I voted for the first time at the age of eighteen, in Portugal, after I went back from being an exchange student.

I voted a lot.  You see, Portugal had a lot of parties and at the time for whatever reason governments were always falling and special elections being called.

I was a snooty kid (well, I was) and made mine a protest vote for the only party that had no chance of ever winning an election: the monarchists.

Note that going in, they had someone inspecting however many yards away to make sure that no one was wearing campaign anything.  Also, they made you show your ID card, and sign a card, which they compared to your signature on file.  Note also that this was the village and EVERYONE KNEW ME and even if they had been alone all my life and didn’t know me personally, they’d have figured who I was by resemblance to my grandmother, my father, my aunt.  They still made me show the ID card and carefully compared it to the signature.

Also, though the socialists always won (well, they controlled all the media) I know the vote counting was correct because the local votes always showed two monarchist votes, my own and that of my best friend’s older brother.  (Whom I probably would have married, if I could only have stopped thinking of him as a brother, as well.)

Okay, so at the time the village was pretty monolithic racially, so no one could have accused voter ID of being racist.  (There was one mulatto lady in the entire village.  She was known as “the black woman.”  Nothing racist really, because the protestant family were known as “The protestants.”  In the village they just tended to nickname you by the most visible characteristic.  And it stuck.  I don’t doubt that woman’s son, who is blond, is called “Son of the black woman.” My family is still known as The Potato Sellers, because my great great grandmother had a potato-buying-reselling business.  When friends from America came to visit, they got lost in the village (which took talent, let me tell you.  Yeah, nothing was marked, but there was ONE main street and a bunch of warren like alleys.  My parents lived in the only large street to the left coming into the village on the main street.  (The large street to the right led to another village and eventually if you kept on walking, to the city of Porto.)  Furthermore, we’d told them my parents street ended at the train station.  Never mind.) and went around asking for me by name or for my dad — Antonio de Almeida — by name.  Note that my family on dad’s side had lived in the village at least 150 years and maybe more.  NO ONE KNEW us by surname.  When they finally made it to the house, they reported this odd fact and dad laughed “You should have asked for Tone, the Potato Seller.”  “But you don’t sell potatoes.” “Yeah, but my great grandmother did.”  You should have seen the expressions.)

But there were poor people.  Very poor people.  And there were illiterate people (A ton of them.)  I don’t know if all had ID cards.  They sort of needed them to collect anything government or go to the doctor or whatever, but I suspect my grandmother only got one because her sons made her, and I very much doubt the farmhands had one.  However, they probably had some picture ID: church card, or whatever.  And their signatures got compared, or if they made “a mark” they had to be vouched for by someone of importance/well known in the community. And those who REALLY wanted to vote made an effort and got an ID card.

What I mean is, there would be more reason in Portugal to protest ID cards than here, where it’s almost impossible to live without ID.  Okay, this is Colorado, and I could imagine someone lost in the hills for forty years and without an active driver’s license.  But if that person was that invested in coming down and voting, they could make efforts in advance.  Also, most of those people would be white, or at most have a little Latino admixture.

Also, elections in Portugal are on Sunday, but NO ONE demands to vote by mail/in advance.  The one time I had to vote because I was leaving the country before the election (mom insisted I vote, even though all I did was my little protest vote) I had to fill more paperwork than to open a bank account.

I’ll note in the US elections are on Tuesday to allow (back then) people to travel by horse and buggy to the poling place.  If they could do it…

I think there’s only one way to secure our polls.  ID cards, yes, of course, but also voting in person.  Early voting allowed only by reason of absence and/or job won’t let you out.  And that allowed only on specific days (Say the Sunday before) and no votes touched/counted till then.  And no results even spoken of till three days after the voting, to make sure everything is counted.

But in this our corrupt time, I sat and voted at my kitchen table yesterday — a serious violation of the secrecy of the ballot.  Oh, not for us.  We’re a decent family.  We each sat and voted and though husband and I traded jokes about some of the initiatives like the we really want to keep the money we overcharged you on yet another excuse this year Storm Water initiative, I didn’t even glance at his ballot, much less the boys’ ballots.  But I imagine situations of abuse or even just well intentioned interference.  Secrecy, what secrecy? And that without counting rampant intent to commit fraud — and filled out my vote.

It might count for nothing, mind.  I know.  I’m not an idiot.  The elections have been corrupted since Motor Voter, when you didn’t have to show proof of citizenship to get a voter’s registration.  Now, it’s just silly how easy it is to commit fraud.

But for the good of everyone, including those who think it’s their right to commit fraud in order to hold onto power over those “less capable” people, nota bene — I experienced almost cathartic relief in voting against you.

What does that mean?  Well, like my little protest vote in Portugal, there is relief and empowerment in being able to say “This is my middle finger.  You can’t have my vote.”

In Portugal, at least, I knew my vote was counted.  Useless, but counted.

That relief I experienced yesterday?  If my candidate loses (and there’s a good chance, because see rampant fraud) and you manage to reinstate One Idea Mark Uterus  then it will become obvious I might as well have written my choices in a paper and thrown it away.  And then next time the election will bring no cathartic relief.  For me or anyone else.

And that’s the road to revolution.

When you rule over the people against their will, it’s not going to end well.  You might think you have the tech and the ability to keep power and convince people it’s for the best.  I shall remind you that the soviet union called itself “scientific” too, and that you fourth generation authoritarians aren’t even that capable.

Can you hold onto power?  Sure, for a little while.  But these regimes always end in tears for everyone.  And the more ground you take, the worse it will get.

The certainty that your vote counted; the legitimacy of elections is the only way we have to keep peace over a large populace.

I don’t care if Marx told you you’d inherit the Earth.  I don’t care if you’ve been telling yourselves for generations that people really want your rule, they just don’t know it.

I counsel for your sake, as well as ours, that you step back before you step out into the abyss.

Whether the abyss is Irish democracy or armed revolt, you won’t like us when we’re angry.

 

That’s An Awfully Nice Civitas You’ve Got There . . . – David Pascoe

We are mere hours away from finding out the results of the latest batch of experimentselections (so what if it’s more than twenty-four; if you can’t count higher than that, you’re insufficiently ambitious). There’s been speculation for months on whether the Republicans will once more snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. More recently – and more widespread than ever – there’s been speculation that voting practices enacted by largely Democratic legislatures will provide sufficient screening action to allow for the necessary fraud to secure power for All Timeanother couple of years. Regardless, the results of these elections are fiercely anticipated on all sides.

Well, except for that silent mass who don’t know, and don’t care. They just want today to be more or less like yesterday, and for tomorrow to be more or less like today. Which is why Daddy Gov’t appeals so strongly. Someone else to take responsibility for making things work? How great is that? And when the Sun God, er, der Fuhrer, um, Uncle Joe, uhhhh, the Dear Leader promises you’ll get, not just what you need, but enough to provide all those big screens, enormous SUVs, and all the iDevices you could want? And at the expense of meanie rich people and their eeeeeevil corporations? What’s not to love? Especially since they hate us anyway, because accidents of birth, or skin color, or some such.

And, at one level, that’s what it’s all about. And what we writing Human Wave keep working to change. Humans being tribal, we’re wired to gather some “in,” and box everyone else “out.” And we do. Even we, the Huns, do it. Those who show up spouting foolishness about collectivism, and how the good of the many necessitate sometimes, unfortunately, require the trampling on of the rights of the individual get quickly shown the door, so we can go back to picking on each other like a good family.

Our so-called leadership keeps working to do exactly that: fracture American society along lines that make us easier to control. Watch the vileprogs at work: those white people (forming a majority of American citizens) hate black, brown, yellow, orange, chartreuse and mauve people, and want to keep them as chattel. Look at that group of brown(ish) people: they’re really more like white people (as evidenced by things like test scores and college attendance rates), so they hate these other brownish people (who are generally newer to the scene, and so haven’t had quite as long to develop roots in communities and build on their ancestors’ wise decisions). And of course, all those people with more stars on their bellies hate all the people with no stars on their bellies, so you should Always Vote Democrat (early and often, now facilitated by all-mail ballots, though fought tenaciously (those enemies of history, them (AhhH! Nested parentheses!!) by such horrific things as voter ID laws, like they have in Mexico) because we’re ever so much cooler than those old fogies who believe in personal responsibility and duty and similar regressive concepts.

(This is the part where Dave gets to the mother-loving point.)

