way to put it, though it’s more like a jello after it dries thing called Marmelada.  It is called that because it’s made from Marmelos, which is the Portuguese word for quince.  (BTW I’ve found reference in British books to this being GREEN which is fricking insane.  It’s orange-red. The jelly made from the peels is deep ruby red.  Since these references are from the nineteeth century, I wonder if there was a method of making the dish, or something used to color it then which I never saw.) The British, during the Napoleonic wars, saw it, and liked it, and from it made “Marmelade” which is orange (made from oranges) but tastes nothing like it, and is, to Portuguese food trained taste buds nearly inedible being bitter.  However, it wasn’t until I was an exchange student and one of my best friends, a Japanese girl, got a package from home, that I realized Marmelada is nearly identical in color, texture and taste to a red bean sweet made by Japanese.  Portuguese have been in contact with Japan from the 11th century.  Which came first?  The red bean or the quince?  Who knows? Who cares?  Humans have probably traded recipes as much as genes around the world.  We probably have traces of Neanderthal recipes (or recipes for Neanderthal  or both) in our cookery.

There are plenty of reasons for Europeans to be proud of their culture and their achievements.  For one, their Judeo/Christian basis infused them with an appreciation for individual humans, which in turn made freedom and economic prosperity possible.

But a preference for a certain food is not a mark of superiority. The statement that European food is better is about as sensical as saying cow is a more “logical” word than vache.

Sure, humans are born with certain instincts, but training and early exposure constitute most of the culture.

Even the vaunted “short time” versus “long time” preference, while it might have inate roots can be trained.  When we made poverty not only unpleasant but disapproved of, people learned longer time preference.  Sure, some would be better at it than others, but none would be totally incapable of it.  Because genetically humans of all races are more alike than not.

In fact, things like punctuality, thrift and organization followed industrialization around the world.  And the even five generations of an industrial revolution are, as any biologist will tell you, far too short a time for evolutionary selection to operate.

If we believe that the ability to take advantage of the fruits of liberty and individualism birthed into the world by American culture (which is a child of British culture, but not the same) is genetic, this leads inevitably to the logic of genocide, which by itself negates such fruits and destroys civil society.

We also demonstrate a total lack of understanding of human history.  Wherever and whenever men have been rewarded for doing nothing and living at other’s expense, even if this curtails their liberty, they have done so.  The welfare state is the cause of most dysfunction in the people it seeks to help.

I realize many generations will have to pass and all the sociologists influenced by Marx will have to die before we can correct that.  BUT until then we do not need to compound the error of rewarding people for bad behaviors and then assuming they’re inferior because of those behaviors.

It is time to get out there and emphasize bourgeois virtues in the happy knowledge that taught early and often, EVERYONE can acquire them.  Yeah, some will be better at them.  So? No human being is incapable of them.

Get out there and win the culture wars.  Don’t get distracted into things like cultural appropriation and food.  Man is a trading, fornicating, warring, colonizing, learning ape.  It’s why we’re so fascinating and so good at survival.

Go be human.

I woke up late and with a sinus headache.  We’re apparently having a major change in weather sometime today, so that explains it, but even ibuprofen failed to dent it, which accounts for my being so late today, I guess.

The other part of this is that I don’t want to write an obituary.  I’m in that uncomfortable position of losing mentors and older relatives, that leaves me with the expectation that I’m next in line for the doleful harvest, as well as missing the people who depart and being left in the expectation that I now have to fill the role of elder and mentor, for which I’m not ready.  I’m not sure anyone ever is, of course.  Maybe it is true that man is an ape who understood his own mortality and went insane.  These days the insane thing seems startlingly obvious.

Anyway, yesterday I learned Ed Bryant had died two days ago.  Part of the problem of being very busy is that even my forays into the book o’ faces don’t get all the news.

Ed was the mentor of the very first (walk in/at will) writers’ group I attended.  It met at UCCS and the “price” was, I think, $2 to pay for Ed’s gas to come down.  Considering how much trouble he went through, he didn’t make enough from this. I think sometimes he made a little more, enough for a coffee with us after the meeting.

