According To Hoyt

I’ve had it with bleating.

No, I’ve really had it with bleating.

Blame it on the steroids.  Blame it on the fact that I have bags to pack for a con trip and an international trip, instructions to write for the house sitter, cats to take to boarding, clothes to process for the guys AND work to pack, because since we’re mostly going to see my parents, we’re mostly going to be sitting there, and I might as well finish books.

I should be attending to one of those, but instead I’m going to try to stop the bleating.  Particularly the “doomed, doomed, doomed” bleating.

It never fails.  It’s predictable.  If I write a post with a modicum of optimism, like yesterday (Kindly read it: As long as we’re fighting we have a chance is not telling you that it will be easy or fast or simple), I get the bleaters.  “You’re too optimistic”  “you’re out of of touch” “Look at the candidates” “Elected Obama Twice” “Uniquely corrupt” Dooomed.  DOOOOOOOOOOOMED.

Honestly, I don’t know if these people think that taking up Cassandra’s beat makes them interesting (I don’t think so, they’re all, afaict, over twelve), if they know absolutely no history (I don’t think so, most of them are readers), if they think that saying “We’re doomed” excuses them from the perilous fight, or if they’re simply getting old.

I hate doing this post right now, because US history is NOT my area of strength.  I only started studying it 6 years ago, and the way I deal with history is that I will accumulate the feel of “how things worked” but not dates or names.  I don’t accumulate dates and names, because I can ALWAYS look them up.  However, in this case I won’t have the time.  OTOH I can rely on RES to supply anything I lack in comments.  Other people too, but RES and CACS have made the kind of study of history of the US that I made of Tudor history.  They live there part time.

Some things though I can answer up front.

“We elected Obama twice.  We’re done for.”  Yeah, and?  We elected FDR FOUR TIMES.  Were we done then?  FDR was kind of like Obama with more energy.  He turned a recession into a depression. People thought he was anointed of G-d to lead the US.  People had his picture everywhere.  Even when I was born in 62, in a country far away, his name evoked reverence and awe.
Were we done then?
What we were was in worse shape then.  (More on that later.)  And the worse things get, the more people want a man on a white a horse to rescue them from reality and from themselves.  So the worse he made things, the more he got reelected and worshiped.

Were you under the impression the American people were more than human?  Not flawed?  Our culture is better than most, but we’re still human.

“Our institutions are now uniquely corrupt.”  Oh, please.  That doesn’t begin to pass the laugh line.  You could say our institutions are now uniquely BLOATED and you’d be right, since the left views them as a sort of welfare.  But UNIQUELY CORRUPTED?  You have got to be kidding me.  Read any bio from 100 years ago.  Read around the edges of Expanded Universe.  Talk to someone involved in politics who won’t bullshit you.

One thing will come up “Machine politics.”  Not only at the national level, where we still very much have them — at least on one side of the isle — but EVERYWHERE.  Some cities were run by some machines.  Do you think the machines ran the politics for no purpose?  Oh please. Of course they ran them to enrich themselves/give jobs to their cronies.  Patterson believed that Heinlein’s “had a silver mine” was his doing some “laundering” for one of the machines.

You can’t have power without the power attracting sharks and mafiosi.  It is, again, a consequence of being human.  The corruption has moved more from local (although we still have some.  Hello DIA positioning) to national because the federal government has way too much fricken power.

“But that is what I was saying, Sarah.  The feds have too much power.  We’re all going to die screaming.”

Oh, please.  No, what you’re going to do is get out of the way and let the rest of us continue to fight.

The people elected Billy Jeff twice.  They elected Obama twice.  The amount of fraud needed to get the second victory for Obama (and he was never at Clinton’s levels) was massive.  If you worked the polls or if you saw people claiming to have “created” two million votes for him, you know that.

I also don’t see the encomiums of Obama to stick as did the ones to Clinton for at least four to five years after he left power.  Also, no one is trying to make Clinton sound like FDR anymore.  Because it won’t stick.

Had Clinton or Obama held power a hundred years ago, they would be revered as icons, people would be ready to vote Obama in for a third term.

“But they’re ready to do that for Hillary.”

Oh, please.  The democrats — I still have some dem friends, and a lot of acquaintances — are as happy about her as most of us are about Trump.  This is the election where no one wants to vote.  “Let the least hated win” is not inspiring.  Their party machine, which is corrupted as hell simply pushed a choice between Bernie, which the still sane dems don’t want to vote for at all, and Hillary.  And Hillary is the SANER choice.  And meanwhile OUR party machine decided to punish us for not taking to Jeb! by pushing Trump (no?  Really?  They were openly against Cruz until the end, but they can “do business” with Trump.  They should be able to.  The reason the man hasn’t released his financials is that he’s been a wholly owned brand of multinational banks for twenty years.)

Given the choice, yes, Hillary might win.  Some of my conservative (more than I am) friends are voting for her.  Some are voting for Trump.  Some are going Johnson.  Some are staying home.  I’m either leaving the top of the ticket blank of voting Johnson, who won’t win and has that virtue.  It’s not worth my immortal soul to vote for either Hillary or her twin with the toupee, Trump.  Just no.

So yes, Hillary might win.  But what will that do?  That will cause even more lack of confidence in government among the people.  And if the press try to push encomiums it might finish off the press’s credibility.

Because ninety percent of our problem is that we’re fighting with both our legs in a cement bucket

Assuming you guys are serious with the “uniquely doomed” bullshit, you are convinced of this because you’ve been gaslighted.  Not just the newspapers, no, though that’s part of it, and they’re doing their best to sell “the people are united behind the progressive future” as hard as Pravda ever did.  You’ve been gaslighted by movies, by entertainment, by history books that sell the past as kind of an upright moral utopia when it was in the hands of democrats.

Government by the people is never clean, perfect, virtuous.  If you think the people are always disinterested and clean when it comes to politics INCLUDING THE POLITICIANS, you are a child and shouldn’t have the franchise.

If you think the American people are uniquely corrupt, lawless, evil, you are a progressive and should learn history — or go abroad without counselors, nannies and money.

Government by the people is messy, faulty, often corrupt.  Down in the trenches, the mud gets all over everything.  You have to fight with elbows and truncheons, even as a pundit, and you have to hit people you like but who are being idiots.

There is NO clean politics.  There is no perfectly virtuous free people.  The Founding Fathers themselves engaged in what we’d consider corruption, and fought in less than clean ways.  The progressives view this as a signal our system is awful.  If you want to join them, there’s the door.

Government by the people is messy, odoriferous, stuttering, halting and often counterproductive.

It’s an awful, awful system.  Save for every other one.

Stop bleating.  Yeah, we’re in trouble.  There isn’t a year since the founding of this republic that we’ve not been in serious trouble.

You want to be rescued by a man on a white horse who makes it all work flawlessly?  Yes, I kind of suspected that from the encomiums to Trump I hear even from supposed libertarians.

But reality doesn’t work that way.  The man on the white horse becomes the tyrant we must depose.  Because he’s still flawed, and working with flawed reality.  And you picked one who is … well, a machine politician, or at least a man playing at politics, with both feet in the democratic machine.

No one told you it would be easy.  This is not a game.  Being a subject is much easier than being a citizen.

I understand you’re tired and discouraged.  I’m tired and discouraged too.  We thought that we’d defeated the biased press.  And we’ve only taken away maybe a tenth of its influence. This is not how I planned to still be fighting in my fifties.

But we are discouraged because we were unreasonable optimists.  It was just around the corner, we thought ten years ago.  Yeah.  Well, we weren’t right.  And we’re not just fighting the press, but as what you guys keep saying shows, the entertainment, the history books,  the–

As a civilization we were gaslighted by the unified lie.  We’re just starting to have the tech to come out of it.  And look at the strides we’ve made in gun rights, among other places.

Yeah, the carrying momentum of the left machine will still score it victories.  You can’t stop it over night.  BUT we’re starting to score SOME too.