With all this fracturing, aided an abetted by technological upheaval, we’re losing the older senses of community. The neighborhood, where people sit on the stoop of an afternoon, waving to those out perambulating (another thing which happens rather infrequently) and enjoying the fresh bugs and the delightfully muggy air. The parades and gatherings to celebrate the togetherness that happens in a group of people who live in the same area and have had to help each other to survive droughts, winters, floods and Those Jerks From Over the Hill.

We’re losing (lost?) that sense of togetherness for those whom near we live. I’m not saying that’s good or bad, just that it is, and the more able we are to fool ourselves about long-term survival by looking at short-term trends (what? No, we’re fine: the grocery store is FULL of food. And TP), enabled by technological miracles, the deeper that disconnect will grow. We’re seeing it replaced by more far-flung communities, often of a virtual type. We are an instance of this. Many conventions do the same thing. Fandoms of all kinds are notorious for bringing together misfits from all points of the globe. It’s practically what they’re all about.

I was going to pitch the notion that we’d do well to resurrect some of that small-town, Music Man kind of local patriotism – and I think we would, though this isn’t the way to make that argument – as a means of revivifying the social glue that may or may not have ever actually existed, but that doesn’t seem to be where my fingers have lead us, this morning. It may well be that the old civitas, the sense of citizens bound together by law, with rights and privileges pertaining thereto, is dying. We’re seeing evidence of this as our betters treat us peasants commoners with infuriating disdain. As they gather to protect their own, instead of those to whom their duty is sworn. I mean, really, what are you going to believe, our credentialed experts, or your own lying eyes?

Can we salvage our society from the encroaching hordes of barbarism? I don’t know. Can we do it by writing decent stories, by telling those stories to each other to bolster flagging courage? Again, I don’t know. But I do know that’s the only thing that can, and that’s how big things always start.

“Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”

― Robert A. Heinlein

When I was six, I found out that my parents could yell, they could threaten, but they couldn’t actually, physically, get in my brain and make my body do things.  This must have led to a fun and exciting time for my parents, in finishing raising me.

However, to this day, I remember that.  In the ultimate analysis I am free.  People can kill me, but they can’t MAKE me do stuff.  (absent neural programming, which Speaker assures me we don’t have yet.)

In the same way, in the course of almost as many years as Shakespeare’s total life, I’ve found Heinlein was right.

I don’t care how noble a side sounds, how profoundly urgent its benevolent message, if they say “this you cannot think.  This you cannot read.  This you cannot even consider” they are a tyranny in the making. If they get power over you and yours soon you’ll find that it’s “This air you cannot breathe.”

They are also unsure of their logical appeal and their ability to withstand the market place of ideas.  Otherwise, why ban certain thoughts and ideas and points of view?

This is why “political correctness” is a bad thing, because it takes away your tools to think of things properly.  If you can’t even express that men and women might be different, you surely can’t think about it.

It is also why progressivism with its ever growing list of “forbidden terms and words” because of racist sexist and imperialist bad thought (brown bag, really?) is a tyranny in the making.

I read an article this week, from Popehat about gamergate. I would like to say he made some good points, but he didn’t. Impossible to make good points when you mis-define the sides in the Gamergate and (by extension) the SFWA dispute and everywhere your favorite Social (in)Justice Whiners attack.  He seems to have bought into the definition of the sides brought by the SJWs and so views them as mostly urban, educated, often in tech professions, etc.  I.e. “Smart and cutting edge.”  He also seems to think they’re in search of true social justice.  (Le sigh.)  He says he is neither on “team blue” or “team red” (his terms) because while he’s fiscally conservative he’s for gay marriage and he prefers urban environments.  And he defines the opponents to SJWs as homophobes.  (I wonder if he defines them as racist and sexist too?  Including the women and the many gamergaters of interesting racial origin?)

Yeah, by that measurement, and actually including the “well educated” and “citizen of the world” measurements, I’d be in between too.

I’m not in between.  I’m staunchly in opposition to the SJWs.  Why?  Because the sides aren’t as pictured.

Are there some homophobes on the side of Gamergate?  I doubt it, particularly in the States.  Look, most of these people are younger than I, and gay relationships are just a thing that at worst we don’t care about one way or another.  Are there some homophobes on the right side of politics? Undoubtedly.  Probably not as many as there are on the left, though.  (No? Look to their favorite slurs and accusations to people they hate.)  More organized, maybe, though disapproval of homosexuality for religious reasons is not necessarily (or often) homophobia.  (Can be, but I’ve met very few.)

As for educated… pfui.  It’s possible that on the SJW side there are more graduates of “good universities” with impeccable credentials, but listen to them for ten minutes and you realize these credentials were acquired by regurgitating the indoctrination poured down their throats by their patchouli-infused professors.  In fact, if you try to discuss anything real with them, from the history of Western culture, to the real issues of some non-western civilizations, they gape at you like guppies in search of a crumb.  You’re talking of things they were told don’t exist and they can’t think about them, because thinking about them would make them automatically bad people.

So if your head hurts and you’re confused, this is because Popehat mis-defined the sides involved in this dispute.

The SJWs aren’t for equality or inclusion or any of that grand stuff.  They’re not even for upending the “scales of privilege” which at any rate haven’t been as described for at least fifty years.

They are for one thing only “Do as we say, and enshrine us as arbiters of all that’s right and just.”

Because their “system” of competing victimhoods is so confusing and irrational, they need someone to tell you when and how to discriminate, and whether a black handicapped straight woman has precedence over a Muslim, communist, gay guy.  These hierarchies change, too, depending on whim and whatever comes from the top.

So you need to constantly pay attention to the “voices from above” to know what to think and believe.  And even the wrong word you didn’t know was wrong — “lady” — can get you attacked by people who are keeping up with the SJW diktats.

Which means there must be SJWs in charge, and they must be listened to constantly.  IOW they get power to tell you what to do, what to think, what to read and what to believe.  Read or believe the wrong thing, and the pack descends on you like the red brigades on a deviationist.

In fact the whole thing smells of the power struggles in the Soviet Union.

This is not coincidental.

Both systems are tyrannical and aim at controlling your thought.

This you must not read, this you must not think, this you must not see even if it happens before your very eyes.

To be an SJW you must believe that, the long history of life on Earth notwithstanding, the attraction between male and female is arbitrary and part of “conditioning.”  That men and women are both exactly alike save for sex organs, and completely different in that women as historical victims have all the virtues of humanity, including compassion, peacefulness, healing, etc.  That if only we weren’t “oppressed” by a capitalist system, everyone would have enough of what they need/want and there would be no war or strife.  That saying that a 200lb man can carry a 90lb woman under one arm and laugh at her struggles is sexist.  That saying cultures are differently functional is somehow racist (even when the cultures belong to the exact same race, like say, Morocco and Italy.)

In other words, you have to be willing to believe things that just ain’t so and that simply won’t work in the real world.

In the article, Popehat makes reference to how they’re trying to get into gaming because it’s one of the sectors of the economy still doing well.  All the places that the SJWs have colonized before: books, news, industry, corporations are floundering.

It never occurs to him there is a cause and effect here.  As John C. Wright points out, everything they touch they destroy. EVERYTHING.  That is because what they want is power over the human mind, and because their set of beliefs is completely out of touch with reality.

You can’t, for instance, run a corporation as though men and women were exactly the same from the neck up.  As though they were both capable of leadership sure.  Identical, though?  Never.  Women have a completely different style in social relations.  To deny that is the true sexism.

The difference between the two sides is not red and blue, a scheme that changed in my lifetime anyway (Really, since when isn’t red communist?  Were they afraid of the linkage?)

The difference is between the bound and the free, the mentally enslaved and those who can read and think anything.

To compare us to the “party of the past” and the “party of the future” and to ascribe to the SJWs the future is to forget that America is not Europe.  Our past is not the staid past of aristocrats and serfs.  It is the past of revolution and freedom.  And none of us is advocating stasis.

We know technology changes, and its changes affect society.  It is the SJWs, the party of the past of Marx and Lenin and Stalin and Mao and other blood stained, dead, and for the most part white males, who are afraid of the change. They own the imagined future of the past and they can’t face the real future with interpersonal communications they don’t control, news they don’t control, entertainment they don’t control.

It is they who want to shut down internet discourse, or at least control it.  It is they who hate the free and chaotic environment online.

It is they who run around telling everyone “this you must not do” and “this you must not think” and “this person you must not associate with” on pain of being ‘worse than Hitler’.

We?