He was a gracious and kind mentor, moderating the excesses that took place when he couldn’t come down — people who mocked your word choice, or people who acted like people with odd accents shouldn’t really be trying to write fiction — he never really said anything about “girl who speaks funny wants to write in English” nor did he ever assume my typos — I’m a typo artist — were the result of thinking in Portuguese (they aren’t.  In fact thinking in Portuguese is rather difficult these days.  They’re usually the result of thinking two fast and not being able to keep up with it in typing, so you type a word from another sentence.  Then there’s the crazy.  For instance, in current book I had “conducting bathroom” instead of “conducting business.”)

Four or five incidents are connected to Ed in my mind.  One of them was that at the time I was attending that group on Sundays, I gave birth to younger son.  My meeting after giving birth, I was saying something, and Ed was looking at me like I was from Mars.  It’s like he knew the voice, but couldn’t recognize me.  Suddenly went, “Oh, Sarah, I didn’t know you Un-pregnant.”  (Which made sense since I’d started in the group while pregnant.  To this day the memory of his expression makes me giggle.)

The other was that while going to that same group, I attended my first writers’ conference.  Ed was the pro at our table.  Something awful had happened in the planning for the meals, and they’d made half the meals vegan.  By the time they got to our table the only “choice” was vegan.  The end result of this is that the meal was inedible as institutional vegan meals often are.  There were four or five of us, forlornly talking about how awful the food was.  Ed got up, we thought, to go to the bathroom.  Instead, he went to the gift shop and bought each of us a bar of chocolate, a gracious gesture he , in no way, was obligated to make.

At another meal, at the same conference, they served melon salad for desert.  Turned out that all of us disliked/were allergic to a different sort of melon.  So a lively trade took place before anyone ate.  Ed was talking to someone who had just come to the table, and missed the pre-trade negotiation, so he turns around, and we’re flinging bits of melon around.  He asked “What happened?  One minute I was at a normal table, and another minute there’s flying melon.”  If I ever name a rockband, it will be Flying Melon.

For a while Ed had a newsletter, which in addition to news of his own books and stories, was devoted to “curious things from the Denver area.”  His newsletter talking about Mike, the Headless Chicken came at the same time I’d discovered Mike, and we spent quite a while trading websites about Mike.

Ed was funny, kind, and a generous mentor.  More importantly, no matter who was in power or what the election was, or how close to a con, I never noticed him holding a political line on whom he’d talk to or be nice to, and despite a wicked sense of humor, he never inflicted a political rant on anyone in a panel, or at least none I was present at.

Our writing styles and interests were completely different, but our minds met at the weird and odd and picturesque.

I talked to him just three weeks ago at Cosine and was very glad to see him.  I can’t quite believe he’s gone.

This is not an obituary, because I didn’t know him that well, I only knew him as a profession and a mentor.  In both capacities his behavior was something to emulate.

Two short reminders here.  First, Darkship Revenge is on presale, if you’re so inclined.

Second, if you read Through Fire and think it’s worth it, feel free to nominate it at Dragon Award Nominations, which are open now. It costs nothing.  And of course you should nominate whomever you think is good, beyond and above my stuff.  Sad Puppies “recommendation site” which will be monthly is not focused on any award and will be up — I SWEAR — very soon.  We ran into “disabling flu” for about three weeks.  The next site will be permanent, no matter who runs the movement.

Sunday Vignettes by Luke, ‘Nother Mike and Mary Catelli

 

I MEANT TO BLOG.  I was looking at a post Orvan sent me, intending to put it up.  And then family stuff came up, and then I got involved in unpacking and ironing from the trip to Portugal.  (What? It’s only eight months, and it got stuck in the middle of unopened household boxes) and I just realized what time it is.

So, I delivered Darkship Revenge and it will be out in May.  Will a wee Snippet amuse you?

