So, what are we humans, as creatures?

I ask, because it bears a great weight on how we answer “how should we be governed”?

A lot of people since the enlightenment (but not the Founding Fathers) have assumed that humans are creatures of reason and that once you get them to a certain state of government that answers certain needs, they’ll stay there.

They’ve assumed this for good and ill.  As I’ve been known to say before 1984 and Brave New World would last about ten seconds under the impact of a Heinlein character.  But so would any of the utopias we can think of.

So, the question is this – are we humans (or can we be) – creatures of pure reason?  Is that even desirable?

Heinlein notably – sometimes being a man of his time, and his education and of course a writer, worked at cross purposes with his horse sense – thought by now we’d have a science of the human mind and a science of crowd behavior.  Of course, at the same time he expounded this, his societies gave it the lie, so maybe he was being tricky and that’s what he meant.

We’re hearing a lot of this too, right now from the progr–  vile progs.  About how they had everyone pegged with consumer info and knew where to concentrate their efforts for getting out the vote.  Brother.  They managed to be more unorganized than the other campaign and I had to forget I was a lady several times over the phone to them before they stopped bothering us.  (And now they’ve resumed.)

Communism, of course, assumes this.  It assumes the only reason man isn’t perfectly rational is the chains of medievalism, the dank influence of capitalism, and that good old villain “greed” which is an excuse for communists envy.

(Sorry, I have in mind an old Reader’s Digest joke.  My father had piles of old Reader’s Digest from his dad lying around, and it comprised a lot of my reading as a kid.  One of the jokes went “I went to my politics test, and they asked for ten ways to combat communism.  The only thing I could think of was the Ten Commandments.  I had an A.”  To an extent, quite right, of course.  Where would communism be with “Though shalt not covet” foremost in people’s minds?)

Then there’s Ayn Rand who also assumed humans could be rational if they got rid of “slave mentality.”

Are humans rational?  Well, most of the time and within limitations.  But thinking reason is the only thing that guides us is as blinkered as thinking emotions or culture or history are the only things that guide us.

If humans were perfectly rational… we’d live in hell on Earth. From the purely “reason” point of view there is no logical motive that the very rich shouldn’t be like the vampires in the vampire-parallel-world of buffy “we rode people like ponies.”

But if you’re going to say that type of behavior is a thing of instinct and emotion, perhaps – but using people for dog food or fertilizer, isn’t.  It’s not our reason that recoils from this.  It’s other parts of us.

Even at its mildest, a human society run MOSTLY by reason would be a crazy society given to all kinds of lurches.  Look at me and my colleagues, and the things we play with in our minds… yeah.

The new and hip thing – and I’ve read a lot of books on this recently – is that we’re purely creatures of instincts, that we react according to instinct and then make up stories to cover it up.  (Groans.)  As someone who took psychology, let me tell you this is a load of pure hokum.  First because – WHY would we make stories to rationalize it, if all we had were instincts and everyone was jumping around when someone said frog?  In fact, if this were the case, we’d never have got off square one of civilization.

But the main reason I KNOW it’s hokum – and you guys might not be as sensitive to it, as I doubt most of you have humanities degrees and/or moved extensively in New Age circles at one time (one of our friends worked in a New Age bookstore for years.  He started a science fiction section.) – is that it’s a non-falsifiable theory.

No?  Well, if I tell you “Of course people aren’t just creatures of instincts.  My instinct was to do x not y and I overcame it with my reason.”  You can always tell me, “No, your instinct was always y, you just made up a story afterwards to rationalize it.  How do I answer that?  How do I prove you’re wrong?  Absent recording my thought process, I can’t.

This theory is close kin to another, also in vogue right now, that “there are no coincidences” and “no one does anything unless at some level they meant it.”  Say I’m late for an appointment and don’t get in.  I meant to do that because I didn’t want to go to the dentist, or whatever.  Even if what made me late was the car breaking down.  You get “subconsciously, you knew there was something wrong with the car.”  Poppycock.  A new incarnation of the “fate” doctrine, only it’s all on you and your subconscious.

And a close descendant of the New Age doctrine that I heard twenty years ago, which insisted if you caught a cold you meant to.  So, you know, you could get mad at your friends for getting sick.

The thing is – watch that ball move – while these theories seem completely different, they’re like the two sides of global cooling/warming, the idea is always the same.  If you can contumaciously get sick when you wish to, it’s a failure of the will, and you need a guru to guide you.  And if you can’t control yourself and are just acting by instincts, you need to quote the song “Someone to watch over” you.  All of you.  At all times.

The vile progs love both of these theories – in their new incarnation.  While they contradict the idea that man is perfectly rational and is born tabula rasa, they have the same solution: if properly trained by the people in power, you’ll be all right.  If not, you’re a quivering mass of contradictory instincts.  And they never let a little contradiction bother them.

Are you a quivering mass of contradictory instincts?  Well, of course you are.  You’re also a rational human being.  But wait, that’s not all!

To all this I’d add that you’re a product of your culture.  The people who think that you have, inborn in you, all the characteristics of your culture at birth have taken over the schools.  This is why you hear people who say things like “you should speak English in America” accused of racism.  Because language is culture and culture is innate, don’t you know?

Forget the fact that we’re not speaking whatever they spoke before recorded language in the fertile crescent, and that we’re not living like them – proof enough that culture changes and is not in the genes.  But before someone says “but genes change, too, gradually.”  Yes, okay.  But what mutation was involved in Italians crossing the ocean and settling in America?  Because my second generation Italian host parents in Ohio were middle America and my mom spoke no Italian.  (My host dad spoke Italian to his mother only.)

Do traces of the culture linger?  Well, of course.  There’s the way things are done in any given family which even in melted pot America are not the same as any other family.  And some of them are very old indeed.  I’ve mentioned before that in my region “pila” was the slang term for a part of the human male – probably the result of a slew of bad jokes by legionaires.

And the ways of life in Portugal, to an extent, including the patronage system to advance, are clearly descended from Rome.  The part the vile progs are right about is that I’m likely to feel transported to childhood (not always in a good way) when confronted with many parts of Hispanic/Latin culture.  My host-parents best friends were immigrants from Cuba.  I loved going to their home, because at a basic “how things are done” level they were a lot like my own family, so when I was homesick, it helped.  It even smelled right.  OTOH …

OTOH when I’m at the Embassy Suites in Denver that is now mostly staffed with Latin immigrants, and they start closing the breakfast buffet half an hour early so they’re done on the dot at nine thirty – as opposed to starting to close at nine thirty, so customers can find breakfast till that time – I’m reminded why that is a bad thing, and why I left.

And that’s ultimately the thing – immigrants CAN leave, and they can make the decision to acculturate and to port the best parts of another culture.

None of which would be possible if humans were merely reactive, or purely reason.  If they were purely reason, culture would not exist or have no influence.  If they were merely reactive, then they would be caught in something like animal behavior – and human civilization wouldn’t really exist, nor could people move between cultures.  (This last is what the vile progs currently believe, so assimilation is a bad word.)

HOWEVER when you are raised in a culture, never go out of it, and/or have to live in it, culture is a heavy determinant of how you’ll react to things, often with no rational thought.

So, humans are creatures of reason, and physical body (which implies instincts, but also other things.  Trust me, it’s possible for me to be hormonally insane and not know it) AND culture.  (To these, because I’m a believer, I’d add a fourth, what Giovanni Guareschi (Great theological philosopher.  What?  You thought theology had to be boring?  Seriously, if you haven’t read his Don Camilo short stories and the other stories about the village in the valley of Po, you’re missing a treat)  called “The something else” which grabs the priest of mind and the priest of body and throws it into the ring to help the communist mayor win a bout against an “outsider, who kept hitting low.”  To this the Christ (the Christ over the altar talks to Don Camilo.  Deal.  Their relationship makes me wonder if Guareschi read Nero Wolfe stories) says “I suppose you mean the priest of spirit?”  And Don Camilo says “I didn’t say that, Lord, I wouldn’t presume to lecture you.”)

The result…

My older son who is about to finish a bachelors in biology says the weird thing is not “how well man is constructed” but that we don’t al fall dead after a few minutes because of how BADLY systems interact together, and everything that can go wrong.

This is because we have in us the remnants of our evolution, like that “pila” embedded in Portuguese slang.  (The first man to make a joke on this gets a carp upside the head.)

Psychologically we’re about the same.  Reason and sentience might have given us an edge over the other animals, but they haven’t exactly taken over completely.  In the end, we might be “in reasoning so like the angels” but what this angelic creature reasons with is an ape’s skull and ape’s instincts, including the desire to belong and to make the band as uniform as possible (because this worked, for the apes.)

All of which means – so how do humans tick?  And how should we govern them and by what principles?

Well – fortunately I don’t have to answer that question all at once and all on my own.  I’d say the normal, default governance of mankind is the strong man system.  This is what governed us in the pre-human bands.

It can be an okay form of governance, too – sort of – if you have an okay strong man.

Take Salazar, in Portugal.  I’ve said before that there were serious troubles with his governance (ruling, really.)  Partly because of where he came from and what he concentrated on.  He was an accountant, and he’d been – I think – a charity inmate at a Jesuit orphanage.

Even his worst enemies never accused him of being lavish in his private arrangements.  He was, in fact, said to live “like a monk.”  And he was probably a decent enough human being, to begin with.

It is a very bad thing to put a decent enough human being in charge of a large group of people and a vast territory (even when these are Portuguese scale.)  There are compromises that have to be made with reality.  You assume other people work the way you do.  Your understanding of economics propagates itself to the economy, and you end up in a mercantilist backwater.  People talk back and give you guff, and you end up with a secret police and an apparatus of repression – for people’s good, of course.  And the bureaucracy festers under you, because no matter how much of a type A personality you are, you can’t do everything.

Was the Portugal I grew up in hell on Earth?  Well… no.  In some minor ways it was much better than it is now: there was virtually no violent crime – there was a lot of theft, mostly of clothes from the lines, and that’s telling – and the police was far less bribable.  (Look, it’s a Latin country, they were still bribable.  But people were NOT afraid to call the (civil) police to the site of accidents.)

But the reason clothes were stolen from the lines because we were all desperately poor.  Because his understanding of economics was the opposite of free trade.  And even though he stabilized it after the disastrous “republic” – life didn’t get much better. That said, we were far less poor than the communist portions of Europe, so if you’re going to have a strong man government, take it without serious ideological sauce. (Salazar had the beliefs of his time including in National superiority or unity or whatever, but he governed mostly with an eye to the purse.  And because he’d come from a very poor background his idea of a road to prosperity was to save.)

And before the Straw Kung Foo Fighters come in – no, this doesn’t mean I approved of Salazar’s government.  I also didn’t approve of the mostly crypto-communists who followed after the revolution and as much of a bumble broth as the current mess is, it’s better than either of those… unless you have to live there with the crime rate and the corrupt institutions. But I do think there are better ways to solve that than strong-man government.

The strong-man form is so prevalent that it’s what communism, fascism and all the other hip “isms” of the twentieth century devolve into.  And, again, it can be okay — depending on the strong man – or hell on Earth.  Names like Castro and Stalin come to mind.  Also, let’s not forget that sociopaths MIGHT be particularly well adapted to get to the top in this form of government.

But it might – given the right kind of education/training – provide countries with stable governments where the least people get hurt and things are “okay”.

What it rarely provides is innovation, a decent life standard for the individual or… well squid farms on Mars – that is, the things we don’t even know never came into being because the system wouldn’t allow them.

The systems under which more innovation happens and the standard of life increases are those that put the most emphasis on the individual.

Universal suffrage is an insane idea, of course, based on the premise that more voices are saner than one voice.  But sometimes insane ideas work.  If nothing else, universal suffrage makes the government not quite so cavalier about what they’re doing “to the least of these little ones.”

But a collection of fallible human beings are still fallible, which is why the founding fathers (and don’t tell me by our lights they didn’t have universal suffrage.  We don’t either, we have machine politics, in which cats, dogs, made up people, cartoon characters and – mostly – organizations control our vote.) had a system of checks and balances, with different people voting on different things and…

The way to promote human prosperity and innovation is to have as close to universal suffrage as possible (actually restricting it to property owners is the most common and least troublesome – in playing out – arrangement) and as small a government as possible.  This is likely to become corrupted as people find they can vote themselves bread and circus, but it will become corrupted faster if the system is subtly changed to direct democracy and if the checks and balances are destroyed, so leviathan can rise.

