If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo,please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months(unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH
Nate Cassin, the alpha werewolf of Missoula, Montana, finds his little city has a big wolf problem when shredded bodies start showing up all over town. Faced with a hostile press and even more hostile hunters, he tries to protect his innocent pack of eight at the same time they try to track down two elusive killers in an area of 35 square miles with a plethora of hiding places.
He’s seen this before. And the hunters always, always go overboard and decide the only good werewolf is a dead one, no matter who’s actually responsible. His pack will be collateral damage unless he can find the enemy wolves—and stop their broken alpha—before they turn his hometown into a human buffet.
As Sumire reveals her secrets in an explosive climax, a young Patrolman finds that what really matters is taking him in hand and leading him towards danger. Now, he has a chance to prove himself… and find out what love really means.
“In the midst of this danger, dirt, speed, technological changes, and social upheaval comprise the heart of steampunk. The old and new were in conflict, and the outcomes were uncertain and fraught with failures, making it a rich tangle of possibilities for characters to clash and collaborate within. ” – From the introduction by Bart Kemper, answering the question Why Steam?
Steampunk is danger, adventure, and technology with a flair for the dramatic and an eye for beauty. Join these 10 authors as they explore worlds of danger, daring, romance and steam.
Two brothers fight for freedom. A lost colony’s governor strives to reinvent the feudal state. Can Martha’s sons escape to liberty and a future?
Thaddeus Dawe is a patient man. On a planet where only the valley of First Landing is fully terraformed, he waits for spring’s agonizingly slow arrival. He plans to take the colony’s last terraseeder to fortify a secret northern enclave outside the governor’s control. When the palace loses power in late winter, Thaddeus scrambles to save his and his brothers’ hopes for independence.
Peter Dawe suffers under another secret. When he receives his brother’s call to return from exile to save the terraseeder, Peter forces himself to disclose his long-planned departure to those who sheltered and befriended him, including the woman he wants in his life. None of that goes as planned, and he heads north responsible once again for too many lives.
With the terraseeder losing power, a promise he has yet to fulfill, and the governor’s men against him, Thaddeus fears the new chaos marks the imminent death of the essential terraforming microbes and the failure of the new world he plans to build. Peter has spent the winter learning skills for his brothers’ northern plans, but joining Thaddeus’ team puts not only his own life at risk, but that of the woman he gives up to friendship.
Can the Dawe brothers escape the governor’s dominion with the life-giving terraseeder in time, and with their friends and loved ones alive?
The Wheels Run Truly is the final installment in the gripping science fiction colonization series, Martha’s Sons. If you like driven heroes, deep bonds of love and friendship, and a fight for freedom, you’ll need to read Laura Montgomery’s thrilling adventure tale.
Lord Danut Adrescu returns to his keep to find a mystery and a warning. A battered young Healer who cannot speak, and a vision of battle with a half-bull monster. What links the two? And what ties them to his new sword, a battle-claimed blade made by the finest Italian swordsmiths?
Sweeping cultural changes sound very good on paper. But in the lives of normal people, even the ones who stand to benefit, those changes can be a challenge… one they might not have even asked for. In the Court of Dragons collects eight stories of the period after the events of the Chatcaavan War, focusing on changes both personal and widespread: old favorites return and new characters make their debut as we follow the effects of the war on everything from the imperial harem to the nascent Eldritch newsroom. What are the Faulfenza up to in the capital? What was the fate of the palace castrates? And who taught an Eldritch to… bungee jump?
This reader-commissioned collection includes stories written by the author at reader request. Come home to the Alliance with these tales of hope, renewal, comedy, and romance.
Peter Wright joined the Navy thinking that he could do his time in a nice, quiet billet somewhere on Earth. The Navy had other ideas. When the asteroid miners claimed their independence, Peter finds himself getting sent to space on a warship headed straight into the combat zone. He has to get used to everything: zero gravity, standing watch, and being the only Earth-born in his crew. And he has to be ready for the biggest battle the solar system has ever seen.
A small, plush horse learns what it means to be real when a little girl chooses her and takes her home. Through adventures and accidents, Lizzy the horse becomes real to her little girl, Carrie, even though she is still a toy.
The High Frontier is no place for foolishness, but nature can always make a better idiot.
Four years ago, Molly’s parents brought her up here to the Moon when their work brought them to Shepardsport. In the time since that move, she’s earned her place here and a seat on this field trip. Only one problem — she’s been given the worst possible EVA partner.
A pencil-necked dweeb with an attitude, Benji wants to be one of the guys. But his stunts keep putting them both in danger, and the adults keep blaming Molly.
When Benji gets in over his head, can Molly save him before it costs both their lives?
A short story of the Grissom timeline.
Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.
So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.
We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.
I’ve been looking for a way to write about the small private tragedies, for which we each blame ourselves, but which are in fact part of a system that more and more militates against humanity and — in our place, in our time — particularly against young people, and even more particularly against young males.
And this has of course had all sorts of bad effects. As the Forbes article he linked to points out, prior to the 1500 hour rule, pilots typically had about 500 hours when they first sat behind the controls on a commercial flight and they were mentored over the next 1000 or so by more experienced pilots. This system worked just fine, and is in fact the system still used everywhere except the US and commercial airliners do not fall out of the sky on a regular basis. But now, in the US, would-be pilots need 1500 hours before they can start which radically limits the pool of potential applicants and raises the cost because if not military they have pay for that 1500 hours of flight time out of their own pockets.
The problem is that the effects of this rule change take years to be noticed (most of a decade I believe in this case) by anyone outside of a few subject matter experts who get blown off because “it’s for the children” or whatever.
And that, right there is the issue. The rules that are signed with much flourish, and which sound so good on paper, have monstrous effects down the road. And yet, the people raised on the previous set of rules don’t know where this is coming from, and are shocked and surprised, and always, inevitably, attribute the problem to the wrong thing.
Mostly, it gets attributed to “kids these days” but unless you have kids, these days, you don’t know how they are bound. And even if you do, you might not realize it, because all you see is the infantilization of a generation, and not that they, themselves, aren’t the ones doing the infantilizing, but all those “good rules” and regulations and laws are doing it.
I realized about 10 years ago that my son’s generation was about 10 years behind where we were. In their mid twenties they were doing things we did in our teens. It was disconcerting. And even I had no idea why, other than too much regimentation in school, too much of a never end of button counting, and not enough room or freedom to think or be on their own.
Since then…. I’ve seen more. And a lot of the reason they are younger than we were is that the entire world is geared not to let them grow up. I mean, let’s be glad that — unprepared or not — they’re legal adults at 18, or people would be denouncing them for walking alone down the street, without an “adult” at 25.
There’s also… adolescence is in some ways a profoundly unnatural life-stage, and more or less invented in the 20th century. In the past, sure, people were children, and people grew to be adults, but there wasn’t this protracted time period where they were adults in size and at least some ability, but weren’t allowed to be adults: they weren’t allowed to earn or spend, or make their own decisions, for years.
The earn or spend thing is important. Kids used to grow along with their tasks. Read Tudor or colonial memoirs, and you find four year olds looking after cows or horses, or learning Latin, or other unlikely things even for twelve year olds in our time.
Mom went to work at 10 and started getting a salary. It wasn’t much, and 90% of it went to her parents’ budget. But she was working, holding down a job, doing things that were maybe not at adult level, but could lead to it, eventually, if she applied herself. This was normal for her generation. In my own generation, amid the working class, most people went to work at 10. Heck, amid the middle class, most people went to work at 15 or so, after 9th grade. Were they more mature than the rest of us that went all the way to college?
I wouldn’t have thought that at the time, but yes, of course they were. Most of my elementary school classmates were married, with kids by the time my biggest worries were final exams. Of course, with my intellectual pride I looked down on them but now I understand they were managing a very difficult job, which at the time I could not have done.
I always feel stunned and shocked when someone says the kids should be “holding down two jobs like I was at 16” or “working to pay their way through college.” (That last is a giggle as it has two impossibilities. Finding a job that pays enough after college which has a lot of make-work expectations, and making a full-time middle-class salary, which is what college costs these days.) Two Jobs. At 16. The difficulties in giving work to 16 year olds, increasingly restriction of hours, etc. combined with chaotic scheduling in the only unskilled jobs remaining (mostly just retail) means that until recently none of them could find A job. Let alone two. And the recently was during Covid. I haven’t seen so many little 16 year olds cashiering, or serving at tables recently. And that’s because most people I’m seeing are around my age: I guess unemployment is biting hard.
But you know, all these strong rules against “child labor” mean that most kids hit 18 or, if they’re going to college, 22 or — more likely, as most degrees (remember make work?) are taking 6 or 7 years — 24, with absolutely no job experience. Which means their applications aren’t even looked at. Not seriously.