This is not the beginning of the book, but it is strongly related to its theme, and particularly relates to its cover:

Which meant that Lucius and Fuse were, what? Dead? Incapacitated?  To say nothing of Kit and Simon?  My throat closed at the thought of Kit or even Simon hurt in one of those buildings.  Not that I wished ill on Lucius and Fuse, and frankly, by virtue of being with me, they were of mine and I’d defend them and avenge them if needed, but Kit and Simon made it personal.  If one of them were bleeding to death in that warren of buildings, how would I get in and rescue him? How could I find him, if the coms didn’t work? Because I had to find him or them and rescue them.  I had to.

I calmed myself down with the reassurance that these people were afraid of being followed, which meant they couldn’t have killed all the people on my side and against them.  Possibly they hadn’t killed anyone, just somehow managed to evade them and get out of the building.

Right.  And these voices sounded young.  Like really young.  One of them still had a relatively high soprano and another’s voice wavered between soprano and basso profundo, in the way boys’ voices do between the ages of twelve and sixteen or so.

None of which made me feel better about the fact that they were going to be here in seconds.

I was armed.  I’m always armed.  I’d rather be naked than unarmed.  But that wasn’t the point.  There were three of them.  There was one of me.  And I had to protect Eris.

Against normal people, this wouldn’t be a problem.  I was fast enough – a skill not developed, but acquired via genetic manipulation of my genes by those who created me – that I could and often did defeat more people than that.

However, here caution applied.  I had no idea who these people were or where they came from.  They shouldn’t be enhanced of course, but…  For all I knew they were the spawn of tentacle monsters.  What I did know is that they had been fast enough and strong enough to subdue and kidnap Kit who, on top of being created the way I was and having the same super-speed from his genetic legacy, had been changed by a bio-engineered virus in utero, to maximize that speed.  If they could capture Kit, no matter if they’d caught him at a disadvantage outside the ship, then they would be able to match my speed.  So, a frontal confrontation was out of the question.

That was all right too.  Okay, I’d never run up against people – other than other bioengineered clones of Good Men — who could match me for speed, but I’d run up against plenty of them whom I couldn’t kill for a reason or another.  In my misguided youth, I’d run up against a lot of people I couldn’t even hurt without precipitating Daddy Dearest’s fury and much worse punishment.  So I’d learned psychological subterfuge, finagling, and deception.  Which worked against everyone no matter what the level of speed or even intelligence.  Most of the time.  Practically.

I banished misgivings.  Look, whomever my wiles hadn’t worked against, they always worked against males.  Mostly.  Almost. Practically. They hadn’t done me much good against Kit, but my darling was a jaded bastard. How many of them could there be in the universe? And could any of them sound as young as those people outside had?

Fast, I made sure of the hidden burners, one at my ankle, one under my hair, and one where it’s really none of your business.  No, not there.  That would impair any fast movement.

Eris had fallen asleep.  I engaged my fast speed, because I knew I had seconds only, to disengage the sling, grab her, and stow her in the back, where a net held back an assortment of toys and blankets and stuff that testified as eloquently as his words that Luce did indeed spend a lot of time babysitting young ones.  I sort of rolled her in a blanket, so that it protected her from any sharp toy edges, but did not cover her face fully.  I was hoping she would pass unnoticed in the middle of the mess, and no one would realize there was a baby back there.  I was fully aware that if they grabbed my daughter they’d render me less effective.  Not incapacitated, but less effective. Or more effective in a “kill them all” sort of way, but that too had its liabilities.

Bless the child, she did not wake up, though she did make a little aggrieved sigh, which caused me to kiss her forehead, before I returned to the middle of the flyer, the open space between seats, where I did my best to appear surprised as the door burst open.

The surprised look was made much easier by what the intruders looked like.

They walked in, in a group, as though none of them trusted the other to go in first.

They were as I’d expected three boys and very young.  They were dressed in what looked like those one-piece baby suits made adult size, only they had boots over their feet.  This was strange enough, as was the fact that these one-piece suits had been embellished with patches, scribblings and bits of metal sewn on.  It was fairly startling that the two who had cut off their sleeves had what appeared to be a welter of scars and blue ink all up their arms.