(We could discuss ways of suffrage.  I used to think Australia was barmy to have voting be mandatory.  One of the saving graces of the American system when it worked was its low rate of participation.  It kept voting to a small, very interested minority, a majority of which would either take the trouble to inform themselves, or vote with the RIGHT instincts – right instincts? – well, yes, a tendency not to go overboard on new new things was one of those.  However, Australia by keeping track as it does keeps the vote of pets, imaginary people and cartoon characters to a minimum and it would be really obvious if thousands of votes were found in the trunk of a car and put the voting at well above the population.  It has merits.)

It actually doesn’t matter much how universal the suffrage is, provided representatives are hampered in their attempts to exert their power and kept in fear of the population.

No system of government lasts forever.  So… how do we judge what we should do?

A wise man said: by their fruits ye shall know them.

Strong man government (and the ancillary feudalism and fiefdoms in any society over 20) is the default system that everything falls to, when out of control and when humans are left to their instincts.  It’s not hell on Earth, unless the strong man is hell on Earth.  But at its best it’s stagnant and it imbues the personality of the person in charge.

Communism STARTS as hell on Earth, because it tries to make humans into gadgets, which can’t be done. And then it becomes strong man government.

A democratic republic seems to work for a time at least – maybe we should give it a try again – but it too decays into direct democracy, which decays into strong man government.

The good of a system that protects life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness might not be self evident, but it is nonetheless real over time and squinted at.

It will never be perfect – humans aren’t perfect.  We’re a barely cobbled together mess held with spit and glue.  It just happens to be the best we can do – even when it’s honored more in the breach.

Humans are cobbled together creatures.  Because we’re social apes, some form of government is inherently “desired” or we default to strong man.  Keeping the government small might be the best we can do — and allowing more importance to individuals, to minimize the chances of mass-killings.

Can we get there from here?  Who knows?  Possibly not without centuries passing.  Probably not without wading through rivers of blood.  Certainly not without an education that’s not mass indoctrination.  (It is worth considering that while state schools serve the interests of a strong man — there are nauseating panegyrics to the great leader, and some of them stick — they serve very badly a system that’s supposed to de-emphasize government.)

It is the only cause worth fighting for.  Even if the brief periods of freedom and innovation and individual prosperity and dignity don’t last – their memory warms the centuries ahead, and passes on the torch, so that the light might be kindled again.

It’s worth a try.

 

I have a confession to make.  I was one of those insane mothers who try to make sure their kids never come in contact with a particle of dirt.  This meant about half of everyday, usually while the babies were asleep, was spent scrubbing floors and moving furniture to vacuum behind.  On a rough estimate, that probably cost me a good 10 or so books by the age of 35.  It was probably — oh, heck, surely — excessive.

Kids who came to play with my kids, even well into elementary, used to say things like “Your house is so clean.”

Then we moved to this house.  I’ve talked about before how this house seems to have a cloud of dolce far niente over it.  Which could be very nice, if we had maids and stuff (or staff.)

However, in retrospect I’m not even sure that’s true.  I mean, that there is a cloud of dolce far niente over the house.

What happened is that we moved here in 03, when I’d been informed my first series hadn’t done “as well as expected” (which, speaking of pure evil and Random Penguins is funny considering within two years I’d outearned the advance for both number one and number two.  Since the advance back then were an estimation of what the book would make the author, saying books that earned royalties over the advance didn’t do as well as expected is duck speak.  The translation is actually this “You earned more than we expected you to, given the crappy non-support and publicity we gave you – but you didn’t become a miraculous bestseller, so we’re dropping you.”)

Anyway, because burning the publishing district was not an option even if it would have made me feel much better, and because I’m a human wave AUTHOR – meaning I behave like a human wave character – I said “like h*ll you’ll fire me.* and spent the next couple of years furiously running just to stay in print.  The running included writing a lot of proposals, halves of some novels (that will now get finished) and apparently an entire medieval romance I have no memory of writing and I’m afraid of reading.  There was also a couple of stints in work for hire and ghosting.  I will not lie – I would have quit writing – probably – sometime in the next two years when things weren’t BREAKING except that we were paying double mortgage, as we were still getting the other house ready to sell, then selling it.  So, I needed money for the double mortgage, which included a year where I made 5k from short stories.  (Do the math at around $300 each story.)

Because all my free time, I was working on the house in Manitou, to get it ready for sale, I wasn’t unpacking/cleaning.  I did the minimal unpacking to get the house functional but that was all.

Then we had the year of crisis with middle school and Number Two Son.

At the end of that, a certain pattern of living in this house had set in.  And unfortunately it wasn’t a very GOOD pattern.

I cleaned every week because I’m allergic to household dust, but furniture didn’t get moved, you didn’t look in drawers (except I organize my closet twice a year, otherwise I can’t find clothes) stuff just got piled in closets and the attic remained a disaster area.

And then I started getting ill – a lot – which meant fewer books got written and the cleaning was even more neglected.

Well… there is a possibility we will have to move in the next year or so – and it would be sane to downsize if/when the boys leave.  (Though the advantage of this house for the times we live in is that it can easily fit two families.  – three would be a bit cramped.)

So I started, desultorily, going through stuff, since the first order of business is “cull crap” – mostly paper books, since we now have a lot of them in electronic format, which thank G-d can’t collect dust.

And I’ve found that maybe the problem is not with the house, but with ourselves.  I.e., we took so long to get settled/get things started here, that by the time we did the clutter was well-night hopeless.  After five years the accumulation of dust in places I couldn’t reach without major reorganization started making me ill more often, and besides we were spending money to buy things we already had because we couldn’t find anything.  (Look, there might be a logical reason to have a collection of drill bits in my desk drawer of my writing desk.  Perhaps a character had told me she wanted to get drilled, who knows?  BUT when I needed those drill bits to fix the kitchen stool… well… I never thought to look there.  There were also two visa gift cards for the kids, given to us around the time we moved, which ended up at the back of my bedside table drawer, behind my weight in pens and about ten thousand hair clips.)

Now, I’m not going to tell you that I’m about to become the world’s best housekeeper.  I think my fans would rather I do three or four more books a year.  And G-d knows this is the last thing I wanted to be doing right now.  (And I have to do guest blogging today and tomorrow.  I just do.)  But those who have engaged in this type of work – possibly not as epic – will understand what I mean when I say that having lifted a corner of the mess, I now must continue until it’s done.

A lot of this, really, is “moving in” and making this house functional to live in, as it never was.  Depending on whether or not it looks like re: staying or having to move, there might be wall painting this summer.  But for now, it’s just getting rid of furniture we don’t need.  Getting rid of stuff we no longer use (though the hair clips are a kludge.  I used them when I had hair so long I could – and did, by accident – sit on it.  Now I have it somewhere above my shoulders, so I don’t have that much use for … fifty different ways to confine my hair.  I don’t intend to grow my hair that long again – but then I never did, I just forgot to have it cut.  That’s what the first four years in this house were like.  I don’t have anywhere to store them, and no clue what to do with them.)

Now, I think I’m about at the point that I can relegate this to weekends – I.e. do my usual lick and promise in the normal areas, but add one room that gets unpacked/organized/decluttered.  Which is good.  It means I can go back to doing the stuff all of us enjoy more.

The idea is that if I do this for a couple of months, then it will be easier to maintain the house and keep from getting sick, and finally fight off the lassitude of “I can’t find anything and why bother.  At least that’s the idea.

However – right now – remember it’s been ten years of my not doing this, it means both the kids and the cats seem to think I’ve been possessed by a cleaning demon which has now spread to Dan who spent yesterday organizing his office, as the kids looked in horror.

Bear with me through late postings and such.  This is health related, though not in the normal way.  (For one, since there was mildew in the humidifier, I need to clean any place stuff might grow in the rest of the house.)

And I’m just trying to make time for the writing.

 

So, we’ve named the type of fiction we like – stories in which the human wins, or at least goes on fighting, and in which humans in general and often (gasp) Western Culture Subgroup humans are the good guys.  Because we’re brats and pests, we named it Human WAVE to tweak the New Wave people as they drown in a morass of grey goo.

Too frank? Well, still true.  The New Wavers were the usual smug and artistic lot, and being boomers, they thought they’d be, ah, yeah “Forever Young.”  If we let them go on taking themselves way too seriously, they’ll do onto genre writing what the post-war lot have done to every other art, and then no one will read, not even us, because if we want unstructured and hopeless, h*ll, we’ll just look outside the window.

It also behooves our lot to not take ourselves too seriously, not that I think there is a terrible danger of that, given that at least the founding lot are my kind of people – i.e. more likely to pelt a boring speaker with dinner rolls than to stand at a podium and make a boring speech.  But still, you never know, we get old and stuff, and well…  you know…  we might start chewing on our gums and saying things like “I started that Human Wave Stuff and look, it’s the last word in Art with a capital aspired A.”  In which case you can point us at this blog post and remind us we’re pests and brats.

Anyway, there is an art to being brats – I’ve been doing it my whole life – and the despair of our elders – been doing that my whole life too.  My brother is ten years older.  But we don’t have much practice at being brats.  At least people my age and up to fifteen years younger (and a few of the boomers who had to put up with the A’tistic ones and who now have all sorts of eye problems, because spending sixty years rolling your eyes is bad for you) have had to be way too serious and get jobs, because the other people were being A’tistic and trying free love and tax-free pot dealing, and looking down their long noses at us for being so “materialistic”.

So, I’m here to guide you.  The first part of being a brat is to make your brattiness noticed.  Oh, sure, I’ve seen some mentions here and there.  But by and large, it’s spreading too slowly.  And we want this movement to catch on a) because it will make “a’tistic” types groan and think they’ve lived in vain, b) because we want more readable stuff, right?

Before people think Human Wave is cool and try to imitate it, we must make them know it exists.  Besides, a lot of them walked away from the fifth “and then everyone died” supposed space-opera and aren’t reading anymore.  We need to let them know we’re here.

Only right now, no one does.  We’re out in the hall and making bad jokes, but they can just ignore us.  We must get in, so we can throw rubbery rolls at the self-adoring speakers.

Yesterday I had a brain storm and I thought: Awards.  (I also made a typo, the rest of you — infants — have been having WAY too much fun with.)

Before you pelt me with rubber rolls – even two years ago, I’d have been the first to say “oh, not awards, they’re SOOOOOOO stuffy.”

But the thing is in indie publishing, and in all publishing as it moves to Amazon and other electronic venues, being able to put on the cover a little seal that says “winner of the blah blah award” (we’re not calling it a blah blah award.  No, you can’t talk me into it.) does give you a huge leg up.  Most of the readers who are rediscovering SF (or anything else) because they can finally find stuff they want to read, see the Hugo and it doesn’t say to them “Award given by small group of people who attend Worldcon.”  They see “Award” which means someone other than the author’s cat read this masterpiece and approved of – or at least finished—it.  That means they’re twice as likely to buy it.

So, what I’m proposing is Human Wave Awards.  The boy has drawn this stylized human figure that is also sort of a wave, all very art-noveau and respectable-looking, and suitable not only for engraving in cool-award-plaque, but also suitable to make into a round silvery medallion which winners can use on the cover of the book and/or their other books with Human Wave Award Winning Author till the end of times.  (And if we make a lot of money, eventually — twenty years from now? — we can give away SILVER medallions with the figure, so it will have pawnable value as well.)

This is why I propose to call it Human Wave Award and not something that would appeal to us more like The Bobby (for Robert A. Heinlein) or the Poul Anderson Memorial Viking Award.

The thing is HOW do we go about organizing, nominating, and making this look respectable – considering that between us we’re more likely to start giggling halfway through and then go out for a beer?

Well, I have a little list.  (Not THAT little list.  The entire internet doesn’t have enough room for that list.  You don’t want to run out of internet, do you?)

1-      Those of you legally minded (as opposed to the rest of us, who are misdemeanor inclined, at the best of times) could you tell me what would be the easiest way to organize?

I know becoming a tax-deductible organization is a mess of work, and might not be worth it, at least at the start when I expect there will be tops a hundred of us, and the money just about enough for the nifty looking plaque and to buy the boy an espresso for his art work.  (As for WHY we should organize, whomever we elect treasurer should not have to report the $500 [I’m wildly optimistic.  Sue me] we get as personal income.  Most of the time that wouldn’t make much difference, but if the treasurer is someone like me, with a lot of self-employed income, you’re just piling onto the self-employment taxes and penalties, and it can mean a loss in the end.  This means S corp or other pass-through income could be a pain, and besides we’ll likely have a varying – and hopefully expanding – roster.)