I’m tired, I’m upset, I hate to have to fight those fleeing the battle, as well as the ones on the other side.

But hopeless?  While there’s life, there’s hope.

And there’s still a lot of life in the constitutional republic.

Yeah, there’s flaws that must be mended.  OF COURSE there are.  It’s a human thing, built by humans.

So?

No one is going to mend them for you.  Pick up your shovel and dig.  Whether your trench is in the culture wars or in outright politics, there is a lot of fighting to do.

None of it will be solved by giving up.

Get to work.

Years ago, when I was particularly depressed about something stupid going on in government, I had to leave the office and go pick up the kids from school.

At the time, we lived in a tiny mountain town near Colorado Springs, and it was a fine late Spring day.  As I walked to the school, five blocks away, I saw people out working on their roofs, people planting their gardens, people taking their pets for walks, people driving for a volunteer organization that drives the elderly around, people going about their lawful business in every possible way.

And suddenly, like an epiphany, I realized that our “elites” including the presstitutes and the supposed intellectual heights of academia, are among some of the most corrupt in the world, but the people?  The people are all right.

This is the reason why, despite our terrible institutions we’re not Somalia or Venezuela or even Brazil.  Our politicians are fully that corrupted, doing and saying anything for the sake of holding on to more power.  But we’re different.

How different?  I’ll give you the two ways that made me fall in love with America:

1- for now, in most places — this is changing and it’s a worrying trend — we are law abiding, and more importantly respecting of other’s property.  Every time I go to Portugal, you can fold more of your car and take it away with you, to prevent people from breaking in to steal it: radio, gps, steering wheel.  (I can’t remember if you could actually remove the steering wheel, or if I dreamed it after the last time.)  In most places I’ve lived in the US, including some large cities, you could leave your car door unlocked all night and nothing would happen.  In the place Older Son has been living (which is more than a little dicey) he couldn’t leave the door unlocked, because his car would get boosted, but even there no one is taking away the radio, or the gps from the car, for fear of having it broken into.  And there are no extortionists threatening to scratch your parked car if you don’t pay protection.
More important is the stuff American-born people don’t even think about.  You guys put out garden decor, and Christmas lights, and stuff, and it never occurs to you that it could be stolen.  For instance, right now we have our entire patio set sitting up in front of the (full of stuff) garage.  Why?  Because it’s going in the back porch, which will be rebuilt in August or September, maybe.  So, right now the stuff is on the driveay, which means ANYONE could just walk out with it without so much as a “by your leave.”  In Portugal, the set (fairly expensive, we bought it back when we were well off, before the 2000 crash) would already be gone.  Most countries in the world it would already be gone.  Which is why people have walls and fences and gates.

I know it’s getting scarier some places, but so long as things don’t get stolen if you don’t nail them down, we’re all right.

2- We roll up our sleeves and do what needs to be done.

When we were first married, Dan did all the car maintenance, and I learned to do all the house maintenance.  I had a leg up as I’m incurably curious and had followed ever workman around, when they came to repair something.  But here’s the thing: what we did would have been considered humiliating and beneath our station in most places in the world.  We were college educated and trained for jobs of the mind.  We should have been sullen and upset at being “forced” to work with our hands.

Actually we both rather enjoyed it, and it often served as a break from my trying to break into publishing and Dan’s often grueling coding job, in those early days.  We’d wonder around on weekends doing sweaty-work, with a song in our hearts (you don’t want me to have a song in my lips.  No, trust me) because we were doing what needed to be done and taking care of business.  When you’re young and low man on the totem pole in your job, or in my case, locked totally outside it, you need stuff you can control, and we controlled our home improvement and car repair.  (I think I improved our starter home within an inch of its life.  Never mind.)  “Deal with that sh*t” became our watchword.

Now, I know that lots of people here, too, think they’re “too good to–” or that hard physical work will kill them.  BUT the majority don’t.  Not only do we have DIY solutions everywhere we turn, but our natural instinct on seeing something that needs done is to deal with it: not wait on someone better off/worse off/with the right credentials.  We just “deal with that sh*t.”

Yes, our politics are a mess, a combination of the fact that we’re NOT as a rule a very political people, being too busy with the business of living and building something better for our children and grandchildren.  Be serious: would you like every one to obsess on politics as, say, I do?  They’d never get anything done.  Surgeons and engineers would need to check instapundit in the middle of vital work.  Be real.

So people who aren’t very plugged in let themselves be duped by the presstitutes and the power-hungry politicians.  What else is new?

We are fractionally more awake and involved than in the early twentieth century, and believe it or not, this horrible election not withstanding, we’re much better off than we were 100 years ago, when it comes to not believing in collective solutions; when it comes to rolling up our sleeves and dealing with political cr*p; when it comes to finding other news sources and not going along with the majority.  If you don’t think so, you’ve not read any memoirs from a century ago.

This country was founded on and will continue to be a struggle between those who want to give power to the government and those who want to be left alone.  As long as the struggle continues, we’re fine.  It’s when we go to sleep under the boot of the oppressor that we are done for.

As long as the people still do for themselves, as long as the answer to “my roof is leaking” is not “call the government” hope is not lost.

Yeah, our kids are a little more lost than older people, but be fair to them, they were indoctrinated like no generation here before (about like mine was, back in Portugal.  BTW, after we hit our thirties we turned into the most ‘leave us the heck alone’ generation the country had ever seen.  Which admittedly isn’t much, but you have the culture of the country to contend with) and they are the richest generation in the richest country the world has ever known.  Compared to the rest of humanity, they’re all scions of nobility.  And compared to those, by and large, our kids are all right.  And they tend to find their way out of indoctrination before forty.  We can’t ask for more.

So let’s go out today and celebrate the shot heard around the world; that sweet air of liberty which is still shaping us today and which offers us hope for the future.

Nations shouldn’t live under the grinding yoke of a foreign power.  And individuals shouldn’t live under the dictates of an impersonal, far away government.

Both should roll up their sleeves and deal with their own sh*t themselves.

As our British “relatives” are finding just now.  They too have discovered the joys of an independence day.

This could become addicting.  For all the world.   And it would be a good thing.  Below is a hokey speech, from a hokey movie, both of which never fail to bring tears to my eyes.

To our blinkered elites, and everyone who thinks the “common people” can’t be trusted be it with guns, with words, with opinions, with free association, with life, liberty and the pursuit of independence:

Yes, we know the world faces many problems.  This is why you should stop joggling our elbows. Leave us alone.  Let us deal with that sh*t.

We were moving # 1 son from his apartment to apartment in our basement, which will save us a TON of money over the year.

We had this scheduled for end of July, but we come back on the 26th late at night, he needs to hand in the keys on the 29th, and while we can clean it, I doubted we’d want to come back from overseas and jump straight into renting a uhaul & moving stuff.

Also this gives us a shot at having house unpacked by time his classes re-start.

PROMO, Now With Books – Freerange Oyster

L. Jagi Lamplighter

The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin

Books of Unexpected Enlightenment Book 1

Rachel Griffin wants to know everything. As a freshman at Roanoke Academy for the Sorcerous Arts, she has been granted to opportunity to study both mundane and magical subjects.

But even her perfect recollection of every book she has ever read does not help her when she finds a strange statue in the forest—a statue of a woman with wings. Nowhere—neither in the arcane tomes of the Wise, nor in the dictionary and encyclopedia of the non-magic-using Unwary—can she find mention of such a creature.

What could it be? And why are the statue’s wings missing when she returns?

When someone tries to kill a fellow student, Rachel soon realizes that, in the same way her World of the Wise hides from mundane folk, there is another, more secret world hiding from everyone—which her perfect recall allows her to remember. Her need to know everything drives her to investigate.

Rushing forward where others fear to tread, Rachel finds herself beset by wraiths, magical pranks, homework, a Raven said to bring the doom of worlds, love’s first blush, and at least one fire-breathing teacher.

Curiosity might kill a cat, but nothing stops Rachel Griffin!