But none of this – none of it — compared to the strangeness from the neck up.  First of all,  they all looked startlingly familiar, but I had trouble identifying them, because…  Because it looked like a piercing freak had gone insane in an electronic components store.  The one in the center, who looked older than the others, had red hair, which he’d carefully shaved so it only grew on half his head.  I’m assuming shaved.  For all I knew he’d killed the follicles, of course.  The half that remained glittered with metal, glass and who knew what the heck else, all of it looking like he’d salvaged it from a computer room.  His eyebrows were pierced all along their length with more glittering components inserted.  There was something orange and green and metal through his left nostril.  There was a blue indecipherable symbol on his forehead.  He looked indefinably familiar, but it was hard to focus through all the facial piercings and tattoos.

The one on the left looked really familiar; must be all of 12 and was prettyish in the way boys sometimes are just before or at puberty.  What remained of his hair – he seemed to have eliminated random patches of it – was inexpertly dyed blue and straightened, so you could see that his hair was both curly and black.  All down one side of his still-babyish face, he had scribblings in blue ink, that disappeared into his collar.  His eyes were blue and feral.

The one on the right also looked familiar, but not as much, was maybe 14, had a still-round face that would probably turn sharper with age. He had fewer of the blue markings, but his ears were stretched with what appeared to be spools of some sort, his scalp was completely bald and seemed to have electronic components actually growing on it.  He had cut off his right sleeve to display a welter of blue wink in designs that included a dragon and made me wonder if these were in fact the sort of primitive tattoos no one used in the twenty fifth century.

In the middle of the designs was a single word: Danegerous.  Yes, it was misspelled.

I’m not a prude or an innocent, and there were very few things that people could do with their body that shocked me.  I grew up between the high class of Earth, the bioengineered Good Men, who treated normal populations as disposable sludge, and in broomer lairs, where frankly most of the population treated themselves as disposable sludge.

But there was something to the way these boys were body-modified that put a chill up my spine and made me realize I was dealing with something completely different.

Throughout the ages, humans had dressed and adorned themselves to look different or to signify membership in some group or family.  I was going to assume these boys were adorned according to some tribe or affiliation.  I was hoping the tribe was “The Insane Neurotics” because that was how they looked.

Before I could make sure that my air of surprise was just perfect, they’d replied with their own hair of surprise.  Nose-pierced red-head jumped back.  I mind-heard him say Whoa!

Danegerous stood rooted to spot and I heard him mind-proclaim to the world at large It’s a woman.

And the baby, the little twelve year old was holding two burners out and pointed at me.

The shock that I could hear them mind talk hit me at the same time that I recognized the youngest one.  I recognized his movements, the crazed look in his eyes, I recognized the sort of mind that always, always, reaches for a weapon first; the type of temperament that views anything strange and fascinating as something that should be shot first, so it could be dissected later at leisure.

Staring at me, those baby blue eyes in the tattooed face were my Daddy-Dearest’s eyes and my eyes too. I didn’t know how this was possible, and I was not even going to make any guesses.  Just as I wasn’t going to make any guesses about their mind talk.  We’d heard that the telepathy bio-ed into the mules was limited and bonded.  That is it had to be a bonded pair to allow it to flow.  Though really, Kit and I hadn’t been when we’d first talked, but an exception doesn’t negate the rule.

Unless these three were bonded, of course, which was possible, as there are many kinds of bond.  But I didn’t want to know why I could hear them, anyway, nor why or how this kid was … for lack of a better term, my baby brother.  I just knew he was.  He’d been made from the same genes that had gone into making me and my late father, Alexander Milton Sinistra.  The feral blue eyes were the same that had stared out of the mirror at me for most of my growing up years.  I hadn’t even realized they had changed until now.

A cold shot of fear went up my spine, because let’s face it, I knew myself, and I’d known daddy.  No one with those genes could be trusted, not even for the simple things that untrustworthy people could  be trusted with, like, you know, not doing things that will get them killed.