Honestly, almost every young person — particularly young men — I know who found a job, and is doing relatively well, did so through contacts. Through friend of friend. Through knowing someone.
This is a bad sign, because it’s how Portugal functions, and it is not in any way shape or form meritocracy, which in turn contributes to other things falling apart.
But more and more what I’m seeing is young people hitting their mid twenties lost, and doing this, and doing that, and trying this and trying that, and nothing ever gels. To make things worse, they don’t have the habits mom had by 10, because they haven’t been allowed to acquire them.
There was a similar generation — one, while here we’re well into two — in Portugal, where unemployment was so bad (the generation before mine) that most people weren’t “established” on a path till their mid thirties. I’d guess about half of them never got the knack of it: of the day to day of working, fulfilling the work duties, just…. the unglamorous day to day that makes us adults.
It’s particularly hard for boys. What places there are seem to be given to girls. Who also, usually, have better grades — though when I saw their work…. never mind. let’s say there was little difference, but everyone is afraid of discouraging girls, so the Lady’s A is a thing — and therefore on paper look much better.
Meanwhile the boys are quietly drowning.
Note, I’m not speaking for my boys here — they’re doing okay. For their generation, they’re doing amazingly and are almost precocious — but being the mother of boys, I got to know a lot of boys. Oh, girls too, but a larger number of boys. And for some reason our friends who had kids also had a lot of boys. Again, girls too, but a lot of boys.
The boys are drowning. And these are not unmotivated or stupid young men. The whole thing about a lot of brain function being inherited? Our friends aren’t exactly slackers and ne’er do wells. In fact, we often anchored that pole in our group, by virtue of my being a free lancer.
But the boys are spinning in circles well into their thirties, looking for a place to belong, looking for something to do where they add value, where they can be adults.
And here’s the thing: it’s pretty much society wide. Yes, some kids go to trade school early and escape it, but those are the kids turning 18 now, who saw older brothers and cousins and children of family friends be destroyed. But kids five to ten years older, by and large are still spinning.
The scale of it precludes personal failings at the route. It’s more … well… let me see, stuff against under age labor, a lot of illegal immigration, undercutting the bottom wrung of jobs, the de-industrialization of America cutting out the type of jobs available to the young and unskilled, and– well, yes — mandatory minimum wage, making it prohibitive to hire someone who might not work out.
All of these things sound good. But they snowball and they roll, and they make it almost impossible to break into the job market. Now, add in everything designed to give women a leg up, because, you know, we’re all victims of the patriarchy and….
Years — decades later — all of these come home to roost. And they’re not chickens, so no one notices. They quail, maybe. Or sparrows. No one will notice till they obscure the skies, like the sparrows returning.
Instead, each family — and probably each of the young men — thinks of it as a personal failing. ”It’s my fault. I shoulda/coulda/woulda–“
But the game was rigged. It wasn’t their fault.
It’s kind of like, on a smaller front, at one time I realized our washer was running continuously, and yet I was falling behind on laundry. And when my husband complained and asked why I didn’t do laundry, I fell apart. I didn’t cry — I only cry when I want to kill something and can’t — but I fell apart, and started trying to explain that I was always doing laundry, but–
So he went down and looked at the times. Each load, in the low-water washer, was taking 2 hours. And we were a family of four, with two kids in sports and other stuff that caused dirty clothes. It was mathematically impossible for me to catch up with wash. (Yes, we changed our washer. It’s now only one hour, which is still too long, but I have to do extra rinses, because of my skin stuff.) Until he did that, I thought it was a personal failing.
I’m sure there are other instances, where we think we’re failing, but it’s a stupid regulation, an idiot rule, catching up with us. Years or decades later.
Only it shouldn’t cost entire generations. And more importantly, we should be aware it’s not PERSONAL. It is, quite literally, systemic. It’s only our remaining individual responsibility and shame keeping us from realizing it.
In Clifford Simak’s They Walked Like Men, there are aliens buying the Earth. (Now, the money counterfeit, and the ending has two holes you could drive a mac truck through, but never mind those). They are buying it piecemeal by buying houses and businesses. And the people who sell for amazing prices, don’t realize that there’s nothing to buy. That the money they got is literally worthless.
A big turning point in the story is when people realize their old homes are vacant, and just move back in. Just realizing there’s something going on and they’re NOT ALONE is enormously empowering.
To the young people out there: you are not alone. You didn’t do this. You didn’t give up adulthood. It’s not a massive personal failing.
It was done to you. A lot of well intentioned (and some maybe not) rules and regulations, supposed to protect you and be “nice” just met in an utter tsunami of crap to destroy your life.
It’s not your fault. You’re not alone. The game is rigged. But that doesn’t mean you’re not needed. You should in fact show the f*ckers that rigged it a thing or two, by getting around it.
Quickly, before they ban gig work and entrepreneurship. Figure out what you can do and do it, no matter how small or stupid. Then build.
And the rest of you: figure out the people who think it’s all their fault, the broken down Atlases trying to lift the world, and go lend a shoulder and a hand.
And while we’re at it, let’s cut through all the stupid, counterproductive legislation and regulations. In this and in everything else.
In which I partly agree with David Brooks and Mark Edmundson
Thanks to Stuart Schneiderman1, my attention was drawn to this NY Slimes column by David Brooks (it’s an archive link) in which he points out that there are a lot of bureaucrats in government and business and they seem to mostly subtract value rather than add it.
Brooks in turn links to an article by Mark Edmundson, a professor at the University of Virginia. In that article, which I read as a rational lefty in the process of being red-pilled and fighting to maintain his delusions, the prof tries to explain that the DIE bureaucrats at his university are nice people who are trying to make the world a better place even if they do so by means of mandatory DIE in academic annual reports.
… I had just learned that there would be a new aspect to our annual reports. We would be asked to tell our overlords how each one of our activities contributes to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Teaching? How did it advance DEI? Scholarship? How did it help speed DEI on its way? If you get an honor or an award, you are to say how it contributed to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Outside consulting: did it do any DEI duty? And what does the university mean by Diversity, by Equity, by Inclusion? The university doesn’t say. There are no official definitions out there to consider.
So I had a lot to tell my friend about administrative interference with academic freedom. I didn’t want the university deans and DEI enforcers setting the agenda for my teaching or my scholarship, or for anyone else’s. At the same time, I couldn’t really argue with my friend’s observation: the people in the dean’s office and the DEI enclaves are decent sorts. I like them…
DIE is one of those things that sounds nice and which no one should complain about, but which is in fact built on a lie. Edmundson, as a self-confessed Bernie Bro and literature professor, may lack the desire or the tools to prove it, but it remains the case. But I digress, because Edmundson does show some signs of detecting the over-reaching problem
The good people who came up with this notion are — without knowing it, I suspect — softly tyrannizing us. They are also softly tyrannizing themselves. And what they are up to isn’t only a university matter. It is happening in corporations, medical centers, primary and secondary schools, foundations, and NGOs. Surveillance and discipline, carried out almost exclusively by good people, are becoming pervasive.
Now again, we can perhaps question whether DIE bureaucrats are good people or not, but they undoubtedly see themselves as good people who are doing all this for our good. Moreover each one is a good little cog in a machine.
Instead, we find ourselves within a web of power whose influence is everywhere and whose center is nowhere. And who administers this power? Not the king, or the duke. And not even — this will matter in what’s coming — the president. Power is now administered by everyone in what we might call an administrative position. The ones who design, vet, and disseminate the mandatory work surveys; the ones who have a hand, or just a finger, in getting the annual reports out to the workforce, whether a faculty or a corporate population; they are the ones who evaluate the students for intelligence, grade them for performance, collect data on their likes and dislikes. These administrators of power include marketing people and advertising people and public relations people — all the people who count and characterize, and whose work manages to shape the lives of their subjects.
All these people — most of whom are no doubt good people — are watched and counted and measured in turn. Do some have more disciplinary power than others? Do some have more surveillance power? Maybe — but it probably doesn’t really feel that way to any individual. They are just doing their jobs. A certain amount of such bureaucratic calculation and observation is critical to the functioning of a mass society, certainly. Yet I think the collective effect of these jobs done by good people is more discipline. The collective effect is less freedom. One is observed more. One is judged more.
[… very very long …]
In truth, there is no center of power to take possession of. If Trump wins the next election, the forces of discipline, which are deployed by no one, in the interest of no one, will continue to compound themselves. The college-educated will get to push more of the buttons, but they too will be subjects of discipline, constantly evaluated, scrutinized, regimented, and regulated. At least they will feel as though they possess some power and some dignity. The non-college group, by contrast, will stroke many fewer keys and see that their lives are being run, though they will think they are being run by those goddam liberals, not by the disciplinary regime. They will not recognize the power that expands for its own sake and functions, finally, for nothing and no one. Its only interest is its own blind growth.