2-      Now, once we establish the Human Wave Committee of North America – leaving room for human wavers the world over to do their thing – I propose relatively painless yearly dues of $5 or $10, which will buy you the right to vote in the award.  Now, you know how these things go – world fantasy has (I think) a nominating committee, smaller than the general membership, which recommends books for the award, and then the members of World Fantasy Convention get to vote.  Hugo has a point system depending on how many people nominate you.  (I don’t think there’s a Hugo committee, but there might be.)  The membership of Worldcon votes. We’re doing this on a shoe string (Sonny, we’ll be lucky if we can afford shoe strings) those big cons might not be the thing for us, and hell, even the Prometheus isn’t presented with the other awards, but in a different ceremony at worldcon.  (Because if we could get ours presented on that stage it might be worth it.  Very rubber-rolly.) I propose we present the Human Wave Award at Liberty con, because if all else fails, I’ll be there to present it, or we can get my publisher to stand in, or all else failing one of the con organizers.  So, I propose to present the award at Liberty con, in July, in Chattanooga TN and for the first one to be presented in 14 (which will give us time to get our act as together as it will ever be.)

I propose that after the organization we elect officers, just so everyone knows what they’re doing:  so, a president to keep the others in line; a treasurer to make sure we have the money for our nifty plaque “suitable for hanging”; and an MC to either present the award or make sure someone is around to.

3-      And then, with some members (at least three of us!) we can vote on rules, like:

Who gets to nominate?  Who gets to vote? Who gets to throw rubber rolls?

I’d like to suggest that members of the organization get to nominate, that members of the organization plus fully paid up members of Liberty con get to vote (Though I’m okay with those two being reversed) and that everyone gets to throw rubber rolls.

I propose that for 2014 because it’s a new award, work going back five years be eligible. That work by serving officers of Human Wave Organization NOT be eligible for the term of service.  That five year thing is an option.  The other one is to do what the Prometheus does and for some years at least do a retro-award, for work published before the award was instituted.  It’s all the same to me.

Now discuss it among yourselves.  I have some (more) guest blogging to do because it would be nice to finish the guest blogging for DSR BEFORE AFGM comes out (the fifth.  If you haven’t pre-ordered, do so now!) and unfortunately health and other issues have made that highly iffy.

Who threw that rubber roll?  I see you, Mister.  Anyone have any butter?

— a guest post by Lieutenant Colonel (And fellow Baen Author) Tom Kratman

Colonel Kratman sent me a message with this post in answer to my challenge to discuss the pros cons and intricacies of a Starship Trooper Type Regime.  For those of you (lucky souls) not afflicted with our writing but and our oddness, this is how science fiction works — someone writes a book and someone else looks at it and goes “Oh, h*ll no* or perhaps *Yes, but–”  or even “How about like this instead.”  I make no mistake of the fact a lot of my stuff is that sort of dialogue with Heinlein — to wit the Earth revolution stuff is my answer to The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (“How about without a supercomputer?” resulted in A Few Good Men and the other notes in the background of that will do for the rest of the series.)  Colonel Kratman says his Balboa Union books came as his taking of the basic principles of Starship troopers and adjusting them for a particular country on a particular planet, in another solar system. (More on Balboa and its narrative universe here.)

So, we’ve established that revolutions don’t do much except make things worse, unless revolutions are the blessing of an order already in place and already functioning, in which case, the overpower vanishes and there it is.

This works best, of course, in Colonial situations, though for the record, most of the anti-colonial revolutions ended disastrously.  Even when the colonial power was as unorganized, hapless and… well, devil-may-care as Portugal, the result… oh, just read the recent history of Mozambique and Angola, or, better, talk to someone who was there.  As for Zimbabwe, its fall from the breadbasket of Africa is… well…

Of course there are other factors for that, including but not limited to the fact that the colonial powers had infected – via their intellectuals – these poor people with Marxism, and also that the Soviet Union used them as cat’s paws to keep the US occupied, to keep its people in goods (it’s curious that while capitalism is accused of this, the communist powers are always the ones who work like ancient empires.  They have to keep invading and stealing, because they simply can’t produce, having long since killed or scared away their producers.) and to kill off a lot of the young males who might otherwise cause trouble.

Leaving all that aside and since space colonies don’t seem to be forthcoming in the next 20 years or so – though I wouldn’t count them out.  Like with ebooks which were talked about forever and finally dismissed as “never gonna happen” I suspect if it does happen it will be suddenly, over about five years, and probably involving some new technology or a will to use the old ones. – what do we do, those of us who don’t wish to live under the boot of a progressively (eh!) more authoritarian regime?

We dig under.

I’d like to point out the regime we are currently living out is the result of just that strategy.  They occupied all the positions of power that lead to government control over about three to four generations.  (It’s what “the long march” is all about.)  Those of us who grew up in unstable countries know what the nexus of power a new regime absolutely must conquer to maintain its grip on the population: radio, TV, Newspapers, as much of the bureaucracy as possible, from your local DMV to whatever passes for a deliberative body – and then you can take the president, and then you’re home free.

The genius of the current take over is that they knew they couldn’t do it South American style and come in with tanks and machine guns, take over all these places by force and get away with it.  That can’t be managed in the country with the best military in the world.

Instead, they went exactly for the same centers, but one by one, and with replacement strategies.  In this they were helped by two of their characteristics and the characteristics of those they view as domestic enemies (No?  Listen to them sometime.) and who are anyone who isn’t to the left of Lenin.  For our purposes we’ll call them “conservatives” though a lot of us aren’t EXACTLY that and though at this point in time “conservative” is a misnomer for people who want to change the current form of governance.

They took over by stealthing it – that is by pretending to be “establishment” until they were secure.  I actually tried to stealth it for years in publishing, and I have friends who are still trying to do it now (All the best boys and girls, you’re better than I.)  I couldn’t do it for reasons that lots of other conservatives can’t do it.  First, I couldn’t STEALTH well enough.  We, liberty lovers tend to prize truth and it bothered me greatly to fake it, so I was never vocal about supporting stuff I, in fact, abhorred.  Second, (vile) progs once in control which was well before I broke in, started demanding VOCAL adherence to their nonsense.  So if you weren’t screaming about the patriarchal, capitalist regime every other line, you simply wouldn’t get the push and the promo.  Or, as a friend of mine said “they watch what you laugh at, and they watch for how you respond in conversation”  and since even professional meetings turn into extended political rants with quite unimaginably offensive things said about everyone not extreme left, keeping an impassive face is difficult enough, let alone faking enthusiasm.

The reverse of this is that liberty lovers have this habit of fairness (which is why it’s so hard for me to wield the troll hammer) so even if we took over, the take over would never be absolute, and it would never, ever, ever be permanent.  We tend to go “Yes, he’s a communist, but that’s a stupid quirk.  He’s a good worker.  Look at what he did with this or that – give him the promotion.  It is by this process that most conservative institutions become far left.  The reverse doesn’t happen.  It’s not that the left is much better at stealthing (though they are) it’s that the right is much worse at excluding ideological opponents and/or viewing them as “the enemy.”  At least quase-ante, before the last few years, we tended to view them more as poor fools.

And this is how they took over all the media, all entertainment and most corporations and boards and anything that was a group of people, that needed “leadership” and that could be manipulated.  It also helps they’re the side who want power over others, while we mostly want to be left alone.

So to propose that we start our own crawl through the institutions is misguided – it’s not something we can do, something we’re good at or something even particularly productive in the current state of affairs.

However, the power-lovers, no matter what the regime have one fatal flaw.  They love to seize power.  They’re very good at wielding it – as in pounding down all opposition – what they suck at, because their temperament makes them not empathetic at all, is figuring out how people work.  And trying to rule (which is what they do) or worse, govern, without understanding people leads to disaster.  It is worse if they are communists, because communism is a religion at odds with reality.  They continue believing it, even as it fails, like those poor cult members whose end of the world is forever postponed one more month, and they continue doing more of what fails, which is why their utopias turn rapidly to hell on earth.

This leaves the rest of us stuck in a situation where EVEN if we could do the reverse of their strategy, even if we decided to crawl through the institutions for seventy years, we don’t have that kind of time.  The people who were so hot on getting into the cockpit, are flying the plane right into the ground because their little (red) religious book tells that that’s the way to gain altitude.

We don’t have seventy years before gravity asserts itself explosively.  We don’t have seventy months.  Sometimes I think we’ll be lucky if we have seventy weeks, and frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if we crashed in seventy days.  Sometimes I feel as if I’m locked in the painting “the scream” shrieking soundless and I can’t do anything.

Wait.  Before you head out to the bathroom to slit your wrists in a warm bath – listen.  I didn’t say there’s nothing we can do.

Like the left we have our own strengths and our own abilities.  And they are things they not only don’t have, but they can’t fully understand.

To wit, the reason we tend to be really bad at politics is that there are things that are more important to us.  A lot of people have complained that people aren’t focusing on the politics because they’re busy making a living, raising a family, figuring out how to survive.

But, listen, that’s a strength, too.

See, the reason that they’re self-devouring is that they see politics before merit.  It’s never “we’ll promote him even though he’s a political idiot because OMG, he can write.”  It’s always “She can write all right, but she’s not “one of the good people” so we’ll not only do nothing but thwart her if we can.”

Over time this allows them to take over ideologically.  And it makes them REALLY dumb about anything else.

Here we have to go back to the publishing industry.  Because ideology was more important than anything else (though they promoted some books with no overt ideological tinge, because the author – they were satisfied – was one of them.  They tolerated these books more anywhere else rather than sf, which is why sf crashed harder and faster, except obviously at Baen.  Because SF is the projection of the present into the future, no “incorrect” politics would be allowed.) they needed to control not just what got published, but what got distributed and what got push.  This meant not only taking over the bookstores, (ideologically, not the publishers) but setting up a system which was determined by pull, not push.  By the end of their reign and just before ebooks hit, they could “publish” a book and make sure it sold nothing (it was never on shelves.  EVEN if people asked for it) and thereby end the career of anyone whom they’d found out was ideologically different – or suspect.  At the same time, of course, someone on the “right” (left) side got push, even if the work was otherwise undistinguished.

This worked to an extent – the reading public simply assumed ALL authors were leftist, and read the least offensive ones.  However, as the houses lost feedback (because this was all push, no pull) they lost track of “what the market will bear.”  Printruns were shrinking every year (the excuse being “people don’t read anymore.”) and they were starting to feel the pinch.  The bookstores, in particular (their fault for buying into “to the net” and the publishers’ push model) were caught in the middle and imploding.

All it took was the emergence of a free market in electronic books to send the whole thing into a tail spin.  (Most of the houses are dead, just still – somehow – walking.)

The houses reaction to ebooks was classic too – they reacted just like cultists whose UFO/prophet failed to bring about the end of the world on the appointed date: cover up, ignore, and hope the whole thing goes away.

Well – this is basically what we’re seeing in government, in finance, and anywhere that the left has got its big foot in, including “big science.”

They have been promoting people on the basis of faith, not intelligence for years.  And that’s no way to run a civilization (the problem goes beyond the USA, though I suppose, as usual, it will be left for us to solve.)

So – you want your second American revolution and your second American republic?  Fine.  Start building a structure that works, behind, beside and beneath the official one.

In some cases this will be very very difficult.  For us writers, for instance, it’s almost impossible to work for anything but US dollars.  (Though, who knows, that might change.  Will for sure if the crash comes.  I will of course work for gold, if anyone wants to cover me in a pile of it!)

On the other hand, we’re going around the publishing establishment, more and more so, yay us.  I’d advise every liberty-minded writer, even the traditionally published ones, to look into indie.  At best you can use it to support and promote your published work (I have brought a lot of people to the Darkship Thieves universe through the short stories.)  At worst, if something happens to your publisher (No, I don’t expect anything to happen to Baen, but a lot of it rests on ONE WOMAN’s shoulders, and while she’s younger than I and I hope she outlives me, sh*t happens.  To everyone.) you have a fallback and something to build from.

At the same time, I urge artists to find other ways to market their art.  Both of these will take stepping outside your “validation” comfort zone, but a lot of us had to do that with politics anyway, and it’s not that different.

If you’re not there – I urge you, urge you – to use your skills to advance the building of a parallel structure.  If you’re a computer maven, build a game engine that will allow indie game writers to compete with the big houses.  If you’re a computer maven, again, think about animation tools and others that allow indie movies to do what the big guys do for one percent of the price.  If you’re a teacher or interested in teaching, study how to do it on line.