The Raven, The Elf, and Rachel

Books of Unexpected Enlightenment Book 2

Before coming to Roanoke Academy, Rachel Griffin had been an obedient girl—but it is hard to obey the rules when the world is in danger and no one will listen.

Now, she’s eavesdropping on Wisecraft Agents and breaking a great many regulations. Because if the adults will not believe her, then it is up to Rachel and her friends—crazy, orphan-boy Sigfried the Dragonslayer and Nastasia, the Princess of Magical Australia–to stop the insidious Mortimer Egg from destroying the world.

But first, she must survive truth spells, fights with her brother, detention, Alchemy experiments, talking to elves, and conjuring class. Oh, and the Raven with blood-red eyes continues to watch her. It is said to be the omen of the Doom of Worlds. Will her attempts to save her world bring the Raven’s wrath down upon her?

And as if that is not bad enough, someone has just turned the boy she likes into a sheep.

J.M. Ney-Grimm

Star-drake

Lodestone Tales Book 4

Gefnen – troll-herald and hound for Koschey the Deathless – hunts life across the moors of the far north.

Not deer, not pheasant, not meat for the table. His master eats choicer fruits. When the piercing scent of youth tingles his senses, Gefnen focuses his chase. The prey – a boy – lacks guardians strong enough to best a troll. Swift triumph awaits.

But other seekers tilt the chances of this game. Spirit of storm, poignant memories of a sea-prince, and something more ancient than memory or the wind shape the looming tumult.

Gefnen hunts victory, but a darker victory hunts him.

(This edition of Star-drake includes Rainbow’s Lodestone.)

Kyra Halland

Urdaisunia

Urdaisunia, once favored by the gods above all other lands, now lies defeated and in ruins. The gods, displeased by the Urdais’ weakness, have turned their backs on the land and left it to die.

Rashali, a widowed Urdai peasant, has vowed to destroy the conquering Sazars and restore Urdaisunia to greatness.

Prince Eruz, heir to the Sazar throne, is driven by his conscience to walk a dangerous line between loyalty and treason to do what he believes is best for all the people of Urdaisunia.

When Rashali and Eruz meet by chance, the gods take notice, and a divine wager sends peasant and prince on intertwining paths of danger, intrigue, love, and war in their fight to save the land they both love – Urdaisunia.

 

So, this is a brief explanation of what is going on, the plans for the near future and why ALL THE THINGS ARE LATE.

Yes, I know I’m overdue on delivering Darkship Revenge, and getting Royal Blood finished and up.  I had also hoped to get the first chapter of Guardian done and approved by Liberty Con.

I’m starting to believe this won’t happen.  Any of it, though if I can get one to happen, it will be DSR delivery, because it was supposed to be done in February for sure.  Then we got the “impromptu, totally uneccessary move, due to landlord (two houses ago) being an asshat” (How do you know he’s an asshat?  Well, a) the house is not for sale yet. Reason he needed us out RIGHT THEN was that they were going to put the house for sale.  RIGHT THEN. Pah.  b) they kept ALL our deposit, claiming the cats had peed all over, and he’d have to replace the carpets.  He also claimed that the carpets were brand new when we moved in.  When we moved in the house smelled pissy, and one of the kids’ friends, who knew the landlord’s family pointed out they had very large, not even nominally house-broken dogs.  Which would explain the huge yellow stains, which we actualy removed during our stay.  Never mind.  He owns a renovation company, so I’m sure he had a “receipt” for the carpets.  Not worth a legal case, but definite ass hat.  IF Kal Spriggs and his wife hadn’t taken a hit by agreeing to not sell and renting their house in the Springs to us for three months, we’d have been in a hotel for that time.  As is, between two moves in three months, house cleaning, carpet cleaning, etc, I think all this cost us around 10k.  Hotel might have been a wash.  ONLY hotel we couldn’t have the cats, and also we didn’t know IF the sale would come through, so at least at the house the Spriggs rented us, we might have stayed, if worst came to worst house-buying wise.)

Anyway…  The problem is that “Two moves in three months” or actually “four moves in a year and a half.  My kitchen, bedroom and office are usable, if you’ve spent two years walking around packed boxes, and being used to “Oh, I still haven’t found that!)

The further problem is that we’re preparing for an absence of TWENTY DAYS.  Yeah, part of that is that five days of that is Liberty con, from which we’ll be flying (early Monday morning) straight to Portugal.  We’ll then be in Portugal about 2 weeks.

You know, the last time we stayed in Portugal more than ten days was before Robert was born.

The problem with this is that we have to have one of the kids’ friends housesit, which means making the house livable for a stranger.  I need to set up the guest bathroom, finish unpacking the kitchen, find the bed clothes for the bed, and leave the house “livable”.

You won’t believe me, probably, but this is more complex than it sounds.

Most of all, though, the problem is the distraction.  I can’t “BE” in the novel, when the back of my mind is going “I wonder if my sister in law would like one of those…” or “Make sure I don’t forget skin meds.” Or… “MY heavens, I do need a hair appointment before we GO.”

ad infinitum.

In a way this is the worst possible time for this sort of trip.  Liberty con is survivable, twenty days absence, when we’re about (over the whole house) 25% unpacked, and need to clear the area where older son will be living, so he can be unpacked and settled before the end of the year?  It’s insane.  Add in this was a short sale and we need to schedule about ten repair jobs, a couple of them urgent.  (Like the gutter issue, which is where water in basement is coming from.  Rarely, but when we have a major storm.)

We wouldn’t do this now, we wouldn’t.  In many ways we shouldn’t.  I have two major collaborations coming up (Larry and Kevin J. Anderson) and one contracted book to deliver, plus three not contracted but bespoken books.  (The dragon thing.)  And all these moves have cost me enough time.

Also, I’m DEEPLY stressed to the point I’ve unearthed the good teapot and am having afternoon tea every afternoon, because it reminds me of grandma, and makes me feel saner.

A trip to Portugal is always stressful, let alone a trip to Portugal RIGHT NOW.

BUT this is the last year in seven older son can go with us.  If younger son’s job comes through (he’s sure, but it’s a startup, and you know what that’s like) in September, this is his last summer for 5 years or so.  My parents are in their mid eighties and my dad is the only survivor of his siblings. (And he wasn’t the youngest.)

We’d have gone earlier, but house issues, and moving out of the Spriggs home so they could put it for sale, (not being the asshole-landlord we dealt with previously, they REALLY are putting it up for sale)  has made that impossible until those two weeks between Liberty con and some must do family stuff here on the 27th of July.

All of which adds up to: Yeah, we’re going.  It’s going to make everything even later, and “full upacking” (except for some pesky boxes in storage) has receded to September with luck.

I hope you guys understand and forgive both late posts, and for the subscribers what will amount to years-late physical stuff.  We didn’t plan on the last two years.

On the good side, my health is much better, despite all this and the latest autoimmune attack is finally receding.  On the bad side, being an idiot, I wondered why I always gained weight through auto-immune attacks, until younger son said “DUH, mom, steroids” which is what they give me, when half my body is raw flesh.  I hope after this I won’t have any major attacks, or I’ll look like a DDR women’s swim team member.

Oh, the “forever house” (Knowing us, I doubt it will be more than 15 years, actually, but I COULD be wrong) backs onto 300 acres of undeveloped land, and I have so far seen eagles, coyotes and wild turkeys.

Something with bright blue plumage is nesting under our (second story) porch.  Thank heavens we won’t be rebuilding that till September at the earliest.

Anyway, there will be posts here, and I’ll try to be more regular with instapundit posting too, but the occasional late/weird hours thing might happen, because I’l be in Europe.

Also, I think it’s only fair to point out that when the Hoyts travel outside the country, international incidents happen/wars break out. I’m sorry.  I don’t know why.  It is reliably true, though.

And I promise I’ll report on it at instapundit, and babble about it here.

Now I need to go install a shower curtain and call my hairdresser to see if I can get my hair done before Wednesday.