This is the problem. And this harks back to Brooks and the death of 1000 papercuts.
The real problem is that DIE is embedded in bureaucratic administration. Administration makes regulations, some of which (e.g. DIE discrimination ones) are bad and most of which are merely questionable, but which end up making it harder to get things done. See the rant above about documenting whether your job helped the DIE cause. DIE is just the cherry on the cake of red tape that is strangling productivity and creativity. But the key point is the thing that various UK Tory ministers called the blob is in charge. It’s the administrative stuff, some of it government bureaucrats, some of it NGOs/charities, some of it organizational HR departments and so on. Each one of them come up with an idea that adds just a little more straw to the camel’s back. DIE edicts are just the last few straws before the poor camel collapses.
Then there’s Richard Hanania’s recent post2 on why DIE wokism won’t kill safety, which is, IMHO, overoptimistic but in the middle recounts an incident where bureaucracy gratuitously makes things worse and no one can fix it. This is what happened when in the mid Obama era the FAA decided to unilaterally make a change in pilot hours required to qualify as a commercial airline pilot:
In this particular case, we have if anything too much “merit” when it comes to hiring pilots. The US used to require only 250 flying hours before an individual could earn their license. After a crash in 2009 that doesn’t appear to have had anything to do with the amount of training the pilots involved had received, they upped that number to 1,500, making the US a global outlier.
And this has of course had all sorts of bad effects. As the Forbes article he linked to points out, prior to the 1500 hour rule, pilots typically had about 500 hours when they first sat behind the controls on a commercial flight and they were mentored over the next 1000 or so by more experienced pilots. This system worked just fine, and is in fact the system still used everywhere except the US and commercial airliners do not fall out of the sky on a regular basis. But now, in the US, would-be pilots need 1500 hours before they can start which radically limits the pool of potential applicants and raises the cost because if not military they have pay for that 1500 hours of flight time out of their own pockets.
The problem is that the effects of this rule change take years to be noticed (most of a decade I believe in this case) by anyone outside of a few subject matter experts who get blown off because “it’s for the children” or whatever.
This is all, IMHO, an expansion of Parkinson’s Law of Bureaucracy
Parkinson’s Law of Triviality, also known as “bikeshedding,” is a phenomenon that occurs in organizations when a group of people spend a disproportionate amount of time discussing and making decisions about minor or insignificant details, while neglecting more important issues.
DIE is a classic bikeshed. It allows people of low competence and limited knowledge about the major subject manage to take up the time of others doing nothing of relevance. But because it is something even low competence people can have a viewpoint on they can argue about it, while decisions about the actual functiomn of the organization require rather more knowledge and competence so they shut up. See for example the Afrochemistry chick
Or the Johns Hopkins HR chick, though she may be just evil (or stupid, or both). Having said that she actually has a significant academic publishing record (far more significant than that of Gay, C – to pick a diversity hire at random) and many of them are about diabetes and seem (at a quick skim) to be reasonable. Mind you some appear to be less high quality:
Measuring Structural Racism and Its Association With BMI
Structural racism has attracted increasing interest as an explanation for racial disparities in health, including differences in adiposity. Structural racism has been measured most often with single-indicator proxies (e.g., housing discrimination), which may leave important aspects of structural racism unaccounted for. This paper develops a multi-indicator scale measuring county structural racism in the U.S. and evaluates its association with BMI.
etc. ad nauseam
I haven’t read the paper, but I’m pretty sure it’s blaming racism for African Americans being fat. Probably because African Americans are poor wittle children with no agency who are forced by the ebil white patriarchy to eat a poor diet and not get any exercise. I may be exaggerating, though I’m not sure because how else do we read the original explanation of ‘privilege’ that said that it was something white, male, cisgender, middle class people had. In other words male normies.
For the most part these people contribute nothing of value to their organization, but they need to justify their salaries and existence somehow so they attach themselves to the DIE bandwagon and play the RACISS card in order to show their power and authority.
And I have a slight tangent to insert here. A lot of the useless bureaucrats, both inside government and outside in corporate HR, NGOs etc., are “minorities” or “women” or were otherwise affirmative action/diversity hires picked for their original job mostly on the basis of their skin color, gender etc. with less concern for their ability to do a proper job. Originally there may have been a decent excuse for this, back in the 1960s/70s – which is, I remind you, HALF A CENTURY AGO – but that excuse should have been tossed some time in the 1980s or 90s. I don’t have statistics or indeed much beyond anecdata but I find it noteworthy that we are seeing the issue now as the affirmative action hires of 20-30 years ago, probably hired back then by other older affirmative action hires, now bubble up to the top of their organizations and then cock everything up in ways that cannot be swept under the carpet because they are the visible face of the organization (see Gay, C as the perfect example).
The other problem is that these people, who are in fact generally of less than stellar competence, have found that they can’t get jobs designing bridges or aircraft or computer games or indeed much else that requires actual intelligence and knowledge. Neither can their children [and yes ladies and gentlemen and little furry creatures from Alpha Centauri, IQ and executive function are in large part heritable characteristics, with another critical influence (not) being in a female single parent household]. This, they assume, has to be due to “structural racism” and/or “the patriarchy” because they can think of no other reason why precious darlings can’t get intellectually stretching jobs.
But returning to Brooks, DIE is just the visible tip of the iceberg that is the problem. The real problem is bureaucracy in general, the fact that people who have a real job to do must jump through pointless hoops of (electronic) paperwork before (or after) they can do what they need to do and they have to attend meetings and training sessions that at best waste their time and at worst actively assume they are all bigots in the process. Those who have a real need to solve have to navigate pointless levels of semi-automated phonetree or level 1 customer support people before they can talk to an actual human who has the power to fix their issue.
Or perhaps just the knowledge to tell them that the issue cannot be fixed with the current product because some idiot government efficiency mandate has made it at best semi-functional.
And going back to Hanania, the corrosion of woke may not have yet showed up in the statistics but it is certainly present in everyday life. I know, for example, of a number of people (some of them probably readers of this) who deliberately choose older white doctors as their primary care physician. Who likewise search for (generally older) male tradesmen for repairs and the like. And so on. They have made choices that mean they avoid the dangers of a woke diversity hire being involved in their life and harming them through incompetence (or malice). They tend to buy used older stuff or commercial stuff to evade idiotic energy etc. mandates that make their dishwashers at best semi-functional. Likewise many now fail to have flight cancellation issues or to be groped by the TSA because they no longer fly commercial airlines. Who no longer work for large corporations with DIE HR policies. Who no longer watch woke TV or read woke magazines. And so on.
The blob of bureaucracy is there and growing and it is absolutely making things worse. See dishwashers. And DIE.But DIE is as much a symptom of a bureaucracy that wants an excuse to expand as it is a cause.
Japan is different
In many ways Japan has skipped the general encrudification. Japan has a reputation as a pretty bureaucratic place and that is true, but the bureaucracy in Japan has not grown like it has in other places. Just as prices in yen have barely increased in 30 years, so too the bureaucratic load. Indeed in certain respects Japan has actually decreased the bureaucratic load – various pointlessly low speed limits have been removed, for example, and (after some teething troubles) the entry process at airports has been significantly streamlined post wuflu with everything done via a website/app that you show to the nice immigration or customs agent.
[Note that you still need to queue but that’s due to the volume of tourists seeking to enjoy Japan as a cheap, safe tourist destination. Also as someone who once bought the most expensive beer of his life in Tokyo I find putting the words cheap and Japan in the same sentence to be bizarre, though it is true.]
Flying domestically in Japan is not as good as it was in the US in the 1990s when you could board your plane 15 minutes after parking your car, but it’s also not the hour plus long gropathon that is the current TSA experience – unless you fly at peak periods but then proportionally the time is less than US equivalent peak periods. Moreover you don’t have to show photo ID, you don’t need to take your shoes off and you can carry bottles of booze (or microphone stands) in your carry on bags.
In healthcare there has been no Obamacare and thus no requirement that your health insurance support this or that fashionable thing. You get to choose your own doctor or hospital and for the most part you and your doctors determine your treatment plan without having healthcare bureaucrats – either government or corporate – arguing over whether it is appropriate. The price will generally be clear too, as is what you will be expected to bear as copay, and if you don’t like it you can ask another clinic if they’ll do it for less.
In some areas – e.g. construction – Japan is actually notably freer than other countries. Zoning rules are much broader, buildings just need to meet safety standards (which is likely one reason why the recent 7.6 magnitude Noto quake killed less than 300 people total) and anyone can turn their home into a shop or other small business (or vice versa) with no way for a government busybody to stop it. Noah Smith had a recent article about the “California Forever” new city project3, where he mentions the zonings for mixed use residential / commercial / light-business as a positive but any Japanese bureaucrat would be scratching his head and wondering why this was special.