My face must have turned to stone.  He hadn’t recognized me, or the relationship between us.  Which was good, I supposed.  I was measuring the space between us and figuring out how to disarm him.  I wondered if the other two were armed too.  So far they were not making any effort to reach for guns.

“How do you know he’s a woman?” Baby Brother asked, in voice, glaring over his shoulder at the other two while keeping his weapons trained on me.

With anyone else, I’d have risked a lunge at him. I would.  But with him, which is to say with myself, it was too risky.  It might push him past slightly annoyed into homicidal maniac.  I felt a trickle of cold sweat run down my back.  From the pile of toys I heard the snuffle, snuffle, snuffle that was often the precursor to a really good Eris; cry.  Surely not.  Surely she wasn’t going to start…  Please, don’t start.  I didn’t want to see what these feral children could do to a baby.  I was going to guess they had no protective instincts of any sort.

I took slow, controlled breaths.

The redhead, who was clearly the oldest one, blushed.  It was kind of weird to see someone that pierced and tattooed blush, but blush he did.  His voice was gruff and low as he said, “Look at her.  She—”  He made gestures in the front of his chest, even though Baby Brother had gone back to staring at me and wouldn’t see me.  “She looks like a woman.”

“Maybe he’s just malformed.  How would you know?” Baby Brother was defiant and sneering.  “What would you know what a woman looks like, anyway?  And how many women can there be? On Earth?”

“Uh,” Danegerous said.  “Uh. Many. The hollos,” he said.  “From Earth.”

“Bah,” Baby brother said.  “They could just be differently dressed men. How would you know what they look like naked?  That’s the only way to tell if there are real differences.”

I saw the two older ones trade a look and thought there must be hollos that Baby Brother wasn’t privy to.  But why hadn’t they seen women?  And why did they seem to think women were rare?  Had they been raised in some home for the seriously mentally unstable, kept locked away from all of humanity?  Now I thought about it, it made perfect sense, actually.

“Come on,” the tallest and oldest one, the redhead, said.  “You don’t have to see what they look like naked to see they’re different.  In olden times, they were the people who gave birth.  Their whole body is designed for it.”

Baby Brother’s eyebrows went up.  He looked deeply thoughtful, in that way that my soi disant father had looked before he had someone arrested. He turned to me.  “Strip.  We’ll see if it’s true.”

Right.  And I’d see him in hell.

But I couldn’t say that, and I couldn’t mouth off.  There was that snuffle, snuffle from the toy storage at the back. I had to control my expression.  I had to find a way out of this.

I couldn’t run at him and pound him into dirt, because the other two might object, and if Baby Brother had the enhanced speed as I did, the other two might also.

And I couldn’t intimidate him with words, because I didn’t know where he’d come from or what he’d been through.  As I said, an asylum wasn’t out of the question.  Perhaps father had made him as a back-up body donor.  The thing was I didn’t know what to hold over him.  If someone has already been raised in hell, threatening him with flames is besides the point.  Which I’d proven over and over again when well-meaning ladies had threatened me with expulsion from schools where Daddy dearest had enrolled me.

When sane routes out of trouble are impassible, as my broomer friends had taught me, you take the crazy one.

I let my knees hit the floor, raised both my hands to my head, and bawled in the most sincere way I could manage, “Oh, please, don’t hurt me.”  My noise had the effect of covering any noise Eris might make.

By the corner of my eye, while crying, and cringing, I noted that Redhead and Danegerous had jumped back. Apparently my performance was terrifying.

But Baby Brother also resembled me in not scaring.  Or perhaps in scaring angry.

His lip curled up.  “He’s a coward,” he said, and stepped forward, raising his foot.  I had to struggle not to smile.  The more psychotic they are, the easier they fall.  And by genetics alone, poor Baby Brother was laboring under more issues than some long-running journals.

As he raised his foot to kick me, I bent forward, as though to grovel, and said, “Oh, please, I’m just a poor woman.”  I noted that both Redhead and Danegerous did a little mental shout of Told you so.  Which was good because it took them off guard too.

I grabbed Baby Brother’s foot before his kick landed, and pulled.  Up. Hard.  With Super Speed.