Heck, I gave my sons The Communist Manifesto when they were 12.  I figured it was better they taste the poison from the source, and not from the various repackagers who made it more palatable.  Looked at, in its naked horror, the ideology can’t fail to repel.

I also let them read their fill of various of the diluted sources afterwards, because if you’re armed with logic, the dankiest corners of the SJW universe hold no terrors.  Mostly, they hold boredom, because without the ability to be challenged there can be no independent, individual or new thought.

The two sides are as follows:

They’re the would be slave masters; we’re the free men, holding two middle fingers aloft in their faces.

Yours is the choice.

Greetings, O people my people. Now that All Saints Day has passed, the deluge of Christmas kitsch can now descend. To drown out the pop stars murdering White Christmas, I offer you some interesting books to peruse this week. So go, buy stories, leave reviews, and for those of you doing NaNoWriMo, good luck and make sure you send me your finished work! Heck, you could submit it for the promo post too. :D As always, future entries can (and should!) be sent to my email. Happy reading!

Jason Dyck, AKA The Free Range Oyster

World-Renowned Word-polisher, Shameless Self-Promoter, and Slave to the Groove

JL Curtis

The Grey Man: Payback

Deputy Sheriff John Cronin and his granddaughter, Jesse, are preparing for Jesse’s upcoming wedding to her Marine when the Cartel decides to murder some South Texas cops as a payback for arresting their drug smugglers. They send a hit squad to kill Cronin, Jesse, and everyone close to the family. The only problem?

They missed the old man.

Leaving his badge behind, John Cronin, Francisco and a few others head south to teach them a lesson about what old school western justice really means.

John Van Stry

Of Temples and Trials

Portals of Infinity: Book Three

With the first of what he suspects will be many favors completed, William finds himself busy with important tasks back at his home on Saladin. Queen Rachel has several jobs she needs him to do, and Feliogustus has similar tasks in mind for him as well. All in all, it seems easy enough to Will, it’s not like he’ll be fighting in any wars, or traveling across the infinite on a strange quest after all.

But things aren’t always as easy as they might seem, and both politics, as well as the other gods, aren’t going to ignore Will, or the tasks he’s been set to complete. And is if dealing with that isn’t problem enough, when the time comes to do some serious diplomacy between Hiland and a neighboring Kingdom, a deadly problem comes from a most unexpected quarter, forcing Will to take immediate action to payback both his, and his God’s foes.

Jenna Vincent

A Deed With No Name

A Rae Vigil 911 Story

Rae Vigil stumbles into an ugly case of domestic violence with a young child caught in the middle. The parents are very powerful and the police are powerless. Torn between saving the child and professional confidentiality, every instinct tells her not to get involved, but sometimes instincts are wrong.

Impossible Odds

Impossible Odds contains a pair of stories involving everyday people, making difficult choices in uncertain times and coming out ahead, despite the odds.

Available for free from Smashwords with the code RZ84D until Christmas Day.

Ben Zwycky

Nobility Among Us

“Still, this process does not sit well with me. Letting the people think they are in control of these proceedings, having them vote for their chosen candidate as if they will change the way things are done, these are dangerous ideas. Furthermore, these are actual lowborns we are admitting to our ranks. What if something slips through the filtering process, what then? I have this nagging feeling that this whole enterprise will come back to haunt us one day.”

Brought together by a reality show designed to pacify the people of Gandria, Viscount Marcus Draishire and his low-born wife are secret devotees of the forbidden book. This could get both of them imprisoned or worse. Marcus hears a case of a cattle farmer suing his baron for unfair taxation. Should he follow the king’s decree, that all nobles are immune from criticism, or judge the case on its merits? Marcus chooses the latter and gets himself some unwanted attention. He now has to balance acting in the best interests of his subjects against antagonising his superiors, who tend to express their displeasure with a bomb, bullet or knife.

The people under him have their own struggles and the nobility itself is walking something of a tightrope, the need to crush dissent weighing against that of projecting a benevolent public image; no-one wants another uprising.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

• Feed A Read
• Nobility Among Us
• Alibris
• For our international branches of the Hunnish Horde, this book is listed on various Amazon sites too numerous to list here.

Some of you — cough Eamon J. Cole cough — asked about this novel To The Dragons that I’ll hopefully be writing in the later half of NanoWrimo.  It’s actually a trilogy To The Dragons, With The Dragons, For the Dragons.  I am not proposing to write those three in two weeks, but maybe I can finish it over the holidays?

Anyway, for the subscribers, yes, I’ll be posting more on it, as I finish it, you get first peek.  But so everyone else doesn’t think I’m even crazier than usual (or perhaps has his/her suspicions confirmed, who knows?) here’s the first chapter:

 

To The Dragons

Sarah A. Hoyt

 

I always get scared before a flight.

Up in the saddle, with my pulse racing, I check the extra magazines for the Lewis, in the saddle bag, and hope that I’ll have time to reload. Then I check the bombs in their container and hope we won’t have the rare kind of defective that will blow us both out of the air before we even come near objective.

My dragon’s wings spread, and I feel the shifting of his muscles, and that’s when I start shaking, in a mix of nervousness and memory. It is never sure, when we take off like this that we’ll come back alive. In fact, the odds are greatly against it.

Suddenly my uniform is too tight, the wool prickly against my skin at wrist and collar. I count the bombs on the saddle bag, afraid of one of them will be a dud, afraid we’ll miss the one chance at fulfilling our mission.

He stretches his wings and I feel, even beneath the saddle, the movement, as the great muscles of his thighs coil, then push, lifting us into the sky, his wings flapping madly, biting into the air for purchase, until he can find the thermals and coast.

The sound of the giant wings against the sky reminds me of the first time I ever heard them consciously, flapping above my childhood home.

For just a moment, I’m a three year old standing before the ruins of her home, thrown out of a window by the initial explosion, the only survivor of her entire family. A war orphan.

The trembling gets worse, and then I hear the dragon’s voice in my mind: “You’re all right.”

It’s not a question, but an affirmation. I’m all right, and he’s there with me, there in all my memories, there as we head for what might be a no return flight. There.

It makes a difference. I am in peril. But not alone.

From the age of three to twenty two I was alone, another orphan in the war with the dragons, a young waif evacuated in one of the last convoys from Great Britain to make it safely to the United States, raised in an orphanage in Chicago, trained to be an elementary school teacher to the other legions of orphans this war had made.

And then at my first job I was faced with the talent tracker.

It was a box, square, pale. Looked like it was made of painted metal, nothing much special about it.

I’d balked at it, but I’d been told everyone had to go through it when they got their first job. It was the needed thing to do, the important thing to do. Only one person in a thousand could bond with a dragon, and even then half of those who could didn’t, for some reason. Everyone must be tested. The Katharos dragons had numbers we couldn’t match, and we must use all our dragons. All of them. Humanity had no hope of winning a battle against the Katharos, unless we could field all of those dragons who stood with us.

I’d balked at it because I did not want to bond with a dragon, not even with a dragon on our side. We heard things, after all. How much on our side were the dragons? How much did they identify with the Katharos, the pure, the dragons who wanted to purge humanity from the world? Dragons had killed my family.

But it was the law and at least if rumor was true to have the type of mind that could bond with a dragon’s, you needed to have dragon blood yourself.

Dragon riders were needed because transformed dragons couldn’t drop bombs and fly or keep their minds and sight clear enough to battle in midair, so even the Katharos had one dragon in human form riding the other, in dragon form. And the dragon and rider had to communicate telepathically, which might be easier for dragons, but for humans it meant you had to be bonded to a specific dragon.

And we certainly didn’t have enough dragons in our midst to be able to afford dragon flying teams.

I knew all this. I still didn’t wish to be tested for it.

On the other hand, they said you needed to have dragon blood to be able to bond with one of them. And I very much doubted I had any, unless my ancestors were far more interesting than I’d been led to believe. Less than one person in a thousand had the ability.

Which is why I’d stood in that small office, transfixed, staring at the small white box as it hissed.

I can still remember it perfectly, the expression of the matron and the principal frozen in shock, and then the principal’s smile and “Well, well, that’s never happened before. That’s quite an honor, Miss Winter, that is. Now, if you would wait here, I shall go put a call through to the search headquarters. I’m sure they’ll send a car.”

He shook my hand, effusive and congratulatory, his hands dry and very warm, his face grinning. I wondered if there was a finder’s fee going to the school, then chided myself. After all, anyone who wanted for humans to survive would be glad to have found a potential dragon rider, right?