It is true that large Japanese companies remain horribly bureaucratic places where mediocre performance does not necessarily lead to lower pay or slower promotion, but they have not got worse, except for a notably increased propensity for wearing face masks post wuflu. If it took a year to make a decision in, say, 1995, it takes a year to make the same decision today. There’s no additional friction and just as in 1995 once the decision has been made it is implemented promptly.
As well as masks there are mutterings about “eshicaru” this and that and “essudeijiizu” (ethical and SDGs) but in general this is froth. In part this is because even government bureaucrats mostly believe in customer service. Yes Japan has plenty of mostly pointless bureaucratic stuff to do but as long as you stay on the track of everyone else the process is clearly documented and you carry bits of paper from bureaucrat A to B to … and end up with the permit to do what ever it was. Indeed if you expect to deviate from the standard track but tell a bureaucrat first, the bureaucrat will likely help you fill in the right forms / provide the right supporting documentation etc. and all will be fine.
Aside: Japanese bureaucracy only gets nasty when you don’t get prior approval and then act all huffy about it. It’s much, much better to ask for permission than forgiveness and if you did fail to get permission, an attitude of deference bordering on groveling will often result in you being let off with a warning as long as you write your apology letter properly.
The Solution
It is unclear how to solve this problem without mass disruption. In fact it may be hard to solve it even with mass disruption. But the key to the solution is to take an axe to the entire bureaucracy not just the twigs that are DIE and ESG. Almost certainly the Milei approach is required. A chainsaw that cuts down branches and all the ivy, brambles and other overgrowth.
The key to recall is that Parkinson’s law is a ratchet on the bureaucracy, so you have to both repeal 80% of the regulations AND fire (at least) 90% of the bureaucrats. Do not reassign them, just fire them. There are almost certainly entire government departments (Education, HUD…) that can be entirely replaced by a small outsourced call center, if that. Others, the EPA comes to mind, need to be pruned radically and have most regulations in the last 25 years revoked. The FDA, FAA, SEC etc. probably need more careful pruning but I’m sure that a significant reduction in regulations and manpower will be easily achieved.
And so on.
How to choose which bureaucrats to remove? Well a simple first wave is everyone that has showed up to the office fewer than three days a week in the last year, call it under 150 days in total. That’s likely to be about 75% of the government bureaucracy. And if that impacts other bureaucracies than the ones that need to be cut then those get more firings as required.
Once the government bureaucrats are fired, the next is to go after the NGOs that get government funding. Simply pass a law that no non-profit can receive government funds. Most of them will be doing useless things like DIE training so there’s no loss. Of course if you word this right that will include most of the universities. That’s probably a positive, but it may be necessary to include carveouts for actual scientific research, but it seems reasonable to require that universities that accept research funds comply with a few rules that will likely remove some of the faculty as well. It is probably beyond the (federal) government to remove administrators but state governments almost certainly can for state funded universities. There probably ought to be a maximum non faculty staff number/ratio to undergraduates that is approximately the number of such staff in 1999.
Some sample rules
(Undergraduate) entry requirements must be objective and compliant with US non-discrimination laws, Supreme court rulings etc., with subjective choices only taking place in the case of objective ties.
Any researcher who receives government funds and fails to produce sufficient raw data/methods to enable replication shall be required to repay the funds. If the research doesn’t have any raw data/methods it isn’t research and shall also not be acceptable
After that the chainsaw needs to go to corporate HR departments. Almost certainly the lack of required regulations to comply with (thanks to the chainsaw above) will help most organizations decide to remove chunks of HR drones in the interests of larger bonuses for CxOs because of greater profits. But a stick, in the form of a reminder that US non-discrimination laws, Supreme court rulings etc. mean that diversity hiring is generally illegal and could open the company up for prosecution would probably help.
If the US is lucky, the next US president will take a leaf out of the Milei book. In other countries it may be too late.
Since 1933 and the rise to prominence of FDR, America has been an occupied country, governed by a ruling class that hates the nation’s older way of life and wants to see America on the side of the global revolutionary Left. This is why FDR’s administration was filled with communists and the American government gave $300 billion to the USSR in its existential war of survival against the fascists. America did not remain neutral in that conflict because the American ruling class was explicitly on the side of the communists.
I mean, he’s wrong insofar as, well two things:
First, this started under Wilson, which paved the way to FDR. Second, well, being on the side of the Nazis wouldn’t have improved anything. And staying out might not be possible. But the thing is not only did we aid the USSR in war, but we continued aiding it. It was when that help was removed and pressure added by Reagan that it collapsed. But it was barely surviving before. Communist countries can’t survive without aid.
He’s also right absolutely that all of our upper echelons of everything, even those that are supposed to be on the side of the right and the good are corrupt and if not explicitly communist are implicitly so: this is true of everything from grocery chains to churches and yes, the army too.
This was accomplished by corrupting the universities way back in the early 20th century. Communists were seen as not just the wave of the future, but also “just” and “fair” and wanting the best for others. What it meant in practical terms is that universities which run on virtue signaling and are ever willing to embrace of virtue that requires no sacrifice went into it with both feet. Being a commie became “just smart”. There was a brief period of confusion, because the USSR fell. For about a blink they didn’t know what to do or why. And then they realized their networks were still in place and they could do what they’d always done. BTW more or less the same happened in Russia, only it couldn’t get its vassals back without active US help. It’s been trying to ever since. They want the USSR back. And if you say “Oh, but they’re nationalists” I’ll tell you they always were. The “international” in socialism was a ruse. It was always Russian Nationalism Everywhere. Just every other country was supposed to bow to Russia. Seriously, if you were in one of the countries it was doing its best to swallow this was painfully — literally — obvious. Russia swallowed communism as a vehicle for its expansion. The idiot US commies swallowed communism as “Russia is our model.” Bah.
Anyway, you could tell the moment the academics went back to doing what they always did and being part of the brain dead commie net. There stopped being discussions about the plight of Russia and how badly off they were left. There was no more mention of the horrors that happened under communism. Hell, even in Germany, with living proof of how bad it was in their midst, the talk stopped, and eventually the komissars started getting elected again, because communism was just “smart you know” and definitely the way of the future.
When the universities are corrupted, in a society soaked in credentialism, means that every one of the upper echelons that require the right credentials are corrupted.
In theory at least.
Except something happened on the way to the glorious communist revolution. It met America. And America never behaves as expected.
So we didn’t let them convince us we needed a revolution. We ignored the propaganda. The basic programming of America won out over the indoctrination, and the fact that communism was “cool”. Most people parroted the lines we had to to stay okay socially, or to climb the social ladder. To move ahead. But we still lived as Americans where it counted. And the attitude that we’re never poor only temporarily embarrassed millionaires is with all of us. Which means we make lousy revolutionaries. We certainly make lousy communists.
To convince our young people they’re socialists, the left has had to define socialism as everything that is done in a group, from schools to roads, as though those hadn’t worked under every single regime since the Romans, or probably the Egyptians, long before Karl Marx’s misbegotten birth.
The truth, guys is that it took them too long. It took them too long to institute the glorious dictatorship of the proletariat. It took them past the fall of the USSR. It took them till the system put in place by FDR has slowly decayed, till it’s falling apart visibly. Till the internet exists and we know that we’re not alone. We know it doesn’t work. We know. Everyone knows.
And the fourth generation of of leftists, promoted just because they’re leftists, are so totally incompetent, they actually drink their own ink and are trying to institute DEI, and hire the mentally ill to fly planes and–
And with all that, with complete control of all the institutions, the only way they could seize the Federal government in the US was by cheating. By cheating huge, in front of G-d and everyone. Yeah, the cheating was more subtle in 22, but it was still visible, if you knew how to look.
Even having full control of the levers of government, all they can do is stomp their little hooves and say “obey my authoritah” while the American people say “Nah, bro, we’re fine.” They managed to lockdown, through immense effort, and through fooling the entire world. But they aren’t doing it again. Heaven knows they’re trying. And they’ll probably do completely crazy things from here on.
But here’s the thing: Everything they do sours and turns out wrong.
What they are trying to do is akin to trying to build the Berlin wall while people are ripping out chunks of it and driving off in their ladas and trabants. Driving off, as far and as fast as they can, until they hit the ocean.
I’m not saying we’ll win this year. The fraud is so deep and thick, it might be impossible. It doesn’t exempt us from trying. But be aware we’re fighting against a tide of fraud and corrupt information streams.
But–
They can’t win. Not the elections, but in installing a communist regime here. Everything they do turns wrong and upside down.