So, yesterday, apparently, my post was taken as evidence that I was angry and “always angry.”

This shocked the living hell out of me, as the precipitating incident to yesterday’s post didn’t even rise above “annoying.”  I’m fairly sure the person I was interacting with had bought the gospel of literature as social work hook, line and barbed sinker. I’m fairly sure that she didn’t realize the “write to change the world” is just a “social marker” of “real literature” (i.e. that the writer has had an excellent education and knows how to signal it.) I do know it because I not only studied literature, but I studied history of literature and literature criticism. Also, I grew up in a country with a long history.  What is now signaled by this “concern for representation of the voiceless” (is this why you guys get so upset when the supposed voiceless shout back?  Bah. You ain’t got nothing.  Serious revolutionaries silence the “voiceless” before speaking for them.  You’re Bush league.) and “writing for social change” is what used to be signaled by putting vast undigested classical quotes in your work, or (like Kit Marlowe) writing your stage directions in Latin.  All it means is “I’m special and better than these people and I deserve special consideration and treatment.”

But it was clear the woman I was discussing this  nonsense with had NEVER questioned it.  Sweet mother of pearl, she admitted she didn’t know the difference between sad and rabid puppies.  The practitioners of the big lie just say we’re all the same.  She didn’t even know that.

So, no, I wasn’t angry.  I was somewhere between annoyed and amused, kind of like when the kid gives the cat chocolate milk, and you know you’ll be cleaning feline diarrhea off the carpet for days, but hey, the kid doesn’t know any better and this is not even misbehavior, just ignorance.

As an aside, I find it very funny that these… Innocents Abroad aren’t even aware of cultural differences enough to understand the tone of my posts.  I’ll paraphrase Bridget Correia, here (she was talking about Larry and the example she gave was buying tomato plants.)  “Yeah, I sound angry.  I was born and raised in Portugal.  We get enthusiastic about things.  Other times I sound angry — and am not — when discussing which type of tea to buy; when telling my kids about a book I enjoyed; when telling my husband we’ll go for a walk in five minutes; when declaiming poetry; when telling you good morning.”

I sound angry, that is, if you know absolutely nothing of the culture I was raised in.  And of course, most of these people know absolutely nothing of any culture except what their professors told them, poor nibblings.

For Portugal I’m considered laid back, bordering on the boring.  The first time my husband had a meal with my family he tried to dive under the table, utterly convinced we’d murder each other with the steak knives any minute.  We were in fact discussing which shops I should take him to, to buy shoes.  (I wonder if he realizes that somehow his kids have the same communication style, helped along by the fact I’m going increasingly deaf, so that I’m perpetually afraid that the neighbors will call the police when the boys shout at each other about their favorite comic books.)

But leaving all that aside, lets say I was really angry.  So?

How does that invalidate my take down of their wanting me to write about “minorities” “by the numbers” each one the appropriate stereotype they were taught in school?  And, mind you, at the same time, they tell me I can’t write about any minority I’m not (though I’m allowed to write about white, blond, American born men, even though I’ve never been one — go figure) because I can’t possibly put myself in their shoes, since they are apparently aliens, and mere empathy and human fellow feeling won’t do.  Oh, and if I write about minorities (which I can’t do, remember?) I have to show them being oppressed forever.  I can’t say, have a future in which most of the people in space are dark skinned and when a white man ventures into space he’s sneered at.  No, because oppression now is oppression forevah, which is why the poor “voiceless” need crazy people to talk for them and tell other people they have to talk for them/not talk for them/shut up already/write more minorities or you’re a racist/how dare you write a minority when you aren’t one?

How does my reaction to their asshattery invalidate the fact that they’re wearing a stylish colon-hat?

It is the mark of the never thwarted child, who has attained what should have been adulthood without anyone EVER having had the nerve to tell them they are wrong, to think that someone being mad at their nonsense means the person is wrong.  Because, I mean, speshull snowflakes are never wrong.  Even when they’re being told by a Latina and an Indian man that, yes, they are wrong about what we want out of science fiction.

I wasn’t angry yesterday, just mildly annoyed.  And, weirdly, also amused.

However, let me tell you things that DO make me angry:

I don’t get very angry about gatekeepers who try to impose their political opinions on the field when they don’t even know what they’re doing, and are just parroting what they heard at school and in their social circles.  They just happen to think that this is the way everyone thinks.

But I get incandescently angry when they then use their bully pulpit to call in slanderous articles to major publications, saying that those who oppose their dominance of awards in the field oppose “women and minorities” writing science fiction.  This when not only are those women and minorities organizing the resistance to them, but they’ve treated women and minorities who didn’t fall in line with their ideas like redheaded step children for decades.  This is the school bully screaming he’s being harassed.  I used to beat up school bullies.  I’m much more controlled now, having grown up (you should try it sometime) but I still get angry.

Other things that don’t get me angry include innocent people parroting the cr*p you’ve been feeding them for years.  People are people and homo sapiens are social animals.

On the other hand, I get incandescently angry when you use that crap to bully talented writers off the field, to besemirch the reputation of dead and/or older writers who had more talent in their little toes than you have in your entire bodies.  If you don’t know damn well that it’s impossible to write more minorities and not to write them at all; if you don’t know that people don’t fit your stupid stereotypes; if you think that ANYONE needs to feel “represented” to read ANYTHING, then I’m sorry for you.  There’s clearly some cognitive disorder involved.

But if you know those are idiocies of the first caliber, as most of you doubtless do, and wield them as a hammer to pound more talented people down?  Then yes, I get incandescently angry.

You’ll know I’m too angry for words, because I will mock you with GIF posts.

Heed well, this is not a threat, just a reading of the circumstances and the current social mood: moderate your shenanigans.  For I only mock you with GIFs, but behind me comes the mob who spanks you with axes.

I have a vested interest in not getting to that point.  Superficially, coming from a Latin country, having a masters in language and literature, working in an artistic profession, if the mob doesn’t stop to think — and when do they — they could think I’m one of you and come after me too.

And you must know that I have the greatest attachment to my head.  I think it looks best right on top of my neck.

So again I say, stop that crap.  I know your parents never spanked you or even told you no, but it’s time you learned to say no to yourselves, and stop pursuing your mean-girl way (particularly if you’re guys) to the top.

You don’t know what you’re stirring.

And I don’t want it splashing on innocents.

 

 

 

Yesterday, in the time between ALMOST finishing unpacking the kitchen (there’s a box to go.  It’s cleaners) and scrubbing the floor, I got involved in a sort of argument on facebook.

It wasn’t exactly an argument, because the person who was lecturing me and an Indian gentleman wasn’t arguing.  She was lecturing.  She was absolutely sure of her ground, and she was in her role of lady bountiful enlightening the benighted.  If you picture her with a long suffering expression, arms half-open and light issuing from her hands, you have the right mental pictures.

The other benighted and I weren’t having any, and we were becoming increasingly more upset, but I doubt she saw it.  If she saw anything, she saw us being very rude indeed to our betters.

It started with Dave Freer’s sharing of his brave post, in which he admitted that we as Sad Puppy supporters are responsible for everything bad in history.  Since we have a time travel machine, we’re responsible for everything from the extinction of the dinosaurs to the eventual heat death of the universe.  The heartbreak of psiorasis, leaf mold, and that embarrassing little problem one of you gentlemen suffered last night are our fault, and I’m glad Dave admitted it, since he is far more eloquent and gifted with language than I am.

However this shocked one of his facebook friends, who I am to understand is also one of our colleagues, though I’ve never heard of her.  (There’s dozens of successful practitioners of science fiction I’ve never heard of, because there’s branches of sf/f that only marginally interest me.  My reading is selective in urban fantasy, non-existent in paranormal romance, post apocalyptic is not a good idea for a chronic depressive (unless it’s done by Ringo who does post-apocalyptic like a shout of rage in the face of darkness), and 99.9% of “literary” science fiction could double for a soporific.)