But I didn’t feel glad. I made a muffled excuse, something about using the ladies’.

I went out and kept walking, with only the money in my purse. I didn’t dare return to my lodgings.

In my mind, I had the vague idea that I could take a train across the country to California, that I could find some place to get lost there. We always heard that California, being subjected to attacks by the Katharos was far more chaotic and tests weren’t being properly made and all.

This was not so much a clear thought as a mindless drive to get out of Chicago, to escape, to escape the search office and their car, to escape the search itself and bonding with a dragon.

I couldn’t do it. I approved of it for others, mind, but I just couldn’t.

Twenty eight hours later, I got out of the train in Denver, to take another long-distance train to California.

And stopped as I saw a line forming, in between platforms. There was a desk and a search machine set up. There were military police all around. I could have run, I could. But if I had run, I’d have found myself caught very quickly. I could earn nothing by it but bruises.

And two hours later, I was winding my way along mountain roads, in the back seat of a car, with a military police next to me, telling me how glad they were to have found me, how difficult it was to find dragon riders, and particularly young women dragon riders.

Turned out the search wasn’t for me, but just a general search. Apparently people who were discovered weren’t always willing. Some had history like mine, but more were already married and set in their ways.

“I suppose you had no idea you were a dragon rider,” the young man said, as he dropped me at a base outside some caverns which I understood had once been used as a touristic attraction. “I mean, a potential one.”

The people who received me, men in uniform whose insignia I couldn’t understand, were all smiles. “There is a bonding going on right now, and there are far too few riders. Come on along. You’re just in time. No, I’m afraid there is no time to change.”

There was also no time to escape. As panicky as I felt, I could not run in the face of this. They weren’t doing anything to make me run. And besides, where I would I go.

They escorted me down what might once have been natural corridors, now provided with smooth floors and electric light.

The bonding cavern, as I’d learn it was called, was a huge room. You could have dropped three or four Cathedrals in there and not have noticed.

There were half a dozen people there who were not military personnel and who looked as out of place as I was. Or at least, they wore what looked like jumpsuits. I suspected it was the same uniform they’d have given me had I had the time. But I wore my grey skirt suit, and clutched onto my purse, as the uniformed men escorted me to join the group.

Past the group were… I smelled them, the slightly reptilian, dry smell. It smelled like… like hot leather. I didn’t have any associations with the smell. I’d never smelled those who’d destroyed my home.

There were at least a dozen dragons, in colors ranging from bright red to green to a strange silvery one with a shimmer to him that made him look like he was made of glass. I knew this type of dragon. At least I knew him from reading. They were called Pures by the Katharos and considered the most desirable of all types of dragons.

I found myself blinking at him, as he turned his triangular head to look me in the eye. He had dark grey eyes and somehow I got the impression he was there as reluctantly as I was. He looked away quickly.

“Ah, here, if you just put your hand on their muzzle. If you bond, you’ll hear the dragon in your mind.”

My hope was that I would be one of fifty percent potentials who wouldn’t bond. Bonding with a dragon is like a marriage. In fact, to preserve decency, the bonded pair is strongly encouraged to marry. The flip side is that you might have all the ability in the world, but if you didn’t find the right one, you might never bond.

With a military gentleman next to me, I patted desultorily at the nose of a brown dragon who leered at me, and a green one who rolled his eyes. There was nothing.

I took a deep breath of relief as the military gentleman took me to stand right in front of the silvery-glass one, and waited. I lifted my hand and set it on his muzzle. I knew he was male, though I hadn’t been sure about the other two. Don’t ask me how. Something to the structure of the face, or the expression.

I set my hand on his muzzle. Like the others, it was soft and warm, which surprised me, since I expected dragons to have cold skin.

Nothing.

And then something happened, like a tingle in my back brain. The dark grey eyes focused on me and widened and I heard an unmistakably masculine, faintly accented voice in my mind saying, “Damn.”

 

So, yesterday I had a comment I had to think about before I approved.

I always think about approving new commenters before bed, because this gives them free rein to scat all over the threads before I wake and usually before the Huns are active and neutralizing. So this comment made me hesitate.

First there was the name. The name was Ele. Now that means “he” in Portuguese. It could also arguably be a diminutive of something like Giselle. OTOH it’s also a misspelling of Elle – French for “She” which is the sort of commenter name feminists with glitter in the hoo ha tend to saddle themselves with.

Then there was the comment. Not only were there internal alarm bells in the comment itself (I’ll explain) but the comment itself was living proof that the commenter had either not read or not understood the post AT ALL.

The comment is this:

I’m sure this will get lost – but Hoyt, did you look at the site you linked to? The vast majority of it is misogynistic ramblings, including the idea that all women are bitches unless they find a man attractive (because that’s the only thing that makes a woman behave). He said that.

I’ve always respected you, but look at your sources. While the article itself is not objectionable, linking people to a site that clearly espouses hatred of women is not a good idea. Don’t give him a platform – and don’t give liberals ammunition.

The internal alarm bells are as follows “Hoyt” – no one who reads this site for any amount of time, no matter how silent, calls me “Hoyt” particularly in an appellative sort of way “Hoyt” betrays that they were sent here and have seen no more than the header, not even bothering to look at the books for sale on the side.

So, that “Hoyt” effectively contradicts “I’ve always respected” – because this person doesn’t even know what my first name is.

This is enforced by “respected” – look, “respect” is almost exclusively a liberal word. Usually used in the sense of “respect the office” or “respect me because I have this credential.” When speaking to a blogger or a writer, a conservative/libertarian is more likely to use “I’ve always admired” you.

The only thing that decided me to let the comment to was “And don’t give liberals ammunition” which is typical of young, scared and possibly in the political closet conservatives and libertarians. (Later, they grow a spine and they start being able to walk upright, but that’s something else.) Also, that the comment was all in all fairly innocuous. Not wholly innocuous. It might very well have been planted with the intent of having me defend that site, and therefore having me further tainted by association. Since I hadn’t read the site and didn’t have time to answer in full, that wasn’t a problem.

Well, this morning it’s tilted slightly more towards the “obnoxious SJW (sodden social jejnue justice whiner warrior) infiltration” on this comment, because a) this person judging by her email writes like one (this is not conclusive. People try to pass in various ways) b) there has been no other comment, no plea to me to be careful, nothing.

If that’s the case, she should hold onto her hat. And if she is a young but daft conservative/libertarian in the closet, she should hold on to her hat.

In the first case because “I ain’t afraid anymore” (there is a Portuguese joke, told after the revolution, not incredibly funny to anyone who didn’t live through it, about a guy who orders a brandy and a coffee and refuses to pay because “I ain’t afraid anymore” – that’s sort of what I feel like.) In the second case because, oh, honey, you need to learn reading comprehension.

For those concerned about the link and how the man at the site is a misogynist who “hates women”. I still haven’t read the other posts on that site, but I can see the header. He’s one of the proponents of “Game”. For those of you who aren’t acquainted with this facet of the manosphere “ Game” is what pickup artists call what they employ to… well, pick up women.

While in general I disagree with pick up artists as much as I disagree with feminists and for the same reason (because they make an entire half of the human race into widgets, definable only by what is between their legs) I cut them more slack then I cut feminists. I do this for two reasons:

First – There is a world of difference between reading a blog that tries to counter female oppression in, say, Saudi Arabia, and one that tries to counter female oppression in the US. The first might go a bit far in objectifying men or thinking all men are evil without my thinking the person is a loon. In the second, unless the person is devoted to working against white slavery or works at an abused women shelter – PFUI. So, I cut more slack to men who in the US are effectively second class citizens when they go a little far in their own defense, than I cut women living in what is now an effective matriarchy when they blame all their issues on “patriarchy.” (I’m not saying that some women, in the US, due to situation, character, etc. aren’t oppressed, only that the average SJW truly isn’t and uses it as an excuse. And that I cut no slack.)

Second – They are in touch with reality. Yes, they are in fact wrong in the idea every woman can be manipulated in the exact same way. I fell in love with my husband after what would be considered “friendzoning” and by his doing EVERYTHING wrong according to “the game.” However, if your goal is to attract a certain type of woman for a certain type of affair they are in fact right. And they’re right on the very fundamental fact that men and women are different. (Now if they got that women are also different from each other, they’d be even saner.)