And eventually we win. Eventually. Now this might not be in our time. History doesn’t move at the pace we want it. I think it will be in our time. But if it’s not, it’s not the end of the world. Just the end of us, but the world goes on.
It is our duty, it is our very great privilege to do everything we can, in every way we can to thwart their putrid and horrible vision for our country and the world. Voting, sure. But more importantly opposing them every day, in every way we can.
After everything they threw at us, the American people went out and voted against them in 2020 so hard that their fraud had to be obvious.
And that was at the end of just about a hundred years of work — slow crawling through the institutions — to throw us over.
They still haven’t done it. We’re still standing.
And we’ll be here long after they’re gone. Oh, maybe not us as individuals, but America will.
Be not afraid. Keep being American.
*Truth in advertising. The first half of this post was written in September 2023. I’m fairly unslept and dealing with getting the pipe repaired. So I couldn’t write an entire post. But I could finish one. I say this, so if there are inconsistencies, you know why. – SAH*
The Good, The Bad and the Eternal a blast from the past from 4/20/2018
So recently some twitter twit, of whom I’ve never heard in the whole course of my days took it upon herself to put down both John Ringo’s work and mine (I’m still not sure at all why I was pulled into this, except that I gall them by existing and not falling in line.)
Those of you who have read both of us might go “What do these two things have in common?” I don’t know, but since this was was on a twitter thread where it was also proclaimed that we wanted people like the writer to die, you have to take it with a grain of salt. I don’t think I’ve ever consciously desired anyone’s death, though I’ve been known to wish plagues of locusts or the like against people who are annoying me. The person then back-peddled and said that the policies we support means people like him/her/zyr would die. This is a puzzler. The only policies I know of that cause people to die are derived from Marxism — 100 million and counting! — so I believe Xer was misinformed. Maybe Syr read too fast and missed the “anti” prior to Marxist. Or maybe the uninformed keyboard strummer really believes all that stuff about you know, not paying for contraceptives is the same as banning them. Maybe zyr believes that if we don’t actually lovingly spoon mush into zyr’s mouth, and pay for it too we want zyr to starve..
However, it was the comment on our writing that amused me the most. Look, I enjoy the heck out of some of Ringo’s books, but it took me a while to get into them, just because his plot structure is so different from mine. I used a very classically ordered plot. He doesn’t. Took me a while to realize no, it wasn’t just formless. And because I’m a writer, it drove me nuts, looking for the pattern, and it wasn’t until I figured out what thread he was following that I could relax and enjoy it.
It’s the same problem I had watching Japanimation with the boys. Their concepts of story are so different from ours that on first exposure, it doesn’t fit well.
So, is John Ringo a good writer? Uh. You know, I listened to the Black Tide series, in audio book, while fixing our previous house for sale. We had been delayed putting it for sale because I’d had major surgery and been so ill, and we were renting elsewhere and running out of money. On top of that everything that could go wrong did, from younger son stepping on a nail and putting it through his foot, to it raining continuously while we were doing repairs outside.
You’d think it was a depressing series to listen to, while doing that, but the thing is, as bleak as much of it is, there is a hint of unquenchable human spirit a surging tide of hope (eh) throughout the book, and you actually feel uplifted by this.
I have, for my sins, a degree in literature (actually literatures, which is a word in Portugal, because I had to study the national literature of every language I studied. My degree is in Languages and Literatures, formally.) If you ask me if John’s work is literature, the only thing I can tell you is that it’s not “literary” which is its own separate genre and requires a certain playfulness with words, and a certain obscuring of meaning which he doesn’t bother with.
But is it literature? Well, literature and literary have bloody nothing to do with each other. Literature, in the sense of the stuff you study in school, is stuff that either has survived the test of centuries to speak to those yet unborn when it was written. Yeah, there’s also modern literature and that tends to be “literary and guessing” and most of it — thank heavens– will be mercifully forgotten if not mocked by our descendants.
That contemporary stuff is picked by literature professors on very specific characteristics. Some of it is just confusion. Because the old stuff we study tends to have a level of opaqueness in language, (because of the time when it was written and the evolution of language) they tend to assume that opaque meaning means “literary.” In the same way because we study the old books according to the current fads, we tend to study the old books according to the prejudices of our time: that is to say through a social-classes, struggle, anti-authority, and other Marxist distorting lens. Thus Pride and Prejudice becomes about female oppression and money, when well… no, it wasn’t about that except very marginally and at the edges. And what they do to Shakespeare is unforgivable.
But because we view the immortal literature through those lenses, we’ve created an entire set of books, an entire genre (and subgenres of other genres) that tries to emulate those characteristics, and is both purposely difficult to read and, at the same time, filled with the prejudices of our time, and the cause du jour.
I am glad to report that nothing of Ringo’s I read fits in those two characteristics.
Does this make it bad? Good Lord no. It moves the emotions, which is what any good writer should do. He also has an amazing amount of logic and world building buried sometimes beneath action and a few jokes.
So, am I a bad writer? Heaven only knows. People in general don’t seem to believe so. Yeah, little Damian lately of the Guardian thought I was, but that’s because I a) used first person, which is apparently a “marker” of bad writing (wouldn’t a lot of immortal writers be shocked.) and b) didn’t engage in pretty-wordage. He might have been shocked if he read my first published novel, the one which was a finalist for the Mythopoeic.
And that’s part of it. Am I a bad writer? Well, if you equate a certain style with “bad” I’ve written some very bad books. If you equate a certain style with “good” I’ve written a few good ones too.
Even if you judge them as I do, as “books that are immersive and cause you to experience powerful emotions” I’ve written good and bad books, both. Every writer does. My favorite authors all wrote some pot boilers and then some brilliant stuff. Our books aren’t just the product of our minds, and whatever idea we had. They’re the product of our state at the time. When a book is due and I’m sick, or preoccupied with something else, it’s not going to be as good as it could otherwise be. And yet, often, those are the most successful ones.
This is why I try not to pronounce on other people’s books. I can tell you what I don’t like and what I like, and I can say if there are factual errors in a book, or even errors of narrative (like the person who kept signaling their character was a tall male, while she was supposed to be a small female.)
Most of the time, though? Most of the time, the worst thing I can say about a book is “I couldn’t get into it.” If after page five I just don’t feel any reason to read on, I can’t tell you why, but the book isn’t getting a second chance. Now, are these ever ideological? Rarely. Only if the politics comes at it out of place. A long diatribe about current politics in a future book, particularly naming names, will pop me out.
But usually it’s far more subtle than that. Usually it’s just “this just doesn’t interest me.” And sometimes, mind you, I personally like the author as an individual. The book just fails to interest me, and since I’ve reached the age when I’m aware my remaining reading time is finite, off it goes.
Sometimes mind you, this is situational. I might be unable to get into a book at a time when I’m ill or stressed, then find it completely immersive three months later, when I stumble on it again. Similarly, I might love a book, then go back 20 years later and wonder why.
So I might say things like “I haven’t read it” or “couldn’t get into it” or even “I don’t like it” or “It depressed me.” But I rarely say “it’s a bad book” PARTICULARLY if it’s a book by someone whose ideology I despise. Because, you know, I’m aware that they’re rubbing me wrong on the ideological front, and therefore I might not appreciate their good points, or even their great qualities. Because I’m human.
Will some of those books I couldn’t get into go on to become immortal literature of our time? Probably. Statistically speaking, at least one of them should.
Don’t I feel bad about it and like I should like it? No. Why should I. What I like is what I like. What I consider good is what works on me at the moment. Writing and story telling being such a personal art, aiming at evoking not just an emotion but a series of them in the reader, I can only tell you “this was good for me now.” And if it works many times over years, like Heinlein or Pratchett, I’ll tell you “this is just good.” But it’s always for me, and through my lens.
Do I have any idea what works will be immortal? What will resonate with future generations? Ah! No. I’d be surprised if at least some of Pratchett and some of Heinlein didn’t make it. I think it’s quite likely some of Ringo will make it. And I think it’s unlikely to the point of making me snort-giggle any of my stuff will make it.
What about the stuff the SJWs write? Will any of it make it?
Some might. Just because someone is objectively mistaken and in need of dried frog pills, it doesn’t mean they aren’t touched by the divine spark that makes something immortal. An that spark makes you forgive a million bad points.
The one thing I can say for sure is that they don’t know what will make it any more than I do. And their attempts to get people to stop reading us because we’re “objectively bad” only mark them as kindergartners, repeating what they heard teacher say, without actually understanding.
As they usually tell us about drugs and the more outre sexual explorations “How do you know you won’t like it till you try it?”
“When any government, or church for that matter, undertakes to say to it’s subjects, this you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motive.” – Robert A. Heinlein.
And that goes double for half-baked keyboard warriors pronouncing a holy ban on things they admit they never read.