She knew, you see, that Dave writes women and people of color (ever so much less racist than “colored people”.  Don’t ask me how.  It’s a sort of magic) and therefore she couldn’t possibly see him supporting Sad Puppies.

At which point I entered the fray with flame thrower blazing.  And she fell back on “both sides are wrong” (though to give her credit, she also admitted she didn’t know the difference between Rabid and Sad.  Have I mentioned Grandma used to say there are none so blind as those who won’t see?)

This was fine, or rather she was boring me, so my ADHD had pointed out that I REALLY should unpack the kitchen machines, until an Indian gentleman joined (I think what discomposed her was that he called her ma’am) and pointed out he really doesn’t want world changing or anything from sf/f.  He just wants a fun adventure and somewhere he can escape to from the difficulties of life.

This is when we were told that SF/F has to a) be representative.  You have to have however many minorities have been head-counted into being statistically relevant or whatever, because only by writing minorities will minorities want to read sf/f.  b) Write about oppression and discrimination to change the world.  c) have “diversity” in our stories, because “diversity” enriches and blah blah blah.

Forgive me, I come from a small Latin village where, when things got on our nerves, we (women) put our hands on our hips and spoke without delicacy.

(Sarah turns the picture of Heinlein to the wall to spare his sensibilities.)

Let’s start with C, shall we.  Why?  Why is diversity enriching?  What the hell is actually meant by enriching?  And what the hell, for that matter, is meant by “diversity”.
We can establish it’s not diversity of thought or diversity of artistic vision, considering how the advocates of this “diversity” react to actual different opinions or ideas.  I think it involves trembling lips and extended pointing fingers and “not one of us.”  It even extends to calling near-anarchist libertarians like me “nazis”, because as we all know nothing says national socialism and death camps as “that government is best which governs the least.”
Is any work actually enriched by describing a character as being this color, another as another color, and have their oppression follow the hierarchy of their color?  Is any work actually “enriched” by being filled with little stereotypes designed to be oppressed by other stereotypes.
Who knows?  Perhaps they are in the sense that Literature Professors understand them better, and find a lot more in them to bore classes with.
Pfui.  And also meh.

Let’s move on to B.  Change the world with your writing?  Sure.  Of course.  Heinlein arguably is responsible for us still having a space program.  Almost all of us space-struck nuts grew up reading Heinlein and almost all of us think only sissies and bores don’t want to space.
If you don’t think that’s changing the world, you are entirely clueless.
BUT what changed the world, what made us move in directions we would otherwise not have taken, was not his preaching at us that we must go to space.  He did that too, in several essay which even he admitted were largely failture.
No, it was his creation of a compelling place to dream upon.
You want to change the world?  Great.  Though first, perhaps you should pay attention to what you want to change it FOR.  After all some of Heinlein’s early advocacy for things like an international governing body were misguided at best, as he himself admitted later.  And we won’t go into other things writers of his time advocated.  Unilateral nuclear disarmament aka the plan to surrender to the USSR was so stupid even the left no longer thinks it’s a good idea.  (All except our current president.  Never mind.  Fourth generation red diaper babies must be granted special dispensation.)  But once you’ve decided what you want the world to be, write it.  Write it in a compelling enough manner that people want to go/live there.  DO NOT just preach and “show oppression.”  Most people who want sermons go to church.
It is perhaps no coincidence that most people mad about this plan of berate-to-change-the-world are from puritan ancestry.  What’s bred in the bone will out in the flesh and familial cultures take very long to change.  I invite them to consider their preachy ancestors didn’t make much headway or much change in the world.

And now A.  Ah. A.

(Sarah makes sure that Heinlein’s picture is still turned to the wall, then puts her hands on her hips and realizes there will be no subtlety here.)

If any of you think that you “need to show minorities” or need to have some head count of a particular skin shade in your book, you are not only unredeemed racist, you are also culturally imperialistic and so blinkered idiotic you shouldn’t be allowed to cross the street without adult supervision.  And by adult in this case I mean any five year old who hasn’t spent a lot of money to be indoctrinated into stupidity, as you clearly have.

What do you mean racist?  You want to include all these minorities.  You want them to see themselves represented in science fiction.  You are lady (or lord, but, pardon me, most males like this are ladies too) bountiful enlightening the world.

Get off the pedestal, milady, and look the f*ck around.  We people who tan, in varying shades of tan, are not only capable of agency and thought.  We are also capable of common humanity with you people of pallor.

WE CAN SEE OURSELVES IN CHARACTERS OF ANY COLOR.  In fact, most of us who read genre literature (literary is different, being read mostly by college professors) couldn’t give a good goddamn about the skin color of a character.  For one, the character description tends to be brief, and then we can reset our brain to be more like the way we want him.  It’s not a movie.  And even if it were a movie, we could still enjoy a character who doesn’t look “ethnic.”

Do you know why?

Because — hold on.  Sit down.  Have a cup of tea, because this is going to be a shock — we are not toddlers or mentally disabled.  We don’t need to “see ourselves” in a book to want to read it.  We need the BOOK ITSELF to be interesting or gripping, or stimulating.

IN FACT a great part of the attraction of good fiction is that you can be someone else, for a while, there in the space behind the eyes that is normally the loneliest place in the world.  You don’t have to be whatever color you were born, or whatever gender, or whatever orientation.  You’re set free to dream.

I’ve BEEN characters of many colors and many orientations and many genders.  THAT is why I read.  To experience being someone else.  To just watch a story, I see movies.  It’s not the same thing. (And arguably this is why I prefer to read and write first person.)

I know this goes against all your training, but people of different colors or genders or orientations than the mean, DON’T need your help or your white-knighting.  We can fight our battles ourselves, and judging from the world, most of what oppresses us are NOT (I know, shock) white people, but broken, dysfunctional cultures, some of them hinging on very old errors, and some on very new Marxism.

Your racism is so deep, so profound, that you would make people of various shades of tan into PETS for you to caress and comfort, and feed.

Sorry, milady, we’d rather be human.

And before you say that people like me only want to read about white people, doing white things, or whatever.  Please see above.  I don’t care what the color or gender or orientation of a character is, provided he’s alive and interesting.  Or she. Or it. Or multiple gender martian.

What I DO care about is alive and interesting.  The character has to hold my interest.

And now we come to “But won’t diverse settings/backgrounds/people” make it more interesting.

Well, hell, yes.  I loved Barry Hughart’s tales of a China that never was.  I have actively sough out science fiction, mystery and fantasy set in other places and other times.  Most often these are a disappointment, as they are the US “elite” version of these places and times.  The oppressed are being properly oppressed, and there’s much blinkered preaching.  But sometimes there are gems.  There was a very good Margaret Ball novel set during the Crimean war.  (And eventually I’ll remember the title, but not enough coffee yet.) I love Stephen Saylor’s Roma Subrosa mysteries and Lynda Robinson Egyptian mysteries.  I love P. F. Chisholm’s Elizabethan mysteries, even if I disagree with her interpretation of some historical personalities.  I LOVE BEING SOMEONE ELSE for a little while.
This is arguably why I loved Agatha Christie and Enid Blyton, both exotic foreign writers to me and both setting their work in a land so strange it might as well be SF/F. Ditto for a lot of early American SF/F.

Because, you see, from the other side, white people and anglo-saxon civilization are exotic and exciting.  It’s all on account of us being REAL PEOPLE and not Marxist constructions.

I know.  Unbelievable, right?  You know who doesn’t believe that people darker than him/herself or of different genders and orientations aren’t fully human and capable of enjoying things without “similar” people in it?  Bigots.  Racists.

Also, innocents abroad.

The truth is that these people have never met any of the oppressed face to face.  Not to live among.  If they did interact with those less fortunate than themselves, it was as part of some international charity, there to dispense a bounty.  (And if you think people present themselves frankly to such charities, you ARE an innocent.)  Else, they talk to people at their own level of comfort and wealth in other countries, and don’t even realize these people were indoctrinated with the same Marxist cant, or else are catering to the gringo’s obsessions, and laughing behind their hand.  It was obvious from another part of the conversation that this person had no idea how UNFREE other countries are nor that people who can create art in Iran, or even in Europe, are doing so, largely with government financing and approval, and so what they’re creating is really propaganda.