IOW the man on the site, unless it’s a very odd representative of The Game is not advocating killing women, or keeping them in a burqa, or taking away their right to conduct commerce. He’s instructing men on how to seduce them. He might hate women (I doubt it. Why in heck would you devote yourself to pursue them?) but if that’s your definition of “Misogyny” you really don’t know anything about how women are treated the world over.

I sort of figured it wasn’t anything as bad as the white supremacist site that shall not be named, because they have scouts who come and infest a site for months because it’s rational. (The white supremacist site is not. And it’s a pity I can’t link to it, because among other things their interpretation of Portuguese history is a hoot. For instance, based on pictures of Portuguese kings in the NINETEENTH century they think all Portuguese used to look like Germans. In fact, the Portuguese kings were related to Queen Victoria, of course, but that had nothing to do with the population. Henry the Navigator, who was arguably the royal with the most Portuguese blood preserved in painting, looked like… a Portuguese man. [His father was, arguably, of Jewish ascent since his mother was a commoner of converso background. He was an illegitimate son.]) Such sites tend to be very silly, even for just one post.

Okay, that’s now disposed of. Now we can move to the important part:

That comment betrays a total lack of understanding of the post.

The whole point of the post was to show that the right (and my fellow libertarians should forgive me. I know that we are just short of the sans culottes in the French revolution with the same lack of reverence for “our betters” but lacking that fascination with equalite, except before the law, and therefore it hurts to lump us in with socons and with people who, in Europe, defended kings. The thing is in the US we are on the right. Possibly the most right of all, since we cling to the “old form” of our founding documents. So, bear with me) reads and evaluates ideas and artwork in themselves, while the SJWs rely on a version of “unclean.”

To put this another way: I liked that article because, with a minor quibble, I thought it described very well what has been happening in literature and gaming. I didn’t even bother looking at the other posts on the site (or the header) because that POST made perfect sense and described the situation in words I didn’t have to write, which then provided the background to my post about why the left is intellectually sterile.

The left, though, can’t apply logic to its beliefs, because if it did they’d crumble at the touch (no? really? Answer me quickly: which one is more UNJUSTLY oppressed? A black woman raised in the lap of luxury by college-professor parents or a white man in the Appalachia raised by a druggie single mother? Which one deserves your help more? If you said the woman, you just proved you internalized your Marxist training perfectly, but you can’t think. If you said “the man” you just proved you are trying to game me. The actual answer is “It depends on the content of their characters.” That’s the ONLY sane, rational answer for a non-racist human in a free society.)

So instead, they rely on a system of “cleanliness.”

Having defined some thoughts as unclean — those that disapprove of any women for any reason whatsoever, or which fail to believe men and women are exactly alike (we’re not. Vive la difference), those that say the poor might have done something to bring their plight on themselves, those that approve of any republican, ever, those that intimate that the person might vote for anyone but a democrat/socialist/communist, those that disapprove of communism and all its works and all its empty promises – they then go around trying to avoid the contagion of those thoughts.

To that end, their fellow SJWs help, by acting like lepers in the middle ages, tolling their little bell and shouting “unclean, unclean” every time a blog or book betrays one of the germs of these forbidden ideas.

They have to, you see. Like lepers in the middle ages they have no clue how the contagion occurs, they just know that exposed people often become that which the SJWs disapprove of. (I.e. ANY rational thought can crumble their perfect pseudo-religion.)

Under that heading, I am already unclean. I’ve admitted that I will vote against democrats in every possible election if for no other reason because the press refuses to report democrat malfeasance which both covers up and enables corruption of democrats in power.

Their system, because irrational, and because they are so loud, has been intimidating and maiming the right for decades.

You see, no one wants to become a target of their screams and pointing because, well, who the heck wants to be called a nazi because they disapprove of gynocracy in Science Fiction or of giving awards to people because they, in the ultimate analysis, have a vagina and/or an interesting genetic background?

When I was a kid, every Sunday we visited the slum where mom grew up. (Yes, I hated it, why?) On the way to my grandparents’ three room (rented) house, we passed this … magnificent ruin. If I had to guess, it was probably once a manorial house, now many centuries abandoned/in disrepair. (Though it might be older than that. Like its equivalent in the village, it was called “ilha” a direct translation from the Roman Insula.) It had many floors and countless rooms, out of which boiled a multitude of half-dressed, ragged, dirty children, who would swarm around you, hitting and kicking, and trying to steal stuff from your purse.

The SJWs are sort of like that, when they find a target, and no one wants to deal with the swarm of dirty, ragged and intellectually half-dressed children.

Even when you have the courage of your convictions and can defend your ideas rationally, it’s a pain. I mean, my family at the time was probably poorer than most of those kids in the slum (most of them belonged to prestigious beggar leagues. The league is very wealthy and its headmen very powerful) but this didn’t save me from being hit and sometimes having my hair ribbons (mom insisted!) stolen.

In the same way, you might be the nicest man who ever lived and have devoted your entire life to looking after women in shelters, but if you don’t follow the SJW line, they’ll call you a misogynist and a woman hater.

Most people find it not worth the trouble and are afraid of the character association.

This, in the end means that right wing politicians get attacked for reasons that don’t even make any sense. Like, for instance, Romney getting accused of something relating to women and binders, because he asked for the resumes of women who had been held back (he thought, at least) due to their gender and for giving them due advancement. That accusation never even made any sense. Not even out of context. But it was all “Women, binders” and no one, NO ONE in a public position defended the man. So all the woman (and man) on the street retained was “women/binders/war on women.”

Much worse than that, Palin got accused of being stupid and it stuck to her because of jokes by SNL and because the left speciously cut her interviews. This despite the fact she rose to prominence all on her own.

But the right is supposed to be “stupid” and so the left beat that drum. She was on the right and therefore self-obviously stupid, just like the president is supposedly the most brilliant man who ever lived, but we don’t get to see IQ tests or grades. (I’ll show him mine, if he shows me his. No? Yeah. I know.)

This is particularly effective against the right, because most of us came to our positions on our own, and therefore it’s not a unified position. I.e. there are many disagreements even among ourselves. Some of the most heated arguments I’ve ever had were with other libertarian and libertarianish people.

So, when you say “Well, this person believes in x” and it’s against my beliefs, it’s easier to scare me off. Theoretically.

The left, showing its shallowness and lack of morals, chooses to defend people guilty of real, heinous crimes. They make martyrs of people who robbed convenience stores and attacked cops. They enshrine politicians who grow rich at the public expense while talking about the plight of the poor. They embraced racists, and gave them long lives in the democratic party. And they embrace feminists no matter how horrible their blogs or stories are, including those that advocate the elimination of all males or stories (MANY. Do your homework) that imply all men are evil because penis.

This is because they have no principles and no ideas. So the “Democrat” or “communist” or “socialist” label makes someone’s thoughts “safe” even when despicable. (And the fact that communist and socialist are “safe” labels tells you how much they will swallow, because those two regimes always end in blood, faster or slower, overt or covert.)

So by allowing them to Mao Mao the right into splintering and isolating, we’re allowing the truly bad, truly disgusting, truly immiserating ideas to prevail. We’re allowing innocents to think that the SJWs have some sort of moral high ground. We’re allowing the destruction of civilization.

In the name of avoiding the kicking and shoving, the grasping by the filthy hands of the ideologically dirty and morally diseased progeny of Marx.

Except some of us ain’t afraid anymore.

The fact we don’t vote for them is enough to bring the bell and the pointing finger and the shouts of unclean. After a while they form sort of a pleasant buzz as you go about your business. And hey, if they hang around to shout sooner or later they’ll read something that will make them think. Well, it’s possible.

I ain’t afraid anymore.

In the end, we win, they lose.

Be not afraid.

WELCOME INSTAPUNDIT READERS – And as always thank you to Glenn Reynolds for the link!

There’s A Critter in My Fiction! – Alma Boykin

 

So you want animals in your story, or animals wander into your story, and you need to decide what to do with them. Not microbes, but visible animals, pet-sized or larger. I’ll be the first to say that I am not an expert on critters in fiction, or fictional critters. However, I’ve found a few things while writing and researching both fictional and real-world animals that you might find helpful (or cautionary). You’d think something as simple as, oh, a mule, would be easy to write. That’s what I thought, too. Heh.

First you need to sort out what sort of critter you are writing, and how detailed it needs to be. Cart horses, dragons seen only at a distance, rumored sea monsters, the cat that your character shoos off the chair and is never seen again, they don’t need much in the way of precise description and natural history. Most readers can fill in the details and are familiar with what horses, cats, and other things look like. If you are writing a more exotic setting, you might need to describe the wombat, echidna, and aardwolf a little more. However, if you are going to have an animal as a character, or have a completely new beast appear, you probably need to do a little research and thinking about “how does it behave/function?”