Pfui. Only children and savages are afraid of the written word to the point of condemning it unread.
We are given a certain time and a certain number of books that allow us to experience someone else’s mind. Sure, a lot of those minds I won’t like, or more likely won’t interest me.
But there are minds that interest me and which are vibrant and alive in all sides of the political spectrum. And I’d be a fool to deny myself the pleasure of those immersive books just because their authors are politically deranged.
As for trying to guess which books the future will admire, and which it will praise, and trying to read them today? Who cares? When that future arrives you’ll be long dead. Do you need approval so desperately that you must have people you’ll never meet retrospectively endorse your choices? I don’t.
The future can like what it likes. And I can like what I like. And if the future likes something else, that’s fine. I doubt I’ll care.
Read. Read whatever you like. Enjoy what you enjoy, hate what you hate. But do not condemn books unread, because that’s a waste of time and mind.
At times we’re all afraid of the future. Sometimes this is actually rational.
For instance, it’s 2024, and an election year. And we know what the fun, zany “experts” who have infested every institution and bureaucracy cooked up in 2020. The near future looks clown world, with a high possibility of crazy cakes, and the possibility of a squall of kinectic passing through where any of us lives, at any time.
If you’re not scared, you’re not paying attention. Or you’re lulled to a false sense of normalcy by the droning of the MSM and haven’t realized they lie with every tooth in their mouths.
This is what’s known as a rational fear.
But there are fears that are not rational. Whether or not you believe the government’s recent “admissions” (Splorch, giggle) that there are aliens and the government has touched the sky seen them, living with a dread fear of being kidnapped by an alien and anal-probed is not rational.
Even if it were possible, even if it had happened here and there, the incidence is so small the chance of it happening to you as you go about your lawful occasions is somewhat less than zero.
And then there is a pervasive, all penetrating fear of things changing.
I’ve noticed, sometime ago, that the left routinely accuses us of fearing change. Of course, the change they identify is not a change anyone is really afraid of, because…. well, it’s not a change. Take the late kerffufle in science fiction, for instance. We were accused of being afraid of “Women and people of color writing science fiction.”
This is outright in your face clown world, when you consider how many of us pissed off at log-rolling within a small clique were either women or minorities. But it’s even more clown world, because the minorities and women have always written science fiction. Or in fact whatever the heck they wanted to.
Look, bub, when I was sending out manuscripts, in the days before the internet, all they knew was my name on the manuscript. Yes, my name — all of them, as it happens — was female. But yes, of course, I experimented with initials. it made no appreciable difference. And anyone reading the story didn’t know if I was blond, or dark-sand-colored (guilty) or in fact purple with tentacles. Also, no one particularly cared. I might have had a leg up if I had a cool truly exotic name Smokes With Clouds Littlebottom or Purple Tentacles Blopfog but not so much because cool name sounded ethnic, but because cool name would be remembered. So if I were sending things in, say, every week, it would be noticed I was trying really hard, and it might have got a slightly more charitable reading. (Unless it were truly stupendously horrific, in which case it would get circular-filed with malice.)
Yes, I know, when one was starting out it felt like the universe was against us. And since it took me about 4 times the average 3 years to break into pro — many reasons, some of them being the fact that I tend to go at things backwards and sideways, which provides a unique perspective, but is not the most efficient method — I KNOW that feeling intimately. From the inside. It didn’t help that sometimes you got your story back (back in the day when printing was expensive, and you had to take it somewhere to daisy-wheel print, because they didn’t accept dot-matrix print outs. Yes, I know they were hard to read, but it was also a socio-economic filter) looking like it had been stepped on multiple times with malice.
I suspect it was easy for someone who — and this was already true in the 80s — had been indoctrinated into victimhood and into thinking that everyone was against him/her due to color or sex or sexual orientation, to assume only he/she/it was this badly treated.
But actually we all were. It was a market with a million would be suppliers and room for maybe ten people per month. To make it worse, as I found out when I was briefly an editor of a bottom wrung magazine, the million submissions had a solid 750 thousand, at least, that were absolutely abysmally bad. Because I was young and stupid, I read the whole thing, instead of quitting at the first couple of horrific paragraphs. And it never got better. Most of them read like a kid retelling a Saturday morning cartoon, or an indistinct dream. Some were pamphlets for some kind of ideology, but you often couldn’t tell what the ideology was even.
However the hardest was the quarter million that were good. Sometimes very good. Here you had six slots, and you were paying nothing. How do you choose? And if you choose you’re using this brilliant story’s first shot at publication. And it’s not like the author will get a credit that is worth much. Might have negative value.
Anyway, so, not only didn’t the editors have a chance of knowing what you were — unless you informed them. A not inconsiderable minority of cover letters told me the author’s race, sex and sexual orientation. Which seems to me would be particularly stupid if they thought themselves discriminated against — but also it didn’t matter, because most stories (including my early ones. Granted not cartoon retellings, but extremely peculiar.) were rejected with extreme prejudice because they sucked. Badly.
The only thing that gave you an advantage was knowing someone on the inside, which is why the field was incestuous. (Still is, as far as trad pub.)
But beyond that, women and minorities had always been in science fiction. If they were less represented, it was for cultural reasons, not because of discrimination. (As a geekling girl, I’d have given my right arm for female friends who were as much into science fiction as I was, but even my friendly geekling girls didn’t read that “weird stuff.” It was all either romances or, for the branier ones, history and philosophy and such. Or “Literary” stuff. Because Science Fiction had no prestige. We were the pimply guy in the corner, while women preferred to run off with the son of the mayor — Literary — or fool around with the bad boy — romance — so there was no chance. I just got used to being part of groups of guys, some much older than I.)
Anyway, there was actually no change happening. To the extent there had been change, with a great courting of female readers and writer, that was in the seventies with wholesale traipsing into fantasy. By the eighties the process was almost complete. By the time I broke in, in the late nineties, the publishing field: writers, editors, publishers, even readers, was primarily female. That it was females screaming that they were being discriminated against for being females was something that none of them found funny, so I never pointed it out. It reminds me of this. It was all very cool and edgy to be a woman in science fiction. If you were 20 or 30 years earlier, that is.
Which is sort of the left’s schtick. It’s much easier to fight battles that are already won, of course. And much more satisfying to speak power to truth than the other way around.
But I started noticing this was being shouted in the face of anyone at all who complained or tried to change anything at all in our crazy, ossified institutions. “You’re just a white male scared because you’re being replaced by superior and more able women and minorities.”
The fact that black female friends got this shouted in their faces is something else, but– leaving that aside: since this is deployed everywhere and at all times, as “you’re afraid of the future,” and since the left projects like an IMAX, I started looking around and going “uh.”
Look, being afraid of the future is natural, particularly when you live in a time of catastrophic change. Catastrophic change is so called because it is so rapid that things change suddenly and unpredictably and is experienced like a flood or a hurricane, destroying the landscape you know. EVEN WHEN THE CHANGE IS FOR THE BETTER.
Humans aren’t geared for a high rate of change, for the simple reason that for most of our evolution when things changed rapidly it was a catastrophe and limited in time duration — war, flood, hurricane, fire — and then things went back to changing very slowly. In fact, cultures and tradition are designed to keep things from changing vertiginously. It’s a minor miracle we’re not all still in the fertile crescent, scratching at the ground with a stick.
But the type of change we’re really not geared to is the type of change that affects your every day life, in every aspect. That’s the kind of thing great mythological sagas were written about. ”And then the world was covered in ice, and–“ because even catastrophes were usually on the macro scale, but not the micro. You still ate about the same thing, cooked over the same fire. You still wrapped your babies the same way, sang them the same songs, rubbed the same salve on their gums for teething issues, etc, even if you were doing it while running away from fire or flood.
Then the 20th century. Boy, howdy! Innovation came fast and furious. People born in a time when the horse-pulled carriage was the height of transportation might (and most did) have grown up to fly in airplanes in late middle age. The “it’s always been so” suddenly wasn’t. Those very important markers of status and class, that all apes rely on, were suddenly upended, then upended again, and then yet again.
And the 21st century came in roaring like a geek boy who just can’t leave his toys alone without improving them every other week.
While the change in my life has not been as shocking as that in my father’s, it has been, really as total, just in a more close-in, personal scale. Look, when I was young, I had pen pals in America (technically to improve my English. Actually because I could send my mind here, part time.) Getting them was a pain involving several dedicated organizations (probably run by one little old lady in a basement), and continuing the correspondence involved a slow exchange over unreliable mail (on my end at least) and a wait of weeks for a question to be answered. These days, I can and do talk to friends across the world by sitting at my social-media computer and firing up one of many programs that allows me to talk to them more or less instantly, either voice or text, and it costs nothing. (When I was first married, and my parents were anxious, the phone bills on either side of the Atlantic were epic.)