And here we hit on what I have against these people writing “by the shade” and “exotic oppression” books.  I am against their writing those books, because they can’t SEE the real “exotic” or “other” or “different.”

All they actually see is what their sociology professor taught them to see.  Vast shambling groups of “by the numbers oppressed” people. They don’t see these people as people with agency at all.  They’re just targets for the white knighting of the “enlightened” writer.

As such these books are incredibly boring for anyone who went to college… anywhere.   There is nothing new there, no life.  We might actually find it interesting and exotic to read about tight-*ssed white people in an affluent environment where the voicing of the wrong opinion can get you ostracized.  You see, it’s different from where we live.

But reading about stereotypes clad in various skins?  — yawn — give me a break.

Open your eyes.  Then open your eyes again.  Learn to see real people around you, and write that.  And be damned what color they are.  People obsessed with color are called racists.  If you have different cultures, great.

But the important thing is that the book be fun.

Wanna change the world?  First your book has to be interesting and successful.

Wanna be read by people around the world? First your book has to be interesting and successful.

Wanna make it clear that people are people regardless of skin color?  Write people as people, and whatever skin color they need to be.

JUST dream and write, and let the paper pushers and button counters worry about details no reader is interested in.

Dream. Write. To the devil with what your professors taught you to fear or love.

DARE to be human.

 

 

 

 

This has been a week of profound annoyance.

Mostly not for me, though.  Some for me, sure, as younger son’s apartment search didn’t fare well (well, he SHOULD — knock on head — be employed in a couple of months, shortly after we come back from Portugal, so we said we’d pay a couple of months in an apartment, so he could only move once, and be near both work and college.) He didn’t find anything, in time, which is forcing us to move him to a storage unit/our spare room, adding to the confusion in this house (you REALLY don’t want to know.  Boxes, boxes everywhere.)  Also, because he’s new to moving (except for the last two years) we had to do some of his packing, because he always thinks it will take “five minutes.”

And meanwhile, the world has gone insane.

In the wake of the Brexit vote, I’ve been jaw-droppingly aware of people losing their sh*t over the fact the British don’t want to say in the EU.

For some Brits I even understand that.  Some families tend after all to bureaucratic work and the sort of administrative post that will be, if not eliminated, markedly affected by the transition back.  And I must remember that for a lot of the British screaming about this, the EU is ALL they’ve known, or at least all they remember knowing.  And that it was sold in all the school classes, all the universities “studies” courses.

Yeah, the same people who misread the problem with WWII to be all about nationalism and not about socialism, whether the national or the international kind, would extol the EU, convinced if they just prevented men from loving the land they were born and raised in, we’d study war no more.

This tragic misunderstanding has given us not only generations not ready to fight to defend their loved ones from the desolation of war, but also convinced that their place, among all in the world, is uniquely bad.  In other words, it has created a generation ready to capitulate to an invading horde of the worst element of humanity with neither self-awareness nor even a grain of mercy.

People capable of this, have probably embraced the EU’s inconveniences, petty maladjustment and bureaucratic red tape like the flagellant embraces his whip.

None of which invalidates the fear of the children (some of whom are nearing thirty) whom they educated to believe the EU was the thing that would save them all, sort of an earthly paradise descended upon the lands of the west.

What is less pleasant and understandable is the whining, screaming and pettish tantrums of the left on this side of the Atlantic, who are only affected by this ruling to the extent they might need to present their passport when their luxury tour takes them from one country in Europe to the next.

In fact, believe it or not, I’ve seen aristos both here and abroad complaining of how INCONVENIENT these borders will be.  Why, they’ll have to stand in line!

None of this makes much sense, unless you realize that the Brexit was a huge kick center-mass on the vision of the annoying.  (Yes, I know that Doctor Sowell called it the vision of the anointed.  One can only assume that such an exquisitely polite man couldn’t bring himself to give the word without wrapping it in clean linen.)

To be fair, all humans have a vision of where they are, and where they’re going, which includes a vision of where the rest of the world around them is going to.  And because most people don’t want to — nor should be required to — take the trouble to study enough sociology and economics to have a vision of their own, they download their vision complete from what they see on TV, what they read, or what Mike down at the garage told them.

Mike might be safe.  After all, a lot of us have a feeling “Winter is coming” dependent on nothing more than the sort of feelers on the ground, like people telling us that their business is down, or the number of friends we’ve seen be unemployed for years or go under economically.

The TV and entertainment in general, though, have long ago fallen victim to the Vision of the Annoying.

The Vision of the Annoying wasn’t complete bushwa, once upon a time.  Or rather, it was but it was the sort of bushwa that takes experience of more than one country, experience of more than one occupation, and a lot of study of history to detect and which is particularly gratifying to the sort of mind that spends its life in a college campus.  It was gratifying because it was all based on “central planning” which made things “efficient” and therefore it appealed to people headed for work in the bureaucracy, and made them feel all special.  (Which is where Doctor Sowell got “Anointed” (self.))

The misunderstanding about patriotism/nationalism being the equivalent of jingoism and the SINGLE cause of WWI and WWII, led to a sort of idea that the whole world would unite under a single government, which would bring about not only peace, but also end the inequalities among the nations of the world.

Sighs.  Looks skyward.

It is now very difficult to believe that adults, and what’s more intelligent adults — read some golden age SF — believed in this.  If you’ve been awake (unfortunately most people weren’t) throughout the 20th century and if you know some history you know the only thing multi-ethnic/national societies with no reason to be together except their “elites” say so produce is misery and strife.  You also know that civil war is the worst war of all, and that’s what a world-government would generate.  More importantly, if you have traveled at all, you know cultures aren’t nearly as plastic as our Annoying believe.

A culture is — to put it bluntly — a stew of the lullabies you heard as children, the stories you listened to/watched when you were too young to think about them, your mom’s face when you did something she disapproved of, your religious instruction, the religious instruction of your neighbors, the festivals observed and the meaning attributed to them, the food you ate.  A culture is EVERYTHING besides the genes that went into making you what you are.  Heck, what we’re learning is that cultural factors, such as diet, can turn genes on and off AFTER you’re born, let alone while you’re in the womb.

All of which brings us to changing the culture.  It’s really hard to do from top-down fiat.  It’s POSSIBLE to kill a culture.  The Chinese came close to doing it several times, to their own culture, with multiple book burnings, and executions of story telling grandmothers.

This was done to great effect by invaders throughout history where the children of the conquered tribe are taken away and educated by the invader.

This is the sort of thing happening in the EU where festivals and various traditional ideas are banned on the pretext of being unsanitary or -ist and the children, raised in the temples to the state that public schools are, know nothing substantive about their OWN culture.

But what results is not a new culture.  It’s a sort of sad remnant of acculturated to NOTHING people.  It often results in profound depression and an abyssal decline in population.  The remnants know something is missing, but not what, and are too psychologically wounded to reproduce.

Even then the old culture doesn’t die completely, of course, and weird tidbits remain in the way things are done.

So the idea of integrating the whole world, with thousands of cultures and changing each culture enough that these people could function under a world government is something that would only occur to those who think the differences between TX and NYC constitute cultural extremes.

(Note that even Heinlein stopped peddling the one-world government after his one world tour. Of course, others took world tours without changing their minds, because to quote my grandma, there’s none so blind as him who refuses to see.)