For example, Snow the Killer Mule in the Colplatschki books required some research. I knew that mules are not horses, and they behave differently. I did not know until I started reading about mules and donkeys that they require different tack because their shoulders are proportioned differently from a horse (for example), that they mature more slowly than horses, that they don’t run when startled but they tend to freeze, then run with a purpose rather than blindly charging off like horses. You can’t get a mule to charge into danger like you can a horse. On the other hand, mules don’t drink themselves sick like horses are known to do. I read a number of books about mules, some from the 1800s, some more recent, and used what I’d learned. I did fudge Snowy’s gait, though: I have yet to read about a mule with a running walk or paso. But he turned out to be a most mulish mule, which was my intent.

Let’s say I’d been trying instead for a pack-lizard that someone used in the steppes and savannahs. I’d need to bone up on reptiles, and I’d probably go back and read Bakker and others about the supposed characteristics of warm-blooded dinosaurs, in case I decided to make the beast endothermic. An endothermic lizard won’t need special protection from cold but it might overheat, unless it sweats, pants, or uses modified fins to dissipate heat. A cold-blooded pack-lizard would need less food in warm weather, but the drover is stuck where he is on cold mornings until the air and the beast both warm up. And he might be in trouble if a cold front with icy rain arrives while he’s on the trail. I’d also need to decide how the creature moves, if it is more lizardy (like a crocodile or skink) or more horse-like (straight line movement), because that changes how the packs are arranged. It would probably have feet with hard central pads (proto-hoofs) and semi-flexible toes so it could walk in grass and hard dirt as well as softer soil. If the pack-lizard was by nature a browser, the drover would have to bring softer food if he ventures into the grasslands, in case the beast has trouble chewing and digesting a pure grass diet. And how would the pack-lizard behave? Do pack-lizards act differently from riding lizards? David Drake’s The Forge with the canine cavalry might be something to review, to see how he uses dog behavior, then look at lizard behavior. After all, the more “realistic” my pack-lizard, the more believable the reader will find my world.

Which raises another category: uplifted animals. How doggy is a sapient wolf? A comment thread here some time ago brought up what sapient house cats would be like, and most people thought we’d end up with the Kzinti. Or Shere Kahn, neither of which are exactly charming creatures. One example, although not Uplifted from outside their own world (as far as anyone knows) are the Azdhagi. The Azdhagi descended from predators that hunted in packs, led by an alpha male and sorted by size. As they achieved sapience, that behavior became a lineage-based clan system, with the Pack, composed of all members of the lineages, having supreme power should the clan lord fail to act in the best interests of the Pack. This became part of the Azdhagi Imperial political system and remains so on the throneworld of Drakon IV, less so on the colony worlds. However, caste is still size based. And as Rada Ni Drako discovered, the Pack can, and will, eliminate anyone who poses a threat to its survival. She’s watched it happen three times, and on each occasion it chilled her to the bone.

I’d venture to say that in some ways the concerns about writing uplifted beasts blur into those for were-creatures. How much of the animal side remains after uplift/shift? I think it would be safe to have uplifted golden retrievers that worked hard, played hard, didn’t think too much, and loved team sports. I’m not sure about an uplifted Jack Russell terrier, but I’m pretty certain I would NOT want to spend a long trip in a small vehicle with her. She’d be a great camp councilor, though. “Great! You want to go hiking today? Sure, we can go hiking, hiking’s fun. The long trail? No problem, remember to grab two water bottles and let’s go!” She’d also be the one most likely to know all the ways to sneak out of he cabins, because she would have tried them already at least once. And you just might uplift yourself into the Rats, Bats, and Vats world, which would at the very least make communicating with your workers a bit of a trick at times.

And weres. Traditionally, at least in the early movies and some stories, the werewolf had no idea of what he’d done in animal form, and was horrified to discover what he’d become. Are were-creatures beings of evil, or unfortunate accidents, or something desirable? Or is it just something your character has to deal with: as you know, a shifted were-dragon in a small bathroom is not a happy creature, and neither is his housemate. Does the animal aspect reflect the human personality, or is it the other way, that the human over time takes on some of the animal’s patterns? (I know of a professor who’d make a magnificent were-heron. He’s tall, with a very dignified bearing, walks steadily and with a purpose, looks around often, and dips his head as he walks. His personality is more leonine, though.) No matter how you write it, you’d better do research into the animal in question, its size, diet, habits, and how the shift might occur. Rada, for example, grows a pelt in her full-animal (call it were-jaguar) and normal forms. She also sheds in spring. All at once, “blowing” that lovely, thick double pelt in a week or so. It could be funny (for those outside the shedding perimeter) or a major problem (someone trying to track her is going to have a very easy time of it). What if your were-person sheds fur or scales every time he shifts? Messy!

There’s as many possibilities for animals in fiction as there are animals. From small pets to livestock to major characters to comic relief to dangerous antagonists, animals have played roles in many worlds of fiction. Go forth and do likewise!

Now excuse me, I have to vacuum cat hair out of my keyboard.

 

The opposite of creation is not destruction. Destruction, however much easier than creation, however much detrimental to society and to self is at least an action: you do something.

The opposite of creation is a sort of sterile, puzzled nothingness.

I’ve been observing this lately among the Social Justice Warriors (and btw, you should totally follow that link and read that article.) They acclaim a certain type of “art” (for lack of a better word) which is not even the type of creativity you see in school kids where they say take two comics, mash them together, and think they have created something new and Earthshattering.

That is the creativity of the naïve and inexperienced. No, the SJWs “create” by regurgitating onto the page things they read elsewhere and have been told are examples of right think or right positioning. Which is why their works feel beyond boring, sterile, castrated somehow, as if some piece of essential humanity is missing.

I’ve met this sort of “creativity” before.

I’m not going to run down my country of origin. It did pretty well in poetry. I liked Camoes, but that was because it was a requirement and also, I think, because I didn’t know very much of Roman poetry at the time (I suspect it’s rather derivative.) And I liked Fernando Pessoa. And I liked Eurico de Sa (though I liked him as a teen and wonder how it would have ported into my adult self.)

All of those are, of course, post renaissance, and in my opinion Camoes (the Lusiades) suffers from a constriction of imagination.

Part of this is that even into the nineteenth century the country had “accepted modes of thought” (it might still for all I know, but I doubt now they’re religion based.) There were things that were simply unthinkable without offending the majority of the “right thinking” Catholic-brought-up population.

Someone or other in a book I was reading said that Portugal was more Catholic and more authoritarian about it than practically any other country (except maybe Spain) because it had a high number of Carthaginians in its ancestry and those were total fanatics.

This is possible. I don’t know. What I know is this: when people here tell me to write “authentically Portuguese” fantasy and not elves and dwarves and what not, they don’t realize the level to which a religion of exclusivity (not Catholicism, per se. It didn’t do it in Italy or in most of the rest of Europe, but Catholicism the Portuguese way) scoured the imaginative landscape clean of all other elements.

I presume at some point the North had Celtic folklore, because it was part of the Celtic commonwealth. And all of the country, most definitely, had Roman myth.

It’s just that even in the twentieth century the idea of a Portuguese Tolkien was unthinkable. And while the Lusiades had symbolical Roman myth, it was almost self-consciously symbolic and imitative.

I’ll say right now I’ve been away from the country for a long time, and it’s entirely possible that other authors from the times I’m referring to have been discovered and that they were more imaginative. What I know though is that even our equivalent of the Grim fairy tales, collected from the people, are devoid of any supernatural beings but Saints. The scouring of the intellectual/emotional/mental landscape of the country was very complete.

And from what I can gather, looking back, it wasn’t what the civil authorities forbid, (though there was that too) but that the culture had made certain things unthinkable. You couldn’t think of them and remain part of the group.

I suspect the same thing is what happened in the Soviet Union under communism, and why they are having so much trouble rebuilding a civil society without recourse to authoritarian, soviet-like structures.

I’ve talked to people even in lighter socialist countries, like Sweden, who can’t seem to conceive of a non-socialist representative society. If I tell them their system sucks (It does, no matter what progressives say. It makes individual initiative and entrepeneurship impossible, to say nothing of somehow destroying the race’s impulse to procreate. In a connected world, too, it also attracts the kind of migrants who don’t share the culture and who simply want to mooch of it) they instinctively, without thought, go back and compare what they have to what they had when monarchy was absolute in the middle ages. Despite examples in the rest of the world, the idea of representative government without socialism is literally unthinkable. Their schooling has made some thoughts things that can’t be thought.