We have it worse than they did.  We can’t just take over a few strategic points and hope the whole thing keeps running but now under us.  They’re destroying everything because of their anti-reality beliefs.  We have to take over everything just to prevent a terminal collapse.

Fortunately, most of us are “people who do things.”  I urge you to do things.  I have a friend who is studying brewing and welding, in case that’s all he can contribute.  In fact, I’d urge all of us to do that if we can.  Even if you’re a writer an artist or a scientist, if you have a hobby that can be turned into a part time job – growing vegetables, refinishing furniture, cooking, cleaning, sewing, brewing, etc – and bring in some money, do so.

I knew a family in Portugal who were educated and well to do, but when everything went upside down, they arranged with a textile firm to get the scraps of material that would (otherwise) have been burned at the end of the day.  The wife and daughters then fired up the sewing machines and started making pot holders, placemats and aprons (fewer aprons, most pieces were tiny.)  They sold these at the fairs which are at best gray market (the stalls require a license, so you have to declare some income.  But most of the business is done in cash.  You do the math.)  By the time things stabilized, they were living better than ever.

I don’t think that in most places the system will collapse that completely.  I DO think that things like making a living on line – provided you’re either selling something useful or something people find entertaining – will work for most of us.  But if your area goes bad, that second skill will help.

And meanwhile – hat tip to Dave Freer – network.  Network with those in your area, and network with those out of it who can help you on line.  Build connections with like minded people.

Yes, this means we will ALL have to work our tails off for the next – if we’re lucky – seventy weeks.  But work is what we do.  Building is what we do.

You see the current society is like a beautiful building that has termites in the support beams.  We’re working very fast to put up new support beams along side them and to encase the current support beams in strong concrete.

The goal is that when they give out and turn to powder, there is a shhh sound and then, nothing, because our support structures step in place and keep things going.

And THEN we can argue whether the bit on the roof should be round or square and – hopefully – termite-proof the new structure.

But first, it has to be in place.  So go forth and build.

 

This is not a post devoted to examining whether a revolution is a good idea, or even if it is a better idea than not having one (which it sometimes is, even when it’s not a good idea.)

Instead it is devoted to examining the illusions about revolution that reign in our society in large part because the Marxists believe them.  And part of the reason they believe them is that it is part of their ur-myth, the idea that at the end of history you find communism, kind of like at the end of the rainbow you find a pot of gold, or more like at the end of times you find the worldwide caliphate.

Anyone doubting that Marxism is a religion need only take a close look at its myths about history and its eschatology.  I grant you some of these are extra-Marx and grown by some of the stranger branches of Marxism (Feminism As She Is Practiced, for instance) but they still tend to feed back and influence the whole.  Part of this, of course, is due to the fact that Marxism in its stranger branches dominates entertainment and that stories you read/watch as fiction if even mildly convincing ones over time get lodged in a place of your brain that says “I lived through this, so it has to be true.)  The other part is that Marxism as practiced in this 21^st century of our Lord is a “No Crazy Shall Go Unheard” (as long as they are against Western Civilization) type of ideology. And the reason for that is to be found in their myths.

This mythology pervades everything, and many people who think they’re staunch anti-communists have swallowed all or parts of it, hook, line, sinker and sometimes line and rod too.  (Look at the precious poppet who came over to quote Marxists at us, while under the impression he was anti-Soviet.  If he ever grows a brain, that will be one he’ll look back at ruefully.)

It is very important for us to realize where the myth comes in, what it is, and where it’s influencing our own thought, so that we can fix it.  Or more likely, the way things are going, so we don’t make stupid assumptions about the crash and know what to do when it comes.

Right now the myths of Marxism/Feminism/Anti-Capitalism, most of them unexamined and not explicitly believed in the awake mind, except in college students/professors, go something like this:

In the beginning there was communism.  Society was without form or shape (unless you believe it was a matriarchy, which worshipped the great goddess) except that everyone was equal (which clearly is a violation of all we know in nature and about our closest cousins.  Which is why this is religion) and there was no king, no nobleman, no hierarchy.

What property there was got shared by all alike, so everyone got what they needed.  There was no famine and no need.  (This also does violate everything we know from pre-historic burials.  Again, what is your point?  It’s religion.)

This dovetails very well with the expectations in our mind, because it’s an echo of the Garden of Eden which, in some form, has been a myth in most religions and most civilizations.  Perhaps the need to believe in this “we were once perfect then fell” is inherent in the construction of the human brain.

Perhaps it is a racial memory of acquiring sentience with all its complications or perhaps, more simply, it is “logical” because it reproduces our personal experience.  We were once infants, who got our needs met without work or strife, and then life got complex.

For whatever reason this is one of those myths which while – at least in the Marxist version – patently false, yet occupies a niche called “sounds reasonable” in our brain.

So, in the beginning there was the perfect state, but some people weren’t happy with paradise.  Now, Marxism differs from other religions in that it changes the time when the fall took place from as far back as pre-history to as recently as the Industrial Revolution.  (This amuses me greatly since in any Marxist society, it’s the past that keeps changing.  That was, btw, how I got my first doubts about Marxism – no, I wasn’t born knowing – by realizing that even in the same book, their views of events kept changing.)

The feminists have perhaps the most coherent description of the fall – poisonous, in that it makes them hate half the human race – but coherent.  Men weren’t happy with paradise – their fable goes – because they weren’t on top.  So they displaced the paradise women had wrought with their highly hierarchical and violent society, and that’s why there won’t be paradise again till we can have a world that’s all women.  (In the back of my mind, I always see the women who feel a need to believe this as the very well dressed, shrinking violets of my elementary school years, who shrank in a corner, looking in horror at the little boys chasing each other and fighting.  They never grew up, not fully, and men are violent and mean and have COOOTIES.  – My reaction to the boys’ violent games usually meant I came home with torn dresses and my hair in a mess and mom had a hissy fit, until she gave up and started cutting down my brother’s clothes for me, including the leather knee and elbow patches.)

Then comes the description of the fall that goes that before settling and agriculture we were all healthy wealthy and wise – pardon me, I mean, of course we were all happy communitarians – but then we became sedentary and—

Do I need to tell you it’s poppycock?  I probably do, since right now even serious anthropological journals buy into this.  However, for the record, if that’s true it’s the first time a model that made humans more unhealthy and short lived supplanted a better model.  It is, that is, highly unlikely.  And besides, I’m sort of used to this myth because it’s a projection backwards of the Marxist’s favorite poppycock.

This is where in the middle ages, in an agriculture society, in the communitarian VILLAGE – this is believed by EVERYONE who hasn’t lived in a village – everyone was happy and shared and stuff.  Then came the …. Cue scary music – machines and capitalism, and the disposed farmers (who, in EVERY COUNTRY, not just England, where this did happen to an extent – but only an extent.  I wonder if unbiased research would see this as a reaction to flight to the city, rather than the cause of it – were dispossessed by their evil landlords ENCLOSING the common) who had to go to the city and work in inhumane conditions, upteen hours a day, till they all died, which is why the industrial revolution spread across the world, and…

I got nothing.  I particularly got nothing because for the love of babies, the industrial revolution is still spreading.  I saw part of it in my own childhood, and let me tell you, the only people who think life in the villages was better than in the cities, and that peasants were happier working the fields are people who have never done any agricultural work or lived in a traditional village.

Yes, the conditions in the early factories were horrible.  They were just good enough – and the pay was just good enough – to attract peasants from the fields.  And that’s where it is – they offered what they needed to, to be better than an existence as a peasant – and yes, peasant children worked too, sometimes from toddlerhood.

The reason Marxism embedded this idea of the industrial revolution as being forced on an otherwise ideal system is that he was an ideological descendant of the romantics, that sickly eighteenth century poetic/artistic sect who believed that the past was always better than the future.  You know, they liked tombs and ancient graveyards, adored cottages, and had a highly poetic idea of the Middle Ages.  The best thing they did was collect folk tales.  The worst was, like most intellectuals, drinking their own ink.

Anyway, we can’t even blame him too much, unlike his followers he hadn’t seen the same industrial revolution sweep other countries like India and China.

So… That is the general myth of Marxism’s paradise and fall.  Their myth of redemption centers on the concept of revolution, as crucial to them as the Flight From Egypt is to Judaism, or the Resurrection to Christianity.

The redemption myth of communism goes something like this: one day the oppressed peasants are oppressed beyond endurance, and they rise, and kill all their masters, and then – then, you get back the paradise before the (depending on the branch of the church) men took over/greedy agriculturalists settled/evil capitalists forced workers to move to the city en mass and work in their revolting machines.

Come the revolution – and make no mistake, even in Portugal, when Marxists said “Come the Revolution” they weren’t talking about that thing that happened once a month, but this Ur-revolution that brought back paradise – we shall all share and share alike, and the girls will sing songs as they weave wreaths for mayday… or something.

(It’s hard to evade the suspicions that at the back of all this were Odds gone seriously wrong and dreaming a society where they would be, if not on top, at least accepted.  Since most of us have absolutely no taste for business [some of us had to learn] or unremitting labor, this sort of “like the lilly of the valley” existence sounds appealing.  Few realize it’s also impossible and if it were – Thank G-d I grew up in a village and KNOW – it would be a dreadful existence.)

Because of this, in movie and novel and even in supposedly serious historical work, Marxist myths about revolutions have permeated society and made us believe a bunch of things that just ain’t so.

1-      When society collapses, revolution happens and communism results.  This has never happened.  Not once.  Even in Russia, what happened was the take over of power by people who had placed themselves to take it.  Russia was in chaos and had a weak leader (which I think is what gave them this bright idea) but the takeover happened because the communists were placed to take it.  They were in no way the peasants or the wretched of the Earth, but educated men with the backing of foreign powers.

2-      Revolution happens when conditions become unbearable.  (Or as someone said in comments, when people miss three meals in a row.)  Poppycock.  If this were true, North Korea would have revolted long ago, Zimbabwe would have been up in arms, and …  It’s not true.  As far as we can tell, revolution happens when the middle class gets tired.  Which means there must be a middle class of course.  In France, in England (several times) in the US, in…  Every time someone rises it’s the middle class, who are missing no meals, but who are seeing their lifestyle slip and their kids’ futures diminished.  You do get something – sometimes – when the main populace has missed one meal or so every other day, but what you get is the sporadic, leaderless spasms of Greece right now.

3-       When revolution happens communism results.  This is also not true in almost any case – not even Russia, since the “no true Scotsman” fallacy informs us that wasn’t real communism.  What tends to result is strong man “he rode in on a white horse” government.  In an instance – here (and perhaps in the revolt of the Barons against John Lackland, but I don’t know enough of that time) – it results in a relatively more representative system that sort of works (this excludes France which while relatively – I think – better than the Ancien Regime, has never QUITE worked.)  (Yeah, I know, it’s an awful way to bet.)  What NEVER happens is a return to the communitarian paradise they were sure was once there.  (Probably because as Phil Dick said of sanity [paraphrasing, since I remember only the Portuguese] “It is thinner than the edge on a knife, sharper than a guard dog’s tooth, more elusive than a ghost.  Perhaps it doesn’t exist.  Perhaps it is a ghost.”  In this case, for sure it is a ghost, a mirage, something that only devout people could believe, in defiance of all evidence.)

It’s important to know that these myths about revolutions are wrong, because right now the Marxists are trying to collapse worldwide society in the firm belief that revolution will happen and their paradise will result.

And the rest of us need to stay awake and aware, so we can counter what inevitably results from collapse.

We might not be able to stop the collapse.  It might (MIGHT) even be in our best interests to speed it up.  BUT we must stand ready to take the reigns when it all crashes, and we MUST not let them pick the man 0n the white horse, and shove his “enlightened” rule down our throats.  You know what always results from it (Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Mao) and we can’t allow it to happen.

Liberty to the extent it has existed (rarely) in history has always rested on the shoulders of a very slim minority.  We’re not any worse placed than our ancestors.  And we must at least try to avert the tide of death and poverty heading for us.

Do it for the children.

UPDATE: I have blogged Human Wave over at Mad Genius Club.

Ladies and gentlemen

We still hear that at big soirees at the beginning of shows, and when people wearing very good clothes gather to give each other awards.  In some circumstances, you have to say it ironically – say any gathering of science fiction and fantasy people, unless you do something like reverse the genders (and people are sitting in a way you can make that clear) you’re going to get in trouble, because people will take offense at being called that.  (In science fiction and fantasy we’re Odds who are also used to being looked down on by our peers.  We can take offense at pretty much anything.)