But that was the idea.  The world was supposed to go towards a single government.  Nationality was a thing of the past.  One world government and redistribution would solve all of the world’s ills.  (It has always amused me that the dystopic SF written when Reagan was president, partly to show we were headed to hell according to the Annoying, then stuck around as a sort of promised land for the self proclaimed elites.  The second tierr of the Annoying, fed a bill of goods by the top tier actually feel uilty about their Western abundance and lifestyle, and keep trying to “live with less” and “be poorer” as though this automagically made someone in the third world richer [the truth is rather the opposite.]  Our current president, not a great thinker, is one of these second tier bunnies, which is why he thinks that at some point you’ve made enough money and also that if he makes America poorer, the rest of the world will benefit.  Their good intentions are matched only by their ignorance of international finance and their devotion to Marxian just-so stories.)

This is not ALL of the vision of the Annoying.  There’s a lot more including total flying mouse excreta such as the belief all individuals are evil and every governmental or non-profit organization pure and fine and noble.

Sigh.

And then reality keeps breaking their little — quite literally — red wagon.  Here, they’d barely recovered from the fall of the wall, and decided that the problem was how brutal the Russians were, and here they were uniting their little world with their good intentions and soft little heads, bless their little hearts, handing it all to nice bureaucrats to dictate how cultures would unify from above, and the British had to go and want to go back to their old nationalist ways.

Haven’t they heard — how could they avoid it? — the Annoying tell them that nationalism only leads to war? Wouldn’t they rather have a cozy multinational entity where clueless bureaucrats regulate the curvature of bananas and pasteurize public festivals?   Do they want war?

Perhaps they had food with too much salt.  Perhaps they consume too much sugar.  Perhaps their health care needs to kill older people earlier.

On and on the Annoying persist in, well, trying to annoy us all into falling in line with their vision, not realizing that it’s impossible to pound a square peg into a round hole.

The best thing is to smile beatifically, say “bless their hearts” and set about building visions that can happen, and futures that our children and grandchildren can dream of.

So take an ibuprofen and set to it.

Their vision is, ultimately, a passing annoyance.

 

 

*First, before the post, I must tell you that I’m in this bundle.  This means if you’ve been meaning to read Darkship Thieves, but were afraid it stank on ice, this is your chance to get it (Prometheus Award Winner, 2011) and a bunch of other books by better known writers.  You can’t beat the price. https://storybundle.com/scifi.  So, buy, pass to your friends, whatever.*

There have been several times in my life (so far) when I was watching news coverage and someone said “the world will never be the same.” The first time was when I was eight, listening to coverage of Black September.  The last time was… this week over Brexit. In between lie Brexit, and a dozen other “shocks to the system.”

Every time this, for me, had the “taste” of hyperbole, in varying degrees.  I felt like “Oh, please, the sun will still come up tomorrow, parents will still love their children.”

The one I was most doubtful about was 9/11.  Never mind that I was in shock and in horror, and I thought “Surely they’re joking.  Terrorists have hit massive countries before without their collapsing.”  I confess, fifteen years later, I was wrong and they were right, but not the way they meant.  It wasn’t the hit that weakened us, and which makes that wound in NYC still fester.  It was our fifth column, unable to process or integrate that “littles brown peoplez” are fully conscious and self-agented and that they chose to attack us, and that we must PERFORCE defend and survive.  Instead, the left (mostly the left, we have some cartoon critters on the right — for the American definition of right — too.) has chosen to view 9/11 as “all our fault” and a vindication of their hatred for America and their reflexive oikophobia.  THAT is still tearing us apart, has resulted in a disastrous president whose greatest qualification was his cool ethnic name, and results in the two bellends at present standing a good chance at the presidency.

Does this mean everything has changed?  Well, yes and no.  QUITE beyond our chattering elites, America is still America.  The thing is the idiot reactions, the opposition to any form of self defense (even dogs have a right to self defense.  If a dog bites a human after near-death provocation few jurisdictions will put it to death) and their inchoate need to prove how smart they are by hating their homeland is bringing about an equal and equally reflexive reaction.  I think in the end America will still be America, but the backlash against the misguided visions of the progs won’t be any fun in the meanwhile.  And by not being any fun I mean, we’ll lose lives.  Perhaps some of people here.  Perhaps mine.  And in the end an America will survive that will be different from the vision of the annoying (intentional) which has been pushed on us through the unified mass media complex for well nigh 100 years.  Whether it will still be the land of the free and the home of the brave… that’s up to you and me, and our children and grandchildren.  The train is  not stopped, but it’s markedly slowed down, the track about to be torn up.  Our choice what to do next.

Which brings us to Brexit.  Francis Turner wrote an excellent and well reasoned post here Brexit: How, Why and What Next? – Francis Turner.  I’m not Francis, and I don’t have six hours to analyse all the implications of the Brexit nor the knowledge of Britain that comes with growing up there, as he has.

What I do have is this sort of weird sense of “what things mean in world context” and unfortunately I tend to be right.  I predicted before the d*mn primary started that what we were looking at is Trump vs. Bernie.  If I was wrong on the last, it wasn’t me.  It was the Democrat undemocratic system.  Otherwise, yep, our election cycle would be fractionally more insane.  (Though picking a felon — Hillary — only not indicted because not one of the little people over a guy who spent his honeymoon in the USSR might not be counted as an improvement.  Who knows?)

So I’ve been hearing a lot of bull excreta about Brexit, and first let me tell you what it’s not/doesn’t mean.

1- It doesn’t mean that US states will now start to separate.  (Sigh.)  This should be obvious to anyone, but apparently it isn’t.  The left has had a rock hard boner for the US falling apart into several states at least since this happened to the USSR.  And now and then, and always, it makes me want to hit my head against a wall, hard enough to make the wall fall down.

You see, one of these things is not like the other.  You’re not comparing apples to oranges, you’re comparing apples to peacocks.

Yeah, sure, our federal government as an intrusive entity is of relative recent coinage.  (RELATIVELY.  It started biting off more than it could chew about 100 years ago) it overlays a land that has been used to thinking of itself as the same country for about 300 years, give or take, depending on different states.  The people who moved to the new Western states were at least partially from the old states.  The culture is different between the states (something that no one who hasn’t lived here and MOVED between states can fully understand.  I felt ALMOST as lost during our visit to Ohio was during our visits to my parents.  Almost.  There are still certain underlying assumptions.)  And yet, there are assumptions, attitudes, and a general way of being in the world under it all, throughout the land.

Look, it’s not that a Texan and a New Yorker have that much in common besides (sort of) language.  It’s that they have more in common with which other than with anyone else in the world.  So we are a nation for the reason nations exist: we are the same over-arching culture, and as much as we want to pop our sibling states one, at times (I have news for idiots: the same tensions exist even in postage-stamp size countries like Portugal whose culture is more uniform but not UNIFORM.  Because uniform doesn’t happen in human populations except under pretty brutal totalitarian regimes.  (And soemtimes not then.))

Now, the USSR: an unsteady alliance between ethnicities and countries historically independent, and often hating each other, forged by elites after WWII mostly to protect THEIR interests.

The EU… see above, except not after WWII.  A mistake of those colossal proportions might have been conceived of after WWI, but it took them over 50 years to bring it about.  You can bend reality to the illusions of the elites, but not easily or readily and it takes a LONG time.

2- Britain has turned its back on free trade.

This is where my eyes roll back in my head so far I can examine my own brain.  ONLY idiots or exquisitely educated leftists (it takes a lot of education to believe that much stupid) can believe that Free trade equals Huge and overarching government with a myriad rules and regulations into things like the curvature of bananas.

The rest of us have news for you: Yes, I KNOW that your professors told you that free trade was a very dangerous thing that could only exist with regulations for EVERYTHING and thus you needed “an ever closer union” not to mention regulations on what type of clay ware was acceptable, and what wasn’t.  I knew you guys were learning exactly the wrong thing about free trade and prosperity when the newly elected leftists in CO not only set about regulating POTENTIAL space travel till it squealed, but then boasted that CO would have the first spaceport “Because we already have the most regulations in place for it.”  Yeah.  I’m sure Texas appreciates your efforts, guys.