Then there is the nineties, only — checks — 30 years ago. My kids, born in the nineties are now in his thirties, and almost in his 30s. I don’t know how much they remember of our early “family vacations.” In Denver, which to us back then was an hour and a half away. We usually went up for a weekend, stayed two nights at the Embassy Suites in the tech center (Cheap on the weekends, since they catered for business travelers. And listen, the advantages of a single room that allowed you to put the kids in another room with a door that closed should not be underestimated) which our younger kid at one point referred to as “our Denver home.” This happened twice a year or so, three times if we were flush. We’d do the museums, the zoo and, in the early days, hit as many used bookstores as we could, because the used bookstores in the Springs were no great shakes, or were thoroughly mined by us on a regular basis. (Four corners and Poor Richards, downtown.)
Getting to the bookstores, or for that matter any restaurant we’d never been to before, or any attraction we didn’t have a pamphlet for, involved getting out the phone book and the map, and plotting a course. And we took the — hotel’s — phonebook with us in the car, so that if we got lost we could stop at a phone booth and call the place and ask how to get there.
All of this sounds like alien maneuvers to my kids, now. You get in the car, look up the thing in your GPS (only not ours. We have to use the phone. For reasons known only to itself, our GPS is convinced we only want to look up things in Montana. It knows where we are. When you put an address in, it directs you correctly. But obviously if we want to go to Hobby Lobby it’s one in some city in Montana. No, the car has never been in Montana, at least not according to its history. I guess it’s pining for the Fjords altitude.) set the course and go.
There have been myriad such changes, including the fact that applications for jobs are all via applications, some of which seem to be mal-functioning in odd ways. And all of which require “keywords” which, as with publishing, are arcane magic, understood by no one but a minority of marketing brains. (And now increasingly AI, which is why wordpress suggests keywords for my posts that range somewhere between laugh-outloud and WHAT?)
And a lot of occupations have changed and turned upside down since people started, but more so in the last 10 years or so.
I’m not going to argue that the so called “elites” haven’t done dirt to the rest of us. They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe, sent jobs abroad, for cheaper labor and fewer regulations. They inflicted regulations on this great land that make it near impossible to start a business or make an honest buck. They are now trying to take away anything that works, from appliances, to food production. And in the name of making it so that the future is female (what the heck crazy slogan is that?) they are destroying our young men and older male teens, not realizing that also destroys females, because humans don’t live in a vacuum. Frankly the fact we still shamble on, even if greatly hampered, is a minor miracle.
But I am going to argue, as justifiable as it is to be scared of whatever the heck they’ll think up to do to us next, we are less fearful than they are, and have less reason to be. The reason is the same one as usual: We, Odds and Nonconformists who hang out on this blog, including the one on this side of the screen, are more flexible and adaptable, and ready to make the best of what we can, while seeing the problems and trying to fix them. I think growing up not fitting anywhere, while uncomfortable, makes it easier to adapt to catastrophic change.
And I’m going to argue part of the reason for the horrible things that are inflicted on us is the left-elite’s panic-fear of the future, of change, of things being different.
First and foremost, they’re terrified of losing their lefty privilege. I’m convinced somewhere, deep inside, beneath the synapses stuck on talking about what brave fighters and allies (most of them aren’t actual minorities — not the vocal ones –) they are, they are very aware of having been given breaks and pushed ahead due to espousing positional-good-leftist-views. They know that most of them are no more qualified for whatever position of power and/or respect they have than my cat. And certainly not more qualified than all the “unpopular” or less sightly people passed over.
And they’re scared the system will be upended. Dry mouth/clenched fists scared. They are all in for “minorities” and “women” taking over, because, of course, that change is predicted in all their “expert” theories and everything they learned from earliest schooling. So, it’s almost reassuring, you know. It’s “according to the prophecies.”
But their job suddenly changing, or going overseas or whatever that is unexpected, and terrifying. So, it’s easier to send other people’s jobs overseas, to be done in the same old way but cheaper, than say to install automation and to have things change completely, and have to learn new skills to manage.
More importantly, they’re terrified of this hypothetical future where all jobs go way, and you just have to deal with all this population, that simply aren’t smart enough to do anything else. This of course, requires that you consider yourself the pinnacle of human evolution and also be dumb enough about history not to figure out that if jobs were ever going to go completely away it would already have happened.
You have to not be aware that once upon a time all humans scratched at the soil from sun to sun to get a bare subsistence and that now only 2% work in agriculture, while the entire multitude of us is fed perhaps too abundantly. (Eyes midriff.)
You have to not be aware that buggy whip makers didn’t starve when horse transportation went away. And that people who did computations by hand didn’t starve when computers came in. But oh, for the plight of the typewriter repairman! Seriously.
Yes, in all the great changes, some people simply can’t adapt, and are unemployed forever, or become depressed and bitter, but they’re by far the minority. Usually people — absent the generous subsidies of a government run by the left who again is sure “surplus humans with no function” are a direct result of innovation — adapt and innovate some more to find a niche. Most of our close personal circle have had three or four completely different skilled jobs in the last 40 years. And many of those have nothing to do with their degrees. Also, some came from a hobby they had while working their first job years ago.
The left can’t conceptualize this. Even when they, themselves, do it, they’re convinced other people (yes, yes, particularly other races, because they’re arrant racists) can’t do it, and therefore must be kept in the dim servitude of the government dole, just enough to keep them quiet, and not enough to give them any freedom, and always having to reapply and go through bureaucracy. Or of course be given “government jobs” many of which are a sort of sinecure like FDRs job corps, which do and undo the same thing over and over.
The truth is that if you don’t do stupid laws and regulations — say, Oregon’s forbidding the pumping of one’s own gas (Will no one think of all the now very old gas station attendants on the corner, with a sign saying “please give” in all other states?) — and don’t swathe the economy in welfare and more welfare, and don’t create make-work jobs, as innovation displaces people, people find other ways and new things to do, or even new ways to do the same job.
I say this as someone who has been assured that AI will write my novels better in the near future (Splorch, giggle. No, do go ahead. Bah) and that this thing I have to do for some reason I don’t even understand can be done better and I’ll be unemployed forevah! Only I can see ways — if I didn’t enjoy the process — how it could make my life easier, or at least stop the long, depressive silences, if nothing else by driving me batty. (Yes, that works. No don’t get any ideas. If clownworld hasn’t done it yet!)
And I say this precisely at the dawn of AI, when the left is convinced their veddy veddy important jobs, all with nose in the air and mysterious and caballistic procedures, like, oh, news reporter, are going away.
They’re losing their minds. If they balk at all sorts of innovation, things that threaten their function — even more than their jobs — directly are even more terrifying.
The people who have made an entire scaremongering movement out of wanting the weather to be exactly as they remember for childhood forever, are not going to allow innovation of any kind. Much less innovation that might free other people to be inventive and foster most innovation. Nooooo.
The only kind of innovation they’re ready for is the one that’s already happened, and that they’re sure people who are not them — those “uneducated white males” they are sure are lurking in the dark and plotting against them, –fear. That “innovation” is fine because it isn’t, and it’s under their control anyway as powerful “allies.”
But real innovation? Things happening that they haven’t foreseen or authorized? Noooo. Don’t you dare move their cheese.
They will go to any lengths, seize as much power as they need to, silence as many voices as they need to, kill as many people as they need to, destroy as many things and nations as they need to so that they remain in control and no changes happen that they dislike.
They have only 3 problems:
1-The current situation is highly unstable, and changes will happen, anyway, and probably rather fast and in the near future.
2- Their attempts to follow their learned script (China, Russia, Cuba) don’t and can’t account for the new and vast territory, or for the fact their end-system never worked and was subsidized by free nations to even subsist.
3- They are so terrified of change that they can never plot second and third order consequences from anything they do or impose from above. And lately –oh, forever, but particularly lately, because they’re exceptionally unqualified, being 4th generation; and because the situation is highly unstable — everything they do tends to turn around and bite them in the fleshy part of the ass, by creating a lot more “unforeseen change” and making things more unstable. (See, lockdowns. Or vaccines. Or installing Brandon. Or–)
Hold on to the side of the boat. Things are going to go very topsy turvy and of necessity, probably dangerous.
Be aware this situation is global, and weirder abroad, because we can’t fully understand the implications of their culture without deep study no one is making.
Stay flexible. Even for those of us who are older, that’s not exactly difficult. Because if you never fit anywhere, you can sort of fit everywhere.
And most of all, be not afraid. Let them be afraid. We have a future to get to.