I’ll probably get called a gender traitor (again) because of this post.

That we live in an age where you get called a “gender traitor” is in itself a sign that we have entered Heinlein’s crazy years.  No, think about it.  You can be a traitor to a cause, but the fact that I was born with a vagina is not a cause.  It is merely a biological fact, like the fact that I have olive skin, tan rather easily, that my hair went white when I was 28, or that I have a high likelihood – given genetics – of eventually going either via cancer or a heart attack.

Would you call me a traitor of people who grayed early, because I dye my hair?  Would you call me a traitor of people who have heart attacks because I have low blood pressure?  Of course, you might call me a race traitor because I like redheaded men (no, my husband is not, but love transcends mere physical attraction.)  That would be stupid too because olive skin is not a race, but rather a characteristic of the Mediterranean sub-race of Caucasians, broadly identified (but not covalent) with cultures that speak either Portuguese or Spanish.  However stupid is the mark of the day, and our polity seems to have gone insanely howling into the night.

Once upon a time – metaphorically speaking, in a garden far far away – there were men and there were women.  Actually it probably started before that, before our fall into sentience, before our ascent into reason, before we tried to be “like onto gods, knowing good from evil.”  At some point back there – well at all points back there starting with the point at which life on Earth invented genders as a good mechanism of genetic recombination – there were males and females.  There is a fascinating book on sex by Doctor Tatiana something or other.  No, not that type of book on sex.  This is about how males and females of any – and all species – compete with each other to gain the advantage of the other in the reproductive stakes.  The goal is always to pass on your genes with minimal effort and as broadly as possible.

For instance, the male praying mantis is sort of losing at that game, since in most cases (not all females actually do this) he gets eaten while he’s copulating.  (His hind quarters just keep going even as his head is bitten off.)   So he won’t be passing his genes on with any other female.  On the other hand, little appreciated is the fact that he also leaves part of himself in there, preventing the female from copulating with any other males.  He also, incidentally, gives her a nutritious snack, which increases the chances of his offspring being strong.

Humans are not just animals.  In some frameworks, you could consider us animals who have gone thoroughly insane and started defeating instinct with… other things.  On the other hand, since I doubt very much that cars, or even carriages or even the domestication of horses, much less steam and electricity are instinctive (though it could be debated.  No?  Show your work.  There are quite complex instinctive behaviors in other animals. Incidentally, older son and I need to remember not to have these debates in front of normal people, btw.  It tends to make them try to run into the night.  Which is difficult when you’re in a doctor’s waiting room) we’ve done pretty well out of going collectively mad, in that for a tropical animal, we now cover most of the land masses in the world, one way or another.

However we are built on the framework of the animals, back there, through which we emerged.  It’s like when I write a novel, and then rewrite it completely – traces remain of the original framework if only because it’s very hard to re-think everything from first principles.  So, while someone approaching the novel for the first time might not see it, the traces are there, at worst in a scene that doesn’t quite mesh, at best in a line of dialogue that seems oddly out of place, here and there.  Or imagine that you took apart a sweater to make another (in the village of my childhood this was NORMAL.  When a sweater started to go, you unraveled it – sometimes you dyed the thread in between – and then you made it again.  Yes, we do – even I – forget how wealthy we are now, and how people not so long ago had to make and scrape.  And even they were incredibly wealthy compared to most humans throughout history.) By the fourth or fifth time, sweaters acquired this … lumpy and patchy appearance, because the thread had worn unevenly.  It was a new sweater, but you saw traces of the sweaters that it had been.

So, humans, like animals, have evolved strategies requiring the genders to compete, at the same time they cooperate in the passing on genetic characteristics.  The ultimate goal, of course, is to pass on as much of our genes as possible, while the species goes on.

Starting with the pre-humans, if what we see from the great apes translates (it might or might not.  There are… differences)  this meant that our ancestors lived in bands, and within those bands divisions of labor developed, according to the strengths of each gender.

See, the insanity of the sixties (and seventies) was this odd idea that despite all the external differences, despite all the different hormonal brews that course through our veins, gender was a societal construct and that without it men and women would be exactly alike and express in exactly the same way.

There has been a lot of mumbo jumbo developed in favor of this idea and I think in some kindergartens in Sweden children are now officially “it.” Which is … insane.  Because even before puberty, the stuff coursing in a little boy’s veins is quite different from the stuff coursing in a little girl’s and TRUST me, it matters.  More importantly, little boys and little girls are the result of different evolutionary pressures, of different selection processes.

We’ve talked about, before, how women tend to work towards cohesion.  It’s an instinctive thing.  Put most women in a group and they try to maneuver to be just like most other women.

I can only imagine – and it’s hard to, without descending to the level of a just-so story – that throughout most of our pre-civilized stages, women or pre-human females – being weaker and considered somewhat of a “commodity” were often kidnapped by different bands, and that the ones that survived were the ones who were best at adapting – at mimicking the behavior of the new band.

There are other explanations, too.  In a hunter, gatherer culture women tended to gather in bands, and both collect whatever comestibles and watch toddlers.  If you’re “in” with your group your toddlers are more likely to be watched carefully by other females than if you are an iconoclast who just had a big argument with more than half the women and called them all poopy heads.

(So, Sarah, how come we got you?  Recessives, children, recessives.  Same reason two brown eyed parents can, and sometimes do, throw a blue eyed child.  It’s amazing how long the things can stay buried, and how much counterproductive ones – like my temperament – manage to survive.  This is a germane point.  Whenever I talk of males and females and the processes that shaped them and what resulted, I’m talking of “on average.”  There are always weirdos and sports, like myself.  And some women are hairier and stronger than most men [I’ve threatened a male friend with finding him one of these.]  However, to quote Heinlein, “that’s not the way to bet.”)

Anyway, we’re not just animals.  So you take that brew, and you translate it to a highly sophisticated culture – say the early twentieth century – and you get ladies and gentlemen, with the virtues of each clearly defined.

Gentlemen were – for various reasons, among others because women’s lives were often cut short by pregnancy or at least severely handicapped – the motor of civilization.  You can have women’s history day as much as you want to, but almost all the big, public work of civilization and technology, of construction and invention was done by men.  The way people grub in the dirt for things that women – outliers – have done in the public arena, bringing out stuff like Ada Lovelace’s mathematical work and blowing it all out of proportion — is humiliating.  It is also stupid.

Women were as much instrumental in building civilization as men – of course – but their work was of a different kind.  “The hand that rocks the cradle” is a line that people love to mock, but that doesn’t take its power away.  Women formed the very young mind (whether the woman was the mother or a paid servant is a discussion for another day) and instilled both the behaviors and the gender norms into children.  Without them, the gentlemanly virtues wouldn’t exist.

By and large, the roles of each gender in civilized society were the refinement of those things that made men reproduce (and raise offspring) better in pre-historic times: they were strong, determined, innovative and – this is very important – protective.

Women on the other hand were consensus builders, networkers, keepers of knowledge and records, teachers and  diplomats (with the attendant dose of backstabbing.)    For a woman to be a “lady” implied a refinement of the APPEARANCES necessary to evoke gentlemanly behavior in public.  A lady was therefore refined, acted as was viewed as a pattern of perfection by men – that is, demure, quiet, innocent and always “well mannered” (that is fitting within the group.)

To some extent all men aspired to be gentlemen and all women aspired to be ladies.  It was the way to climb socially and therefore get better treatment for your kids.

Yeah, women like me probably couldn’t hack it – though I understand great grandma whom I’m said to resemble both in appearance and mind, managed to walk the line and APPEAR the grand-dame in public.  (The fact that she was also a holy terror who kept her many sons and PARTICULARLY her daughters in law in abject terror, and the fact she ran the family business were backroom things, not to be talked about.)

Yes, the gender order was oppressive.  Yes, people like me and many of you, and a multitude of people who fall on the far ends of the spectrum either way would be out of place (I’m sorry to tell you guys this, but most of us would be out of place anywhere.  I know.  It’s sad) and yeah, I’m glad it broke to an extent.  In a technological age, there is no reason for women not to do public work, the same as most men.  It’s not like we’re required to hold a pig under each arm while leading the horse, something for which men have a physical advantage.

But though I’m glad that women can enter the labor force and that women with excellent minds can use them for other than infant games (though please DO let’s talk about creating in intelligent women the idea that it’s noble and right to raise your own kids.  The fact we’re outsourcing this to – largely, though not always – infantile brains will break the back of our society.) However – did it have to come about in the sixties and seventies?  Did it have to come about when people were so eager to deny biological differences and to reject everything western, instead of analyzing what worked where and why?

Because western civilization was built on a division of labor – because the initial division of labor was simply male-female – because the public virtues were always “manly” and the private ones “womanly” when women first washed onto the public sphere they decided they needed to be more like men.  So far so good.  (I’m talking here of the VERY EARLY women’s work pioneers.) Because most of these women were ladies, they tried to be gentlemen.

This works well, because gentlemanly virtues is what Western Civlization in its public sphere is based on: fair work for fair pay; honoring your commitments; remembering those who helped you on the way up (which my dad taught me as “There are debts that aren’t monetary and that can NEVER be repaid.  There are people who, when they call favors, you do the favors, and you don’t question it.”); and most of all fighting fair.

The problem is that the sixties and seventies while talking (flapping lips) endlessly about social construction forgot the basis on which the social constructions are built.

Women are not men.  Some of us are – or try to be – gentlemen, but it’s a fine line, even for an outlier like me.  Women were chosen by an entirely different process.

Most of the lady-like virtues were DESIGNED to be appearance-only.  Women are VERY good at giving an appearance of respecting all the male virtues (when they understand them.  These days they’re more likely to imitate the male vices.)  In fact, they’re often better than men.  The rub is that they’re not good at HAVING them – not without a conscious effort, and not without the virtues being held up to them as something to be/do.

Do I mean every woman is a sneaky back stabber?  Oh.  My.  No.  Of course not.  But I mean that in a pinch our lines on that are more blurry than man’s.  Consensus must be built, and we must look out for our offspring.

Women IOW don’t fight fair.  We’re not meant to.  Women who fought fair – being smaller and weaker than men – left no descendants.

All that is fine and dandy while you’re using it in the private sphere and keeping the men in the family in protective mode, even while you cajole, manipulate and generally run the place with an iron hand.

In business and in politics on the other hand… it sucks.  It means that we slowly but surely push marriage laws so that they’re a trap for the man and a consequence free experiment for women.  It means we make use of affirmative action even when there is no logical reason to.  It means that we – even in fields like university attendance and novel writing – become the majority while steadily screaming that we’re being discriminated against.

It means we dismantle those very same western modes of behavior that made our civilization.

It also means that the gloves come off.  The war of the genders becomes overt.  Worse, instead of leading to more offspring, it leads to no offspring at all, as each is taught to hate and/or despise the other.

Do I want women to go back to the home and the kitchen?  Well, if they want to.  I think each individual should do what suits him, regardless of gender. Individuals aren’t statistics.

But I don’t think that women – or men – are tabula rasa.

If we’re to save what remains of our culture, we MUST establish modes of behavior.  If you don’t want to be sexist, call them public and private.

In private anyone should feel free to act like a lady – we could use a bit more of not airing private laundry in public, and that’s a very lady like virtue.  But in the public sphere, where we transact politics and business and the public decisions, everyone should be a gentleman.  Contracts should be honored; each should take responsibility for himself; backstabbing, betrayal and unfair advantage should justly be reviled, no matter who does it.

Ladies – I know this will cut out much of your advantage, but – you must learn to be gentlemen in public.  To be ladies, manipulative, deceptive and contriving, does give you an individual advantage, but it is destroying our culture.

And if it destroys our culture, the one that WILL replace it IS one in which women will be held in subjection.  I don’t want that for any female descendants I might have.  I don’t want it for anyone’s female descendants.

Ladies, be gentlemen.  Play fair.  Gentlemen, relearn the gentlemanly virtues.

In the home be what you very well want,  but in public, dry your tears and stop your flashing of leg.  In public life, we must all be gentlemen. Gentlemen play fair.

UPDATE: And today I’m Guest Blogging at Anthony Pacheco’s another member of the great Portuguese conspiracy in SF/F

It is something everyone knows that anyone who wants to shrink government is aiming to push grandmas off cliffs and let the poor starve in the dark.