In the old traditional publishing they could hem us in in the same way. I knew if I wrote even something so innocuous as a communist villain and a good businessman in the same story, I’d never sell it. Ever. It was unthinkable.

I think a lot of these systems become this way and make certain thoughts unthinkable because they’re so certain of themselves, and because what was there before was so much more horrible.

I’m fairly sure that Catholicism in Portugal became absolutist to scour the public mind of Muslim thought with its myriad of genii and spirits. Anyone who has seen Roman ruins in Portugal and sees that for all the centuries of occupation the locals, secretly, buried their dead in the ruins of the church (because it was the only consecrated ground left) can doubt there was Muslim oppression and that the backlash against it was horrific.

Hence the backlash against the horrible becomes the totalitarian thought of the future.

But there is also, undoubtedly, a different reason for totalitarian thought, and that is when the past was better, and when your regime/thought/ruling doesn’t work very well at all.

If we look carefully that’s what FDR did by maligning his predecessors and enshrining the New deal. It was also attempted with varying degrees of success when Clinton took over after the elder Bush. Seizing the opportunity presented by a minor dip in the market, (amplified by news reports of the misery it inflicted on the nation. Ah, if they did those reports now!) they started proclaiming that “trickle down economics” didn’t work and that the new soft socialism would.

It didn’t. Not really. It inflated stock market bubbles with government money and let Friends of Bill get away with murder, which was then used to advance the “all business is corrupt” narrative. (Also no one in the Reagan administration ever used “trickle down” they used “supply side”. Also, anyone who lived through both administrations, let along those of GWB and Obama, knows that whatever the heck Reagan did WORKED.)

However, in the news and the media, saying what Reagan had done had improved the economy was literally unthinkable. Even when some of us remembered it.

But mostly – mostly – I find these… ideologies of exclusion that make everything out of them unthinkable exist not in backlash or on purpose to erase something, but because they are fataly flawed internally and if people were aware of a different slant or looked at them with fresh eyes, they’d find the flaws.

This is the case with a certain type of religion (Islam, mostly, in most parts of the world) but also with all the pseudo-religions of the left. Yep, all of them. Environmentalist, socialism, feminism, and that bizarre blend that’s the Social Justice Warrior.

They’re besieged all about and hemmed in with “this you can’t read” and “this you can’t look at” and “this you can’t think” and they call this being enlightened and free-thinkers. And they don’t have enough critical thought faculties left to laugh when they say it.

For instance one of the SJWs in my field was congratulating herself not long ago for not having a bookstore near her that carried books that weren’t written by SJWs and therefore never having been exposed to “bad think.” Because…

I mean, if those thoughts are self-obviously bad and wrong, she could read them and find rational reasons to reject them, right?

But the truth is she couldn’t. She has no logic as a defense for adopting the positions she does, or avoiding the opposite. She just thinks what she’s told to, and avoids what she’s told to.

Because “wrong think” could destroy the entire construction of what she believes. (Shouldn’t be difficult. It’s internally contradictory. Say, for instance, how do you deal with a woman’s right to choose when a woman chooses to abort all female children. Why you scream about her false consciousness and tell her she’s a subconscious victim of the patriarchy and then you stop her choosing. But then how do you face the fact you stopped her choosing? You don’t. You made her choose right for her own good. Yes, okay, but how are you different from those who say that abortion is harmful to the mother and to society and she should choose life for her own good? You’re not, save for thinking “right thoughts” and holding on to the sanctioned opinions. Just like a medieval peasant in a theocracy, right?)

This type of rigid thought structure is bad, I think, for all professions and all jobs (and thus, ultimately for society.) You can be a decent cobbler, but not an incredibly innovative one, if your entire training is to be afraid to stray outside safe-thoughts.

But it is death for the arts. It just is. You can’t create if you don’t have access to the full panoply of human thoughts and imaginings, at least in the symbolic sense.

None of us – I think – believes in fairies or unicorns, but bringing a fairy or unicorn in to a story is useful to create a certain situation, and humans in that situation are also interesting.

Social justice warriors should be able to imagine a bad woman in power. If women are fully human, they can be bad, without their evil being the result of oppressive patriarchy. But they can’t. They can’t think “badthink.” That would bring into question the entire idea of female supremacy, let alone the idea that men and women are exactly alike but men are worse. In the same sense they can’t, say, write a futuristic story in which someone creates a true hermaphrodite race, because that would make them question that men and women are already alike form the neck up. (Oh, wait, they COULD write that, but it would be all about sex and “consent” and nonsense externalities, not how their thought would be different IN ITSELF from other humans and how THAT would affect the culture, which is where the real creativity lies.)

Their alternate history, likewise, tends to devolve into either revenge plots against those they view as oppressors, or puerile utopias. It is beyond them to create something like the Grimnoir Chronicles, in which the unthinkable happens and the world changes in unthinkable and yet utterly realistic ways.

And this is why when you’re reading their stuff you tend to feel you read it all before and Ursula Le Guinn at her worst did it better.

This is why they default to accusing anyone who is not bound by SJW thought of not wanting women in science fiction, as though objecting to a gynotheocracy were the same as not wanting them to participate. This is why they think allowing people who disagree with them to publish is the equivalent of shutting them up. Because they can’t – simply can’t – coexist in a world that allows other forms of thought.

Which is too bad, because with indie, it’s gone beyond Baen and they are most certainly have to face the fact that some people out there don’t read, write, or play games like they do. No one is going to force them to appreciate the other side, but no one is going to shut the other side to please them and make them feel “secure” either. (And btw, that’s where the whole not feeling safe comes from. They’re not afraid the “wrong-thinkers” will attack them. Only that these people will say things that question their belief system. A totalitarian, exclusivist belief system can’t tolerate being confronted by different thoughts. It feels like an attack and like you’re falling apart. Hence the fears aimed at nice, polite, decent men like Brad Torgersen. If you think of their claustrophobic, limited mind-space it makes PERFECT sense. This is why they need “safe” rooms, too, to get away from divergent thought and divergent people. All while proclaiming diversity, which would be funny if it weren’t so sad.)

They’re going to have to adapt or be marginalized.

Now, if we can come up with a way to make decent, professional indie movies, perhaps we can get away from the present Hollywood phase where the height of creativity is to redo superheroes (cartoonish to being with) as female, because, you know, that makes it totally better. Even when it doesn’t.

As for the SJWs, yep, they still have access to the megaphones of the culture. But those are drying up. The publishers are losing their money, and as TV and movies sign on to their properties my guess is that what will happen there is what happened to literature SF. You can’t make people consume what they don’t like. Not for entertainment. They’ll just go elsewhere.

And then the money dries up there too.

The lack of creativity that comes with their sterile, binding set of dogmatic beliefs doesn’t even allow them to destroy INTERESTINGLY.  These exclusive thought-modes can’t exist in a truly pluralistic environment and the environment that’s emerging in the arts is pluralistic to the point of chaos.

Thought will move past them and elsewhere.

Creativity will return, and with tech change, there’s a good chance it will be freed up in ways we can only imagine. (But they can’t.)

A brilliant new renaissance is over the horizon.

In the end, we win, they lose.

Be not afraid.

 

 

 

Sometimes I feel like Stranger in a Strange Land. I’m of this place, but not of this place. And by this place I don’t so much mean the US as the current mode of Western civilization, say, the last 300 years or so.

You see, I can’t exactly claim to have been born and raised in a village that time forgot. I mean, the village I grew up in was ten miles from the second largest city in Portugal, and could be visited in 20 minutes by train.

On the other hand, other than the five or six kids per year who went to high school and the few men who had jobs outside the village (I’m sure there were more, but I keep thinking and the only ones I can say for sure were my dad and his best friend from childhood) Porto might as well have been on the far side of the moon. My grandmother had visited it three times in her life by the time I was ten. And while people in the village prided themselves on being ever so much more sophisticated and forward thinking than the rubes from “behind the mountains” most people in the village lived in conditions virtually indistinguishable from their grandparents’ lives. They might (or might not. It was a mixed bag until I was about six) have electrical light. They almost for sure had a radio and were addicted to soap operas (I used to walk down the main street at the time of the soap opera (it’s when the bus from middle school arrived) and hear the entire thing, just walking from door to door. They probably didn’t have a tv. Or a refrigerator. Indoor plumbing was hit or miss and the arrangement we had, with the full bathroom just outside the backdoor was about average, both because thick stone walls were hard to pierce for new plumbing and because people raised on outhouses found the bathroom a “dirty” thing to have indoors.