Free trade is free trade: the right of contract, the right of buying and selling, the right of association WITH WHOMEVER YOU WANT TO.  Neither for nations nor for individuals does it require manacles on the hands that trade back and forth.  In fact, those AREN’T free trade at all.  They’re regulated trade.  Which is sort of an opposite, here, where the rest of us DON’T live in opposite land.

Britain has reclaimed its right to make its own treaties, alliances and trades, like real countries have done throughout history.  Oh, sure, I agree with Mackey that the EU are going to be vindictive little bitches and try to hurt Britain, but given the hold on reality of Brussels bureaucrats, they might actually achieve the opposite.  “Ah, we’ll totally de-regulate our trades with Britain.  We’ll see where that gets them.”  Yeah.

3- This means that Donald Trump will win.

Okay, my eyes are somewhere under my desk.  I really should keep them on a chain.

Yes, Trump’s plurality win in mostly the OPEN primaries (meaning the dems could vote for the Republican nominee they’d rather face — what idiot thought this up? –) did mean a great deal of nativist sentiment, and of working-class support, just like Brexit is said to have the same.  (Said to?  Well, don’t forget who is doing the support.)

However, like a paid off boxer, Trump seems to be doing his best to kiss the canvas already.  (Check the May report.  And no, all his “free press” doesn’t offset the lack of local GOTV organizations, which he started shutting down when he secured the nomination. TRUST me.  I’ve worked GOTV for years in various elections.  Many people have opinions, but without prodding just stay home.  And this year, when most of us say “there isn’t a difference, more so.) And there are… other things.  In the end, Trump is the elites and on their side.  If you look at his debts (he won’t release his financial reports for a reason, but there’s a lot you can find online) he’s a wholly financed subsidiary of international banks. Just like Hillary, though granted with less “selling our secrets to the Russians” at least that we know of.  (We used to hang traitors, before we decided to use the cruel and unusual punishment of stuffing them in mao-suits and parading them around the country.)

In fact I suspect the Trump candidacy time line went like this:

1-Hillary’s biggest contributor decided to run in the Republican party and at least make the potential nominee bleed, so Hillary would face a softened field.  His vicious attacks (some of them loony tunes.  See Gabriel Cruz and Kennedy) on his opponents were meant to give Hillary something to pick at in the main.

2- He found himself winning a plurality and thought he just might take it.

3- He realized that Brexit and … other things were in the works.  (More on that in a minute.) Being brighter than what passes for a brain in Hillary right now (she was never that smart, even in her prime.  Ambitious, scheming and ruthless, sure.  BUT not that smart.  Unlike Billy Jeff, she actually believed in international socialism, which takes a certain degree of moronic faith) he decided he didn’t want to be caught in the middle of that, or of the backlash when he won and governed, as he couldn’t help to govern, like the elites (given the banks who have loaned him more than he’s worth, and the contacts he has which are all left-international-socialist.)  Maybe he decided he REALLY is allergic to rope and lampposts.  Who knows?

4- Initiated Operation Kiss the Canvas, to cause even the limp spines of the GOP to replace him in the convention.

I’m going to add the gratuitous prediction this won’t succeed, and that he’ll be the main GOP nominee, and that he’ll be more mad at that than his never-failing supporters would be if he WERE replaced.  I’m also going to predict it’s up in the air whether he’ll win or not.  He would win with even minimal campaigning, but I’m not sure he’ll do it.  And if he wins, we’re in for crazy of epic proportions.

Because…

What Brexit means is the first LARGE SCALE breach in the wall that the (largely national socialist) elites have erected with mass media/mass entertainment/mass art over the last century or so.

What the inimitable Sabrina Chase calls “the media-entertainment industrial complex” worked very hard, mostly by commanding the heights of power and making everyone an outsider labeled “crazy” or “fascist” or worse, if they disagreed from the consensus being built.

This was not a conspiracy precisely.  It was making international socialism with all its empty promises and all its false glamour a positional good in education/arts/the media.  Once they had enough deans/editors/gallery owners/government curators in their pocket (this is btw standard operation when the USSR was softening you for take over.  Just FYI) they could sneer down anyone who disagreed with them, label them no-talents and bar them from publication/public notice.  All they had to do was make it impossible to succeed in many professions (the latest one they conquered was tech companies, mostly through HR) without spouting their doctrine.

This is an old tactic that has been used for centuries, including in Europe in the Middle ages.  No matter how many doubts you had of religion, you still had to express yourself in the language of the church if you wanted to succeed and have patronage.

It’s not conspiracy, except for a very small number, early on, and even that is not conspiracy, just absolute belief in the same (in international socialist case rather absurd) principles, steering you in the direction of keep anyone but your fellow travelers out.

This worked PARTICULARLY well through the 20th century because the communication medium of the times were uniquely centralized.  To put out news even at the local level, required a considerable investment.  To put out a book, ditto, and the distribution was a right bugger, as many self-published authors left with thousands of books in the garage, found out to their own chagrin.

So your chances were kiss the effigy of Marx, or be silenced.

That this has changed and continues to change I don’t need to explain.  Sure, the mass media still holds a large portion of the LIVs, but… but it’s not the same.  They could never run the campaign that demonized militias under Clinton now.  It took them longer to demonize the tea parties, and the job was always patchy.  The Tea Party suffered more from what it WAS — a leaderless organization.  Yes, that was also its strength — than from anything else.  Their news/books/art/narratives reach increasingly fewer people.

Which not only allows things like Brexit to happen (and I’d like to remind you that Europe is well behind us) but makes a lot more of them inevitable.

They think they learned to ride the tiger, with the masterfully orchestrated foisting of Trump as a revolt vote (yeah, yeah, they attacked him.  With things calculated to strengthen his position as the protest vote’s candidate.  Note that very few of his supporters ever heard that Vichy Mitchy bragged of being Trump’s golf and text partner.  AND virtually none have heard of his boasts re: universal health care.  Or his walking back the wall, and Arab immigration promises, or… Because THAT would actually have hurt his position as protest candidate.)  They haven’t learned to ride the tiger.  Trump has seen through it, hence his attempts at taking a dive (and dividing the party.)

You see, the tiger is getting stronger every day.  The main mass media has less power every day.

And because the vision of the elites doesn’t work, and could only be sold while they controlled EVERY means of communication, and — what’s more — both socialism and internationalism are opening more and more cracks as the same thing that allows us mass communication also makes international actually FREE trade between individuals inevitable, the revolt will only gain force.

It will be stupid in many ways, because masses are stupid.  But because the tech of the age isn’t “mass” but individual and one on one and because people in general as individuals don’t cut off their nose to spite their faces, it will settle out.

Oh, the time is past for mass immigration, that last gasp of internationalist nonsense.  And for “free trade” in which most favored third world nations get all the advantages.  And for “communications” in which they get to tell everyone to think like them, and punish those who dissent.

But we’re about to get real free trade and real communication, one on one, between individuals of differing nations.

This neither requires the erasure of national cultures and national identities, nor is that desirable.  Given actual free trade, the most functional cultures and identities will attract the best individuals from everywhere.

NONE OF THIS requires a one-world-state (which was always the dumbest idea imaginable) nor the intervention of the elites.  It is the last that is driving them crazy right now.

Because they’re NOT the elites.  They’re a portion of the population indoctrinated in a doctrine that has been superseded by technological advance.  Like the nobility of old, some of them will hold on, as relics, but their time of leading the world has passed.

This is not right nor left.  It is the people against a few (relatively.  In historical sense) individuals who think they are supposed to lead us to a “bright new future” no one but them wants.  It is a case of people who drink their own ink not seeing reality.

This too shall pass, and yes, the world that emerges will be very different from where we are.  How different and how free is up to us to ensure.

Go work.

 

 

 

 

 

Sorry — I am swamped trying to unpack and catch up on work-work before trip to Liberty con/Portugal and my post on “the crazy stuff being said about the Brexit” and “the crazy stuff that might actually result from it” will have to wait.

Meantime read Francis Turner’s excellent post

Brexit: How, Why and What Next? – Francis Turner