Just because “everybody knows it” doesn’t mean it’s so.  Some time ago – oh, seventy years or so – international communism made it a goal to capture all the gatekeeper positions for mass media and entertainment.  (No, I’m not saying everyone in that position is a communist.  Most of them aren’t even conscious fellow-travelers.  They’ve just bought the “every good/smart/well educated person thinks this, and they’d rather die than think.)

That’s actually what makes it worse.  If these people had been conscious communists, they would have had to re-examine their beliefs when the horror-show that the Soviet Union had hidden came out when it collapsed.  But because they’re simply going on “what the good people believe” without examining it or figuring out where it leads, they have continued, pretty much on course, repeating the lies that were once in service of a now defunct evil empire.  It’s a zombie thing.

So the “big lies” that get repeated over and over by the media, until everyone knows them often are gross distortions of reality.  More often, they have absolutely nothing to do with reality and are made with reference only to the Marxian theory of the world.  (Sort of like the maps medieval cartographers made with reference only to other, previous maps – often someone’s guess at reality – had absolutely nothing to do with where land masses were or even what the shape of the Earth was.)

It is much easier to assume that anyone going against those in power (yes, dears, those who want to GROW government are in power: in government, in the economy, in industry and in media.  No, that doesn’t mean they’re right.  At one point everyone in power thought it was right to get rid of “inferior” races) is wrong and to think up evil motives for them then to examine the moral foundations of unbridled government and to wonder who really wants to throw grandma off the cliff (and grind your childrens’ bones to make their soup.)  Because once you start examining things, you might find yourself on the side where the “good” people aren’t.

First let’s establish what taxes are: taxes are a way to collect money by force – if you don’t pay you go to jail – for purposes so important that they justify the theft.

Theft?  Well, taking money from people by force is theft.  If it’s immoral for the local tough to do it on the street corner, what makes it moral for the government to do it?  Because a lot of people say it’s moral?  Please…

But I can see a position in which it is right for someone to relieve you of your belongings at gun point.  Say, you’re carrying a vial full of a new virus you intend to release in a NY restaurant and which will kill millions of people.  It’s still theft, mind – but it is a justified (sort of) theft.

And here we come to where taxes are justified – in my opinion (no one died and made me G-d, this is JUST my opinion.) – taxes are justified when the goal to be obtained is so clearly and obviously not just good but necessary that it justifies shaking down a grandma for the dividends on her investments.  As a further test, it is justified when even just one person not contributing can markedly affect your chances of obtaining your goal.

Say your neighborhood – in some Mad Max post apocalyptic future – is under attack by a gang of Reavers, and you need to buy barbed wire (or cement) to enclose it.  If grandma next door refusing to give up 25% of what she owns is going to mean none of you can protect yourselves, then it is moral and just to force grandma to contribute, because if she doesn’t, not only you but she ALSO will die.

Now for those of our visitors outside the United States, let me explain that there are three (used to be) largely independent levels of government in the United States: Federal, State and Local.  What might be appropriate and just at a community level is NOT appropriate and just for a government that lays down the law to 350 million people give or take a few dozen.  Why?  Because you lose granularity.  Also, because – trust me, you don’t know that you are ignorant fo this, but you are – we are an incredibly regionally diverse country at a level that no foreigner who hasn’t lived here can begin to GUESS.  H*ll, many Americans who haven’t travelled outside their region or haven’t LIVED outside their region have no clue.  When I moved from the North to the South and then the East to the West I found greater differences than I’ve found between countries in Europe.

So, let’s talk first of the Federal Government: what is it right and just for a government covering 350 million people in widely varying circumstances to take money at gunpoint to cover?  Common defense is the only one I find particularly convincing.  Why?  Because it’s d*mn hard to setup a subscription system to buy a nuclear bomber – though we might come to have to try that.

To cover the expenses and salaries of those negotiating on our behalf with foreign potentates, simply because it would be really expensive and counterproductive to have Texas, Maryland and Rhode Island appoint ambassadors who might disagree with each other.

I’m willing to concede that whether the Federal Government should have some say over highways that cross more than one state, and whether the Federal Government should concern itself with food safety when it crosses state laws can be debated, though I’m not sure either of those rises to the level of “let’s take money from grandma to pay for this.”

If you go to the state level, I’m willing to concede that the government has the right to take money from individuals at gun point to pay for other things.  For instance guaranteeing a minimum income, if the citizens of that state think it is a just and worthy goal.

(I don’t, particularly.  Why should you take money from grandma at gun point to make sure that grandson who is working by day as a barista and playing in a band that makes no money in the evening gets 10k more money he didn’t earn?  Tell me why this is morally justified.  Show your work.)  I think this is an iniquitous practice, but if most citizens in a state think this is morally justified, it’s their state and none of my business.  And if grandma isn’t so confused, fluffy and dumb that she gets lost in her own underwear (Pants-Bunny) she’ll move out of that larcenous state.

Then there is the city level, and at city level, everyone should be able to do whatever they very well please, provided that the citizens of that city agree with it, and provided, of course, they’re not depriving anyone of life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness.  (And here we’re talking real rights, not penumbras.  If a city decides to kill every busker who comes in, it’s violating the constitution.  If a city decides that buskers aren’t allowed to perform on their streets, and fines them and drives them to the edge of town, that’s within their rights, and it’s within their rights to tax citizens to pay for this de-busking program.  The busker can’t really claim that he/she can’t pursue his/her own happiness elsewhere.  Not credibly.  Again, if grandma thinks raiding her savings to get rid of buskers is not a moral imperative, she’ll move elsewhere.)

And right now the kung-fu straw fighters are getting ready to say “you do want the poor to starve in the dark” and “if grandma is poor you want to throw her off a cliff.”

The kung-fu straw fighters are really good at fighting strawmen.

Every human society since – from what we can deduce from their skeletons – before we were fully human has looked after its sick, its ailing and its truly helpless.  This is not something that’s about to change.

Yes, most of the time that was left to private charity – though not always and though sometimes private charity was funneled through the state.

Being me, and being a student of history I think it’s less dangerous to leave the care of those truly indigent to private charity.  The reason I think this is that private charity can’t put to death those who have become too burdensome: a national government can.  (For examples of national governments that have done that, look to Nazi Germany, look up China’s “dying rooms” [if you have a strong stomach.  I looked once almost a year ago, and I’m still having nightmares,] and look at “non voluntary euthanasia” in Europe or what happens to babies who are going to cost a lot of money to keep alive to adulthood.)

However, I’m willing to concede two things:

First, contracts must be honored.  Those people who had money deducted from their paycheck their entire working life on the promise that their retirement would be secure and who are now past or very near retirement age, should be given at least enough to survive comfortably on.

Second, we live in an age when religious moral imperatives have been (deliberately?) chipped at for almost a century.  This means some people (most of whom think the State should do it for them) are not at all inclined to give even one cent to provide for an indigent neighbor no matter how deserving – not out of their own pocket.  Because of that, at state and city level, some arrangements might be needed to provide for those who can’t provide for themselves.  For the record, the Federal arrangements are so inefficient, so poorly targeted (they often require you to own nothing in order to give help – even though your entire worth might be tied up in a house you cannot sell, no matter how much it is nominally worth), that local and private charities have to step in to keep people from real trouble – and often fail.  (For instance, our kids do not qualify for subsidized education loans because a) I’m a contractor and get paid irregularly, so we have “savings” in the bank.  b) The government assumes that all the savings in the bank should be used to pay for the kids’ education first – even if that means we can’t meet next month’s mortgage, or the month’s after.  c) the government assumes I’m going to use that money for EACH of the kids which requires us to have either the ability to use the same money twice, or to (of course) pick the kid we’re going to help through college and let the other one go hang.  No, I am not complaining about this.  I don’t think grandma should be robbed so my kids can go to school—we can contrive and if we don’t, there’s always an appliance box under a bridge.  I’m simply showing it’s impossible for a government covering 350 million people to account for every individual circumstance in a just and fair manner.)  The bigger the government and the more intrusive its aims, NO MATTER HOW NOMINALLY GOOD, the more misery and injustice it will spread.

This does not mean we don’t think the things that the government taxes us to do are bad.  A commenter yesterday brought up a “road safety program.”  That is a nice goal.  By all means, tell people not to text and drive, not to drink and drive, and to keep a car length between themselves and the car ahead of them – I’m sure these are things we can all get behind.  Or at least things we don’t think are INHERENTLY evil.

However, now visualize someone holding grandma at gunpoint to get money for this road safety program.  Is it worth it?  Why?  Show your work?  Haven’t people heard this message before from other outlets?  Why do you think they’ll pay attention when it’s done by the government if they haven’t before?  If they don’t stop under the threat of fine, why will a series of billboards, program spots, or even a policeman stationed here and there along the road make a difference?

Now imagine that the money you’re taking from grandma is the difference between her living independently and not.  (No?  Right now my household spends more on taxes than it spends on food or mortgage and some years it’s food and mortgage combined.  And most of those are Federal taxes.)

Road safety is a nice goal, but is it worth it?  Is it worth taking all the savings grandma has worked for all her life and throwing her to the mercy of public charity?  Is it moral and just?  Show your work.

And then there’s the fact that a bureaucracy has a tendency to become the creature of long-established functionaries and the slave of idiotic law makers.  (And we won’t even go into the fact that our presidents can now legislate with their signature, via executive orders.  I’m sure I don’t know why we can’t power most of the country from the energy generated by the Founders spinning in their graves.)

It’s very easy to convince these “elected representatives” some of whom are dumber than my cat (look up “Guam tipping over.”) that say the lightbulbs we’ve been using for years are baaaaad and we should ban them.  It is particularly easy when lobbyists – GE – get involved.  And if it turns out afterwards that the “ecologically safe” lightbulbs they want you to use emit mercury and can cause brain cancer… well, it’s all to the good, right?  The fewer humans the better for Mother Gaia.  No?  You don’t think that’s worth it stealing grandma’s savings to give more power to these creatures who go to Washington and become self-enriching machines and creating regulations that actually make things worse?  You don’t want to give them power of life and death over yourself and yours?

Then perhaps you should stop doing it.  Perhaps you should keep each level of the government to its essential functions, with a little more leeway at the local level, where, you know, if they want to forbid Big Gulps and their idiot constituents let them, it’s their stupid business and not yours.

It’s very easy to say “I want to make sure no cat is homeless” but when it comes to creating Federal homes for homeless cats – is it worth it robbing grandma to do it?

Look, it is a fact – known through history and enshrined in human nature – that humans tend to do that which they perceive as a greater good for the individual self.  This doesn’t make humans evil.  Most humans are fairly decent people – if flawed – and none of us wants to watch our neighbor die on the street.  The fact we’re social animals means we care for the “group” as well as for ourselves.

Assume we haven’t changed radically in the last two hundred years – we haven’t, at least that we can tell – what is the good of putting all-too-fallible humans in positions where the best for them (more power, more security, more public acclaim) comes from robbing their neighbors to pursue increasingly more quixotic goals?  Why would you assume they wouldn’t go from essential goals to goals they think would be cool to have?  Particularly since this ensures they keep their jobs?

Government is a necessary evil unless and until it is possible to network to such an extent that a group of citizens can buy a stealth bomber.  But let’s keep it small, to carefully enumerated powers and DISTRIBUTED.  You can keep an eye on your local b*stards, but how many of us can go to DC and tell our representatives (or our all too imperial President) that they’re out of their rocking minds and that we don’t want grandma’s money taken at gun point in order to take over GM? (And steal grandma’s shares in it, too.)

I don’t want to throw grandma over the cliff.  I don’t want the poor to starve in the dark.  But if we give the power to make those decisions to a distant and impersonal entity, that entity will INVARIABLY – even with the best intentions in the world – through omission and commission do exactly that to some grandmas and some poor.  And right now we’re headed to a world where we write off the money we send to Washington and are lucky if it isn’t used AGAINST us – while all the real needs have to be taken care of at other levels.

We’ve tried massive governments that supposedly took care of everyone.  The Fascists and Communists were humans like us, made of the same genetic material.  They weren’t monsters.  They had a strong, centralized government and — by their lights — the best intentions in the world.  Both claimed to be “scientific.”  The results were appalling levels of death and misery.  There are no angels you can port in wield that much power with no consequence.  Sooner or later those in charge lose track of the boundary between essential and “would be nice.”  There is no right way to do this.  It’s a bad idea to turn humans into numbers on a bureaucrat’s slate.  And it is evil to expose mere humans to the temptation of playing G-d and (thinking they can) forming the ideal world.

Let’s give the other option a try.  Small Government: Too Small to Throw Grandma off The Cliff or to Make Us All Poor.