The rhythms of life — how food was acquired; how a living was earned; how one behaved; what mattered – all of it could have been grasped by someone from the seventeenth century, with perhaps a bit of excitement at the “innovations,” light, radio and the two private cars in the village. Heck, a Roman from the Christian period (before that it was just too weird) would have taken only a few days to fully integrate.

What I’m trying to say is that modernity, as we know it, and as most people here (even those older than I) grew up with, was hit or miss in the village, as we lived in it.

There might have been some comforts and conveniences, but no one took them very seriously. The innovations existed, but they hadn’t changed life yet.

So while there were factories around, the industrial age was something we rolled our eyes at.

Factories, schools, all gave a great leeway on when you show up and if you do.

Take my first day in official school: I had my morning coffee (it was believed to help with asthma. It would have been coffee with milk but mom had got it in her pointy head that I was allergic to milk (I’m not. I have eczema which responds mostly to carbs and secondarily to stress. Might have responded only to stress back then. My son’s does) so I had my coffee black and sweetened. With day old bread dropped in.) at my leisure. And then at nine or ten mom looked up from her work and said “oh, yeah. I was forgetting. It’s the first the day of school.”

So I grabbed my bag, and the little blackboard we used to practice letters in the village, and off I went. About half the pupils were in class, as my mom delivered me in. The others straggled in through the day.

All this got more formal come fourth grade, because there was a national exam, but the first three years were… charmingly informal.

Modernity had all sorts of rules and regulations about how we had to be in school and people in the village shrugged and did whatever.

We had a substitute teacher for a year because our regular teacher had some operation to her bac. The substitute teacher was in her twenties and got a thing going with the male teacher of the boys next door. We had three recesses a day, about an hour each. We liked it. (And they got married, because you couldn’t behave like that in the village and not get married, or all the matrons would have a talk with you.)

The point is, lesson plans, and everything was fairly flexible. Until we had to prepare for the national exam, no one was straining to make sure we knew what everyone knew.

Two thirds of the class was just going to work in the textile factories at 10, anyway. The rest of us had learned at home.

By the time I entered school I knew how to read, write and knew the rudiments of history. I also knew the multiplication tables, though you’d never know it from my performance because the minute I got up in front of the teach to say them, my mind would go to static.

In the same circumstances, my brother got advanced from first to fourth grade. The only reason I didn’t is that my mom thought at seven I was too young to take a bus to the next larger village for fifth and sixth grade.

But let’s just say I completely understand Mark Twain’s thing about not letting school interfere with one’s education.

My friends and I who went on to high school in the city did well enough and adapted to the model well enough, but it never “took”. Our original exposure to school was more of a rural, relaxed atmosphere than in a factory-school of the industrial-educational model, so internally I at least have never internalized the non scholastic lessons of school.

My early schooling was more as Shakespeare’s might have been where the parent pays the petit school teacher to teach you your letters (and she returned me to my grandmother saying by law she didn’t have to put up with me. This is what I call “getting kicked out of kindergarten” – mostly, I was playing barracks lawyer on behalf of low-status girls the teacher continuously picked on.) and then at some point you pursue your schooling, but age divisions aren’t strictly observed and the classes are small enough that the teacher doesn’t care what you’re doing provided you know the material and are quiet. Most of my time in elementary was spent either reading or inventing well… I didn’t know they existed, but that’s what they were rules for LARPS to play at recess.

My later schooling was more formal, but the Portuguese believe in “genius” as a magical thing and since they’d decided I was one (I wasn’t. I just had the advantage of an intellectually curious family and a lot of books) I got away with clean forgetting my homework, obsessing on one subject to the detriment of others, and spending an untold amount of time writing novels at my desk.

This might be why I’m so bad at holding down real jobs, with real routines, but why I do okay working for myself (the last two years haven’t been stellar, but then I have been ill way too much.)

And this might mean (might) if the future goes as we expect, that a looser, more ad hoc form of schooling MIGHT be better for most people.

I know that schools purport to teach you the skills to survive in the modern world. They actually teach you the schools to survive in the nineteenth century. But here what they don’t teach you that gets passed on and that I’ve run into trouble with (as have other people) in self directed professions:

• You have more in common with people your age than with anyone else. People born within nine months of you have everything in common with you. This has got us to think in generations, which is stupid. To the extent boomers are as portrayed and to the extent that some of them discriminate against past and future generations, it’s the idea that there’s some magical bond between people within x years or each other. (This is mostly seen among leftists who view people as widgets, anyway.) Do I need to tell you there isn’t? The internet should prove that. And yet it was a shock to me to find that most of my friends are either ten years older or ten to twenty years younger than I. I find myself thinking “What is wrong with me?” Of course, nothing is. I’m just not complying with the educational-industrial complex version of it.
• Performing to set task. I’m actually very bad at it. I think it’s a version of standing up to recite for the teacher. When I’m under contract my mind freezes. Back when there was no indie I could force myself to sort of perform, but it wasn’t my best work. Now… let’s say when these two books are delivered, I hope Toni will let me go on a loose rein. I will still deliver books to Baen, probably twice a year. But if she doesn’t want them, I can bring them out myself, and that allows me to work “loose”

However, even I have bits of this thought. I most often run into it with new authors. “I’ve written this book just as the publisher said he/she wanted it. Why didn’t they buy?” Or among college graduates “I’ve done everything I was supposed to. Why don’t I have a job?”

Of course real life doesn’t work like that. Real life is not “I performed well enough to pass.” It’s competition and, in the artistic fields, it’s something else. It’s “I performed well enough to have a divine spark.”

I feel most of the problem with the women in their forties who are stomping, throwing fits and falling on the floor pumping arms and legs about male privilege in SF/F is that they have this mentality. They have done everything they were told. How can the book business be falling apart around them instead of making them millionaires. How dare it? It must be the evil patriarchy.

Thank G-d for the village school and the village itself, where I learned real life is not a point-check system and that whether you succeed or fail is not dependent on how hard you tried and how well you performed, even, but on a multitude of factors, including personality and yes, luck. And it’s not “unfair” – it is what it is.

• Teacher knows best.

Everything, EVERYTHING from “we belong to the government” to “violence never solved anything” is predicated on this idea that there is someone all-knowing and benevolent watching our every move and rewarding the just and punishing the unjust.

The president’s infantile “Putin is going to regret invading the Ukraine, because he’s against the times’ or whatever, relies on this ridiculous conceit that someone is watching over you and keeping count of how well you follow the curriculum.

Well, I believe there is someone watching over us, too, but I believe the accounting will come after we die. I don’t think He puts His fat finger on the scales, except at very rare, miraculous times.

But that’s not what they refer to. They talk about it as the government or “society” or, for the more new agey “the Universe” but what they REALLY mean is “Teacher knows best and you’re gonna get it.” And this is part of what they learned to school, even if it wasn’t explicitly on the curriculum.

• The cool kids know best; I wanna be a cool kid.

Part of this is of course being a monkey. Okay, an ape. We are creatures built on the frame of apes. There is any number of things we get from that, including group mechanics. The “cool kids” being band leaders.

But the idea that these “band leaders” should have no more skill than working the crowd is part of being in a school with same age group. No one is that far ahead of the others, so what excites admiration is superficial prettiness and ways of behaving that are … petty and stupid. Self-aggrandizing cr*p.

This then bleeds into society in celebrity worship and in people trying to get attention by being know-it-all loudmouths.

All of which is hurting us, from our politics to our business.

 

How else is an advanced society supposed to school its young? I don’t know. Being a libertarian I am against public education as such, simply because while if we didn’t have it lots of people would go uneducated, I am at a loss to know what difference that would make from now, where after years in prison-schools, many people emerge functionally illiterate.

I’d suggest leaving it to the parents or perhaps as small a community as possible. In large cities, perhaps a “neighborhood.” They’ll know what’s going on the best. Let people choose, and those who can’t choose, help, arrange for a network to help them.

“But the children won’t all learn the same things/have the same assumptions.”

Good. In the unbelievably complex world that’s emerging, we need true diversity. Diversity of ability and mind. Not millions of robots indoctrinated into things that are no longer true, if they ever were.