Look, just because they could move very fast, didn’t mean they thought other people could too.  Or perhaps they didn’t think women could.  Or perhaps they just couldn’t think.

As Baby Brother hit the ground with a resounding jar, and before he could roll over and shoot me, which he would have, given half a chance, I had removed his burners.  I slipped one into my pocket.  Then I lifted the insufferable brat by the tuft of ill-dyed hair, and pointed my burner at his head.  My idea was to use him a shield and threaten to shoot him.

But of course, nothing is ever easy or simple.  The horrible brat spun around, somehow, ignoring pain.  His hair tore at the roots.  Leaving me holding a hank of improbably colored hair, he got free.  I realized why he was missing tufts of hair.  Apparently fighting recklessly was one of his amusements.

He aimed for my crotch with a well applied kick, and while it still hurt, it didn’t hurt me like he expected – I guess he really didn’t know any women – which allowed me to bring the burner  butt neatly into the side of his head, rendering him unconscious, just as Redhead dove at me.

I shoved Baby Brother out of the way and kicked Redhead in the crotch just before he hit me.  Of all the fighting I learned, both formal and street, for my money, the best training I ever got for combat was the ballet camp I once attended.  It allows such precision in high kicks. I jumped out of the way as he rolled on the floor clutching his family jewels.  Since I didn’t know his resiliency level, I pulled the burner from my hair – look, I didn’t know Baby Brother’s standards in weapon maintenance.  The one I’d taken from him might or might not work – and pointed a burner at him and one at Danegerous, who was backing up, both hands in full sight, his mouth working.

Weirdly, the Redhead, on the floor didn’t even look at me.  He howled, both mind and voice, staring at his companion, “Thor, don’t.”

Danegerous gave a little start, and looked mulish, while shaking his head.  “If we’re going to fail…  If we fail… You know what Father—”

“Fuck Father,” the redhead yelled. I felt wordless shock from the other two. “This doesn’t mean we’ll fail.  Just because the guy didn’t know anything about Earth, and we let Morgan try his way at making friends and influencing people, it doesn’t mean we failed at the mission.”  He looked at me.  “Look, Ma’am, I know we started badly, but if you give us a chance, we want nothing nefarious.  We’re emissaries on a peace mission.”

“And I’m Winnie the Pooh,” I said.

“No, you’re not,” Danegerous said with an edge of hysteria to his voice, his hand reaching into his pocket.  “We know him. He’s much younger than you.”

At the same time I yelled “Freeze.”

He didn’t, so I leapt across the room, grabbed his hand in mine and pointed the weapon at his head.  Only to point it at the redhead who made a jump at us.  Finding the burner pointed at his head, he lifted both hands, “Ma’am,” he said, the soul of politeness.  “You must let me get the stuff from Thor’s pockets.  He’s an explosives fanatic, and he’s trying to blow us all up.”

“I have to,” the so called Thor yelled.  “You know what Father will do to us if we come back defeated.”

Which is when his voice, wavering and adolescent though it was, found a place in my head.  “Thor… Mason?” I asked.

He froze.  “Wah?”

“From the genetic line of Ajith Mason?” I asked.

The Redhead who’d been inching closer, with all the stealth of a cat, stopped and froze too.  He stared at me.  And I caught a flash in the eyes that made his features click into place.  “And you,” I pointed the burner at him, and waved with it.  “You’re Jarl Ingemar’s clone.”

I should have known better.  Look, perhaps it’s genetic.  Like Little Brother I apparently had a way to make friends and influence people.

I’m not going to give you a blow by blow account.  I don’t remember it.  I remember Thor Mason squirming,  trying to go for his stored bombs, presumably.  I mean, what would you expect from Fuse’s little brother?

I hit him hard, on the head, and eased him down quickly, just in time to deal with Jarl’s – and therefore my husband’s — clone who seemed unsure on whether to attack or not and therefore was at a disadvantage when I hit him hard.

I was in the process of tying all of them, individually and securely when Eris started screaming blue murder, and Kit yelled in my head Athena, Athena, answer me.