Who knows?  It’s such a crazy idea, it just might work.

Yesterday we were driving back from Denver – molestation of dinos happened, (aka I got to look and dinosaur bones and let my inner kid out to oooh and ahhhh) and looking for a radio station to listen to.  We don’t actually listen to much Country – not a hatred of the genre, but we grew up at a time when Rock and Roll was cooler, and it formed our tastes.  That said, we like some Country – but as we hit that station, my husband said “you realize they think this is what we listen to all the time.”

I must have looked blank, because he said “You know, we’re the unenlightened.  There are only two types of people who disagree with them on how the world should be run: i.e. with the idea that you can merge all nations together and stop war; with the idea that if America just becomes poor other countries will become rich; and most of all with the idea that people could or should be guided in everything by their “betters.”

The only two people they think disagree with them, are the evil rich, who don’t want to share out their ill-gotten loot (and all wealth is loot to them, since like Marx they don’t realize wealth can be created) and the unenlightened.  I said “the unenlightened.”  And he said “Oh, yes, they live in trailer parks, listen to right wing talk shows, own several guns and might or might not sleep with their relatives, depending on who you talk to.  But they are all white and all male, this is very important, because otherwise instead of unenlightened they would be a downtrodden minority and their opinions would have immediate moral authority.  As is, it’s a wonder they reproduce.””

This made me burst out laughing, but of course, the problem is that in internet forums (particularly when not under my name, but often then too) I get accused of being one or the other of those and often, for a truly contradictory stew, both of them together (evil rich, who live in trailer parks, and….)

The truth is that the Aristo class are a little fuzzy and contradictory on the unenlightened, because, of course, they like to think they are for the “downtrodden” which means they actually can’t look down on the poor.

But the truth of the matter is they don’t (by and large.  I’m sure there are exceptions) know any poor.  Their ideas of the poor come from ill-digested eighteenth century (truly, not debased) liberal ideas combined with what they see about other classes/races/professions on tv shows and movies.  Which are… bad.

Look, stereotypes are a tool of my trade.  You have to round out your world with stereotypes or EVERY pulp SF would be the size of War and Peace and about as interesting.

If I have to bring in an eight year old for one scene, she’s going to fall into one of two stereotypes: either she’s going to be all in pink, like dolls and plastic horses with multicolored tails, or she’s going to be in jeans and a torn t-shirt and carry a football under her arm.

No real little girls falls into one of these stereotypes, no matter how close they come.  I was closer to the second, but I loved my dolls, spent a great portion of my time playing house (I must admit too I was very unenlightened in those days.  I beat up the neighbor boy because he wanted to be the mommy, which I found just “dumb”.  For the record, he didn’t grow up to be gay, (that was the OTHER neighbor boy who never – at least while playing with me – wanted to be the mommy.  Mostly he wanted to build go-carts, so we might never have played house) he grew up to be a wife-abuser.  I probably shouldn’t have pounded him ;) )

However, if the kid is only there for a scene, and maybe featuring as a dead body later, you don’t have time to explain that yeah, she likes to play games with the boys, and play with trains and cars, but she also likes to play at being the mommy.

So, we use stereotypes, of course.  And to an extent they reinforce the stereotypes other people have written.

However, good writers, or writers who try to be good try not to use stereotypes for the IMPORTANT things.  And certainly we try not to stereotype entire economic/professional classes.

In fact, I stopped reading a particular mystery series, because the murderer was ALWAYS the entrepreneur.  And more and more I can’t watch TV – sitcoms and dramas – because all the characters, good and bad are stereotypes.

It wasn’t always this way.  Yesterday we were watching the first episode of Columbo, and what got me was how well drawn the characters were.  The bimbo actress has unexpected depths, the murdered wife is NOT a victim of male oppression, but a woman embittered by life in a marriage gone sour (and probably entered into for the wrong reasons on both sides.)  The husband too, yes, is a murderer, but you can sort of see what he saw and how he got there.

I challenge you to find me a mystery episode like that today.  It always ends up defaulting to the stereotypes of “abusing” husband and “helpless” (or saintly) wife, the “right wing” intolerant man, the open minded intellectual, the rebellious (and ultimately right) teen and on and on and on.

That’s not art.  That’s speak-and-spell.

And the problem has its roots in the eighteenth century, when liberalism deserved that name.  In the eighteenth century, to believe that everyone had the right to equal treatment before the law was as heretical as most of the things you guys and I say here today.

But anyone who believes that, (and I do) inevitably comes across the fact that all men are created equal but (who was it who said it?) “differ greatly in the sequel.”  And most people immediately try to justify this by going on about how all men could be equal if just: they had proper nutrition, they had proper education, they had–  whatever.  (What got us in the housing crisis was the idea that all men would be equal if they just lived in the “right” neighborhood.)

The most popular belief in the eighteenth century was that all men would be “enlightened” if they just had enough of the right kind of education.

It’s a naïve belief, and one that continued through to the idea that if you just indoctrinate the kids in communism, you’ll do away with greed and private property.

It doesn’t – to put it bluntly – work.  In many cases it backfired spectacularly.  There is no reason that knowing a lot makes you good.  (My favorite con-seen t-shirt is “Knowledge is power; power corrupts; study hard, be evil.”)  Education helped the underclasses, of course.  In fact it often helped them overtake the upper classes, which led to little unpleasantnesses like the French Revolution.

What it didn’t do was make everyone angels, which is something that SOMEHOW keeps managing to surprise humans.  (That we can’t be made over into angels.)

Our Aristos are descended from the eighteenth century liberals (sorry but they are.)   We are too.  We are the liberals who decided you had to endure some human imperfections, while trying to be as good as possible, and trying to give others the same opportunity.  (I think the founding fathers were our kind of liberals.  You give the opportunity, but you can’t enforce the results.)

The “liberals” of today are descended via the wrong side of the blanket, bastard sons (and daughters) of communism, by way of the French revolution.  They think this time men can be made perfect, if JUST—

One of the justs remains “they’re educated right.”  Only because real education results in a varying array of opinions, with sub-opinions differing greatly within the opinions (just the words abortion and “gay marriage” suffice for me to pick a fight with most of you, and not in the way you’d expect either.  And then within each of the sub-opinions on that, if I give vent to my full beliefs, I can get both sides to hate me too.  Not to say I can’t do business with most of you.  Of course I can.  If you believe in a small government that stays out of most people’s private life, and if you believe in local control over federal control, you’re a brother or sister of mine, and we’re going the same way.)  When you think, and when you analyze history, your opinions will vary.  You won’t be “enlightened in the right way.”

So… Because our Aristos REALLY want the masses to be enlightened, because this will lead to of course universal peace, brotherhood and rainbow-farting unicorns, they have given up on real education in favor of indoctrination and teaching the “right” conclusions.

On top of that, because pesky humans still insist on coming up with different ideas, once out of the control of the school, (or learn to double think, which I did, early) they reinforce this through entertainment.  Which means the only movies/series/books the gatekeepers will bless are those that enforce the stereotypes they want.

Which is why these days, if you watch practically anything, anyone who disagrees with the Aristos is either evil, rich and greedy (weirdly greed for power never makes their lexicon of sins.  At least not greed for political power.  It’s always greed for money – rolls eyes) or an ignorant gun totting redneck living in a mobile home and talking only in Bible phrases.  (Or, as someone said “clinging to their guns and religion.”)

This is because the only reason these poor children raised with stereotypes can imagine for anyone not to agree with “but teacher says!” is that you are either personally invested in saying the “wrong” things because you get paid for it (let me say right now that I’m FURIOUS I’m not getting checks from Haliburton, the Zionist conspiracy, the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, the Koch brothers and all these other people who are supposed to be paying us [I’m particularly mad at the Kochs since they’re libertarians who support the arts, because well, this art could use some support, guys.]  I guess they can’t get my address?) or because you aren’t “enlightened” – hence, poor, living in a mobile home (I have no clue what they have against mobile homes, except as a mark of poverty) and indoctrinated into the religion they disapprove of.  (Note these people must be white and male, and non-muslim, because otherwise you tread on the toes of protected minorities.)  And in the case of those poor and unenlightened, they think the only reason is that you have been traumatized, you lost your job, you don’t get enough from welfare and therefore you “cling to hatred of those who aren’t like you.”

Because apparently the idea that societies organized on redistributionist lines have not only never worked but resulted in misery and death, and the fact that every time the Aristos take over fully misery and death is exponentially increased HAS NEVER OCCURRED TO THESE PEOPLE.  Because after all “teacher says” these ideas are right, therefore they MUST be.

The truth is that, for the whole time I’ve lived in this country, the best way to climb the ladder of wealth is to be “liberal”.  This is because by the eighties the liberals were already in control of not just entertainment but the boards of most corporations.  Even entrepreneurs who make it, immediately acquire a veneer of lefty opinions (often ill digested) in order to fit in at the country club and network and get ahead.  (No?  Bill Gates.  Steve Jobs.  Major Republicans, right?  Pfui.)

As for the trailer park?  Well, I have nothing against trailer parks or people who live in them – I want to make that clear.  The way life goes, up and down, I might well eventually find myself in one (if I’m lucky.  There’s always the appliance box under the bridge!) – but it is usually a “lower income” neighborhood.  And like most lower income neighborhoods, while it might have some socially conservative people with morally inflexible judgements, these days mostly what it has are people who ran aground while imitating the (no need for marriage, do sleep around with everyone, no need for a job either – the state will provide) “morals” and definitely the manners of the Aristos.

Study after study has proven that if you have the bourgeois virtues: you marry early and stay married, you work as much as you can, you save and defer gratification, you’ll still do pretty well – for a definition of pretty well, in relation to current economy and to where you started.

So while you might live in a small house, you’re unlikely to live to in the kind of trailer park that the “liberals” have resort to for their stereotypes.  In that kind of trailer park most people will in fact vote for the Aristo agenda, under the impression that garantees mo’ government cheese.

Indie, both in writing (and in film – which scares them even more, and which is coming down the pike at torpedo speed, mark my words) scares these people spitless, because it will cease to reinforce the stereotypes.

The bursting of the education bubble (lower and higher) scares them even more because people will get “the wrong” kind of education.

The desperate power grab we’re seeing from the Aristos is complicated by their fear of this, which they can sense only dimly.  Because they think in stereotypes, they really think all homeschooled kids learn ONLY the Bible.  Because they think only in stereotypes they really think that books that don’t obey their blueprint are bad.

And I think, because they think only in stereotypes, they will ultimate be blindsided and left behind by the future.

Aristocracies that grow too divorced from reality ultimately can’t survive.  At best people learn to work around them and they lose all power.  At worst… there comes the guillotine.

I’d prefer the first to the last, but if we don’t manage the first, the last will surely come.

Sometimes it’s hard — and thankless — work saving the clueless from the consequences of their lack of clue.  (And I still don’t get any checks.)

Yesterday I had a very curious experience.  The gentleman who came here to brag of being an NPR listener (Okay, I know that’s not all he came to do.  He also came to exhibit his caring.  But I repeat myself and I’ll explain how those are the same later) sent me a dollar and a diatribe about how we’d taught him he was an idiotic, bigoted NPR listener or words to that effect.  I only read the first line, and refunded his dollar with a note that I was also now teaching him he was childish because that’s a trick only an infant would play.  (And stupid, thinking I’d feel obliged to read his pettish rant for a dollar.)

I’m sure somewhere in there he said he’d been a fan and now would never again read my books – because, they all do.  Let me tell you, children, if I’d lost as many readers as the ones who tell me they’ll never read me again, I’d need to have been a mega bestseller before.

I found this rather bizarre, since the NPR quip was thrown out at random, and wasn’t even particularly offensive.  Also, as was shown immediately after, a lot of us listen to or used to listen to (mostly used to listen to) NPR.  Heck, I even used to have PBS on all day (that or the Disney Channel when we had cable.) which led my in laws to think I was infantile.  (I came from a large extended family that was in and out of the house all the time, and yelling/talking/shouting at each other all day.  The silence in the house when we had no kids and Dan went to work gave me the creeps.  So I turned the TV on in the Living room, medium-low while I did stuff over the house or worked in the office upstairs.  Those two channels were the only ones where I wouldn’t suddenly get growling or shooting [or not often] that startled me out of my skin.  Of course, my inlaws came over, saw Disney and ignored my explanations that I wasn’t even in the room.  You should see the gifts they got me.  And also it took me forever to convince them that I did NOT in fact, want to or have the slightest inclination to write children’s books.)

Philosophically I disapprove of the idea that the state needs to – or should – underwrite a radio station and a tv station.  Philosophically I TRULY disapprove of the idea that there is an “approved” culture that should be shoved down the throats of the hoy ploy.

But frankly other than being dry as dust and twice as uppity, NPR and PBS are no worse than most of the mainstream media.  The opinions ventilated are exactly the same, only now with a veneer of intellectual justification that always fails to go into debate or into the law of unintended consequences, or…

And that was where the commenter was odd.  He came in, hanging his hat on that previous comment about being an NPR listener, and proclaiming it, as a way – I think – to put the rest of us in our place.  See, I PRESUME he thought that the comment was a stray one, and that the rest of us would skitter away from it.  This not only assumes people on this blog intimidate easy, it also assumes that anything on this blog is simple or easy.  To be blunt if one of us, who is a regular, proclaimed that anyone who thinks the sky is blue is dumb, and someone came in spouting obviously stupid (other) opinions and said “and I think the sky is blue” we’d be FAR more likely to close ranks about the one of ours who had gone one step too crazy than to back up.  The most he’d be likely to get was “Well, some people who think the sky is blue are only crazy.”  And then two of you would get into a to-the-death dispute over the meaning of “blue.”

So he’d either not read our comment section at all, or he was laboring under some misapprehension that prevented him from seeing where that would lead.  Frankly, I was very proud of ourselves, for sticking to mostly the economic argument with only a few sideswipes at NPR – except for the side track about several different NPR stations and their slants.  Normally, I’d have expected puns about NPR or worse.

Since he was an authorized commenter, and since I know he’s been by (and only marginally offensive at worst, since he never got banned) before, I have to assume he’d waded through our comments in the past.

So…

So I have to assume he thought the NPR listener thing was a shield of invincibility. See, there are these stereotypes in our culture, and he was wrapping himself in two of them.  Saying he was an NPR listener would prove he was a serious and intellectual, and saying he wanted the minimum wage to prevent Burger King from paying $3 an hour showed that he cared for the downtrodden and was therefore a good person.  How could you attack that?

The problem is that he was out of the place where such stereotypes are accepted.  First, we’re in ATH where we’re all Odd and stereotypes, like cows, are to be tipped.  Second, most of us are really into – really into – economics and numbers, and most of you guys make me look ill-read when it comes to history (I’ve bought more books from your casual mentions than I could afford to.) And third… those stereotypes no longer hold with at least half (perhaps more, depending on how bad the fraud was) of the population.

The political sides of the argument in this country have fractured deeply over the last twelve years.  Before that, those of us of an intellectual bend were as likely as not to listen to NPR or to listen/watch what in the UK (and Portugal) used to be called “Second program.”  You know, lectures, discussions of historical events, arguments on the meaning of the word “blue”.

The other side… were they really less offensive?  I honestly don’t know and can’t tell you, because see, the boundaries of the game were different.  As I’ve said before NPR is not much more loonie left than the mainstream media, and might be less.  I’ll confess that I haven’t listened in a long time, but I doubt they’d say fire doesn’t melt steel, and I’m almost absolutely sure they wouldn’t say global warming causes meteorite strikes.  This, by itself, makes them considerably less insane-left than what passes for talk and news in other stations.  And that’s without going into the biases built into sitcoms and dramas.

But I think they’ve got more explicit in their politics.  All of this is a market-driven change, and it shouldn’t surprise those of us who like economics.

Look, before 9-11, most of us were still getting our news from standard channels.  I think I started reading news on the net about two years later, when the hand-wringing of “what have we done to the oppressed brown people to make them murder us” put me in a permanent state of nausea.  Judging from the size of sites when I started reading them and how big they got since, I’d say I’m not alone.  Those of us of an independent er… path-finding nature took to finding channels that didn’t make us want to murder bunnies just to relieve our spleen.

Those of us who tried to hold on longer, because we liked classical music or whatever, became a tiny minority of the listeners of NPR – or watchers of CNN, which I also was back then.  In response, the stations felt free to radicalize further to the left, thereby sending the rest of us running from the audience, with our hands over our mouths.

This, in turn, left them free to radicalize further.

The readers/listeners/viewers who remained were of two kinds – the kind that thought that Stalin “had the right idea” and who think NPR is too right wing and reasonable by half, but will put up with it till the Let’s Kill All the Kulaks station comes on line – and people who are, I think, like my commenter.

Most people regardless of IQ want two things: to think as little as possible (a masochistic penchant for the activity is what makes the rest of us Odds) and to be thought as intelligent as possible.

So there is a vast majority of normal or above average people who flock to programs (and books.  The success in marketing grey goo comes from convincing people smart people read this) that they think make other people think they’re brilliant do so for that reason alone, and avoid thinking as much as possible.  They don’t even notice when the programs, while sounding learned and profound, in fact, refuse to discuss anything.

For an example of actual discussion on the minimum wage, look at Dave Freer’s comments.  He is somewhat handicapped, because I KNOW how the US is reported abroad and also because, frankly, we are a confusing mess when it comes to welfare (and everything else administrative.)  The flaw (small) in his argument is that he doesn’t realize that while our minimum wage is around seven dollars and change, people making that already qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit (we qualified for this once, and got 10k in addition to however much we’d made, which was I THINK around 30k) and also for a slew of programs including free school lunch, etc.  In fact, I THINK the “support money” you get on welfare is probably fairly equivalent to Australia’s $17 dollars and hour minimum wage, and the support you get if you ARE making minimum wage is probably higher, particularly if you throw in city subsidies for power purchases, etc.  (It leaves behind people who have no clue how to navigate the system, but they’re almost always left behind anyway.)

What I mean by Dave got to the actual discussion is that ultimately it ALWAYS comes to the same question: do we lower the wage, (or eliminate it) level the playing field and allow for a greater wealth of opportunity for all; or do we intervene, set a really high minimum wage and live with the fact unemployment will always be high, leaving employers with the ability to pay as little as they legally can and treat employees like dirt, thereby forcing the state to intervene more?

Depending on culture, size of country and homogeneity of the population – and the ability to live out of the grid, which is massive in places like Australia – the answer can VALIDLY be completely different.  (The size and homogeneity come in because in a large heterogeneous country studies have proven fraud is proportionally much higher, which means the US risks a lot more money PROPORTIONALLY going up the spout – and, given the mess the regulations are, we also risk NOT helping many of the people we’re supposed to be helping.  Heck, even something “simple” like minimum wage pushes minimum skills workers into competition with illegals (who are entitled to welfare, but whose employers don’t have to make all the legal deductions and paperwork, so they get the best of both worlds) and/or into a grey market where they have no legal recourse.)

From there we can get to a discussion of the unique US conditions that make the president’s suggestion of raising the minimum wage not only stupid, but rock-bottom-dumb.  For instance, the fraud in our system is massive and we have one of the least efficient bureaucracies in the world (and that’s saying a lot) with no supervision at all and no penalty for wrong moves.  Or the fact that the US has been, for the last just about 100 years, the main CONSUMER in the world, which means the engine that keeps the world economies chugging, and which allows smaller countries that pick security over prosperity to keep enough prosperity to keep giving security… So while the US driving itself to a crash will make everyone else not only poorer but markedly poorer and force other choices on other countries.  (This is expressed abroad as “when the US sneezes the rest of the world catches pneumonia.)  Or we can discuss the open borders that make an open welfare system and a generous (by comparison to south of the border) welfare system the equivalent of an unguarded pool in the neighborhood in a summer day, the kind that when the children drown in it, gets called “an attractive nuisance.”  Because if you can come North, live off welfare and send home the $9 (they’re not paying benefits in addition, so it’s a bargain) you make which make your family the wealthiest in the village – WHY WOULDN’T YOU?  Particularly if you’re starving?

I come from a country that flood Europe with illegal immigrants in the aftermath of WWII.  I know the other side of this.  People don’t think of legality when their kids need shoes and an education.

The difference, of course, was that the recipients of the Portuguese wave, like France, forced people to acculturate.  Kids HAD to attend all French school from kindergarten on, for instance.  Given something like that, and a demand that you speak the local tongue, this “invasion” though it strains our welfare systems (talk to Basset sometime about the reduction of services to his handicapped daughter because of the strain caused by illegal immigrants) and leaves the untrained in our population out to dry would not be all detrimental.  More citizens are usually good.  But if you add to those drawbacks the “unassimilated and taught to consider itself aggrieved” minority, then it becomes a disaster.

Then there is the fact that almost all regulations, including increasing the minimum wage (which also increases deductions) gives big companies with lawyers to negotiate exceptions and favored status the leg up over the start ups who might challenge them, but who never GET started up.  (And given our current system of crony capitalism, that’s probably a feature, not a bug for the Aristos.)

All of these are valid discussions.  Coming in and saying that OF COURSE unless a benevolent government forces the minimum wage up to a “decent” level people will pay $3 an hour isn’t.  First because yeah, right now – RIGHT NOW – very young kids might be desperate enough to take that (must be very young kids, because even college students can get more benefits than that, with food stamps which most of them receive.)  Which wouldn’t be all bad, since it would allow those kids to get work experience, and get better jobs, which, yes, are still available, but not to those with no experience. Second because if the regulations that prevent kids from being hired were loosened, it would open the door to more legal employment and squeeze out more illegal employment (kind of like lawful use of a park drives out drug dealing.)  NO ONE wants to have employees who have no concept of time, or who don’t get the culture.  They only hire them because they can’t afford to hire legal workers.  Lift the restrictions that make this prohibitive, and the economy will take off.  And then we can afford both to have more mobility of workers and more targeted help to those who REALLY need it.

But NPR-listeners who are still listening to the opinion pieces don’t KNOW that.  They are listening to commentary that ASSUMES that all private employers are larcenous b*stards, and all government officials not only like onto angels but smart and infallible.

Because it’s in NPR they also assume it’s “smart” – if they really wanted to think, they wouldn’t be looking for markers of IQ, they’d be reading and informing themselves.

And that’s why my commenter had such a weird reaction – because suddenly he found himself in the position of those people they call “Faux News Viewers” – which I very much doubt anyone here watches, or at least with any regularity – when they comment on left-leaning blogs.

See, NPR to them still has pre-9-11 status.  That it’s “smart” is not supposed to be in dispute.  So to hear it treated as just another peddler of bad fish left him completely confused and feeling as though we’d attacked him personally – hence the childish lashing out.  Because it hit him below his adult, formed and thinking mind, with the force of a kick in the gut.

We weren’t just, you see – as we thought – discussing opinions, with the occasional snark —

NO, we were attacking him personally by going after his idea of himself.

And both sides are NOT alike in dignity.  Because the left (what I call the fluffy left, which has slid considerably further left without noticing in the last twelve years) had long since captured all the channels of communication and most of the door-keeping functions of entertainment, people who wanted to think themselves smart had “fluffy left” as a default setting. (The fact this is also the side proclaimed ex-cathedra in colleges only helped it think of itself as “smart.”)

The few of those like me who escaped the reservation and looked for other forms of information had the option of “lower brow” radio shows or TV programs, OR of reading primary sources, which required a lot of work.  And even we admitted – back then – that a lot of the radio shows that weren’t hard left were “lower brow” even when we enjoyed them.

The left fails to realize that there are more channels now – because they consume news and entertainment mostly as status markers, so they would NOT go to places no one knows – and therefore sneers at anyone who disagrees with them as “Faux News Viewers” which makes most of us furrow our brows and shrug.  It doesn’t hurt because … because it would be like me calling you “Beaver cap wearers.”  Some of you might wear one, now and then, but I bet most have not ever except as a costume of some kind.  So even if you know the other side assumes “Beaver Cap Wearers” are all stupid, it doesn’t apply to you.

However, when you call someone a “NPR listener” as though it were a bad thing, you’re pulling the rug from under the feet of people who PRESUMED that by listening to NPR they were PROVING they were smart, with no more effort required.

Of course, part of me thinks that it should be done more.  That if they’re not willing to concede any dignity to – even – well reasoned opposition, no dignity should be afforded them.

The other side of this, though, is that most people – MOST PEOPLE ON ANY SIDE – would rather die than think.  Which means a lot of this would cause a hardening of the sides into unbreakable fortresses of thought.

On the other hand, it’s already happening, and they’re capturing a lot of people who fall into the “increasingly less fluffy” left simply because it’s the “smart” side, and unless and until we shake that assumption they’ll continue to do so.

So – with apologies to those who’ll fall on their asses and get bruised – let’s pull the rug.  One, two–