If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo,please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months(unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH
When his client is railroaded in a DC court, Sam Lapidos decides to give up the practice of law and renew his long dormant interest in exploring nature. His maiden journey into the woods miscarries when an assassin tries to kill him. His friends rally to his defense and gather in his home. His attackers develop their own conflicts, as incompetence, confusion and dissension rile their ranks. What happens next is known only to the author and his readers.
Joe has a problem. It’s summer vacation, and all his friends are unavailable. One moved away, another is sick and the others are all gone for some reason or another. In desperation Joe looks for his uncle, who makes a suggestion that he build himself a fort, and even volunteers the space and materials for it. But Joe has other ideas. He doesn’t want a simple fort; he wants a spaceship! There’s just one problem with that. He built it too convincingly ….
The deadly planet of Sumire continues to hold secrets. Lyndi of the Space Patrol must make an arrest, before the threatening dust storm arrives. Her partner is a man she can’t trust, whose name she doesn’t even know. Racing against time, and the threat of the Djinn, they might not make it…
The end is coming.Unlucky jerk Tom Beadle was on watch at NASA when the collision alert sounded: a new asteroid, bigger than the dino-killer, headed for Earth. Big problem, but that’s why we have NASA, right? Except, after decades of budget cuts, NASA has no way to shove it off course. That job has to be contracted out. Will the private sector company his best friend from college works at succeed where the government option failed? Might be best to have a backup plan, just in case…
Endings always hurt, but Vitali Grigorenko never expected a nightmare in orbit.
Assigned to command the last flight of the orbiter Baikal, Vitali had started the mission in a nostalgic mood. That went out the airlock when he saw the body tumbling through space just beyond the flight deck windows. A body in NASA blue, not Russian tan.
Now he’s trying to get to the bottom of a murder in space, and his own country’s space program as much a hindrance as a help. It’s becoming clear that politics is involved, on both sides of what used to be the Iron Curtain, and he’s going to need to go clear to the top.
A short story of the Grissom timeline.
LEIGH IS HAVING A KICKSTARTER FOR “A TASTING PLATTER” OF HER WORK IF YOU WANT TO GIVE IT A LOOK: Shards of Broken Light
Strange things stalk the nights. Especially nights when the land remembers …
Christmas brings surprises both welcome and otherwise for Jude and Shoim. Can they survive the peak of baking season, or will Shoim finally end up in a pie?
Mike and Rich find themselves over their heads, assigned to observe delicate diplomatic negotiations in a haunted—perhaps—castle. Abyssal beasts might be easier to survive.
Deborah, Hiram, and Art try to prove that they are grown-up magic users. Their parents disagree.
How does a Hunter say what he cannot speak, mourn when tears are forbidden?
And more!
Jojn the next generation of mages, sorcerers, Healers, and Hunters on a wild trip through nights silent and otherwise.
Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.
So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.
We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.
This is a very bad time for a lot of people. In fact, perhaps it’s a bad time for everyone. We’ve been kicked around so stupidly by people who were supposed to be acting in our best interests that even those like me who never really trusted experts feel betrayed.
The nature of the betrayal, too, means that lives were ruined, young people were destroyed, education and job prospects blighted. All of us — I think every last one of us — lost friends or relatives, because things like cancer checkups were suddenly “elective” for two years.
Even those of us who suffered almost nothing, who still have jobs and whose marriage didn’t implode, and who are losing the stress weight they gained in lockdown didn’t emerge unscathed. Last week I was talking to a friend how difficult it is to nerve oneself to any social gathering. This is not just for large gatherings — every time a con looms, I start looking for ways to cancel, even if I really, really, really want to go. (And we might need to cancel either SOS or Liberty con this year, for legitimate reasons, not because of this. At the VERY LEAST we’re going to have trouble getting the cats looked after if we attend one or both. Because of family things it means we’d be away a full three weeks, and on the road. And after Helena, boarding isn’t an option.) But to be fair, I’ve never been fond of cons, because they’re WORK. And because I have to be in my public persona around a lot of people, some of which will inevitably be, at best, disagreeable and at worst hostile. But now it’s difficult to nerve myself to see friends, even when I don’t have to travel, which I have always hated. My regular Tuesday “have coffee with a local writer” thing is often on the chopping block, because I freak out before he gets here. Keep in mind that the entire thing is, he comes over and has coffee. Sometimes we talk. Often we just each type at the same table. But I have a quiet freakout and have to stop myself cancelling before he arrives. Or, note I quietly freaked out before Thanksgiving and Christmas, even though the guests were my sons and their spouse/fiance. But they were “more than two people who don’t live with me.” Freakout.
I’m still fine with going out into groups of people I don’t know, with Dan, and sitting quietly and just observing. Okay, fine, to translate, “I’m still okay going into diners and having a meal.” And mildly okay going to church, if it’s not too packed. Everything else, I FREAK OUT. I usually freak out quietly and internally, mind, but it’s still very annoying, because this was never a thing before. it’s just a scar.
As far as I can tell that’s the only (biggish) scar I carry. There might also be a tendency to go from zero into full paranoid mode, or zero into anger more quickly, but that’s…. I’m not sure it’s so much an effect of the lockdowns as an effect of everything else we’ve gone through (and I’ve gone through) in the last three years. Yeah, I’m sure it’s been noticed, but truly, I’m trying to keep it down.
However, I’m aware I’m not the most affected, nor do I have reason to be one of the most affected by the entire mess of the last three years.
There’s a great anger stalking the land. It’s mostly visible on blue on blue (or in our case, I guess red on red, to update the old meme) conflagrations that come out of nowhere. (Not that the usual shit weasels don’t stand by to instigate/claim it’s out of nowhere after countless provocations. That’s condition normal for this kind of situation.) But also sometimes in person, in odd silences, in puzzled expressions.
I think mostly all that’s keeping the anger from erupting in horrible — and likely misdirected, because anger isn’t rational — violence is two things: One, Americans really are fundamentally, decent people. Our civic culture and mutual help and assistance between equals lingers enough that we tend to default to helping each other rather than taking advantage of disruptions. (People in general, not the paid astroturf of the left.) And Two, what was done to us was so large, so horrible, that we can’t fully conceptualize it. The injury was so massive that we’re still stunned and scrambling.
Put it this way: stealing elections is old hat for the left. But doing it by inventing a horrible plague out of a disease that was not big thing (and be aware, because the right is setting up to fall for the same bs again. Note the paper from China was not peer reviewed, so it’s just them bragging, because why not. I doubt what they’re bragging of could be achieved in a way that would affect the world, and not kill ten people and be gone, by US with our higher precision, care, etc. Fro them, it’s beyond reach. Second, the “disease x” thing from the Dravoniacs it’s just psyops. They’re trying to see if it sticks. Be neither afraid nor stupid) and shutting down not just us, but the rest of the world for verisimilitude? That took a special kind of crazy disregard for humanity in general that is hard for normal –or even only slightly abnormal– human beings to conceptualize let alone act on. It’s a level of psychopathy that leaves you going “if they were lizardoids from space, what would be different, really?”
Mind you — and I laughed yesterday when reading a Darvoniac lamenting that somehow, inexplicably, the last three years meant that the people in general no longer trust the institutions or the news, so that their Green New Deals and Great Resets and other grand plans of a Bond-villain kind suddenly seemed to be out of reach — part of the reason for the idiocy spreading all over the world came from the Darvoisie thinking they could use it to achieve their entire agenda faster. Which goes to show you what I keep telling you “Yes, they plan all these things, but we get a vote too. And these people have not thought of all the second, third, or even first order effects of their oh, so cunning plans.” Or if you prefer, not only aren’t they the sharpest tool in the shed, there’s reason to believe they might be a chocolate hammer.
But the point remains: the world suffered a massive injury, in ways the idiots planning the whole thing weren’t even aware would happen. And America specifically suffered a kick in the pants that removed the rest of the illusions we had about the left in this country. Even if most people are still trying to get back into their soft, warm illusions and close their eyes. It’s not possible, and they also know that at some level, which only makes them angrier.
The problem with this free floating, undirected because the legitimate targets are all too far from us, anger is that people can sense it. And some are even aware they’re tamping their own anger down.
And people can sense all this anger, this feeling of “say the wrong thing and everything blows up” and it turns to fear.
Heck, even those of us who think about the whole thing — overthink, as they’ve been telling me since I was 3 or so — are afraid, at a more rational level. Because the whole analogy of the lever (on the left) and the button (on the right) is not wrong. The left thinks of violence as a tool they use to get what they want. Sane people think of violence as a last resort thing. Which means if you use it…. it’s your last resort. This is why Americans are usually slow to wars and then finish them (when not held in check by the left, who again, think it’s a tool.)
The problem is that there is all this anger. If the button gets pushed, the anger is going to feed into the whole thing. Which means chances of its being restricted, or even hitting the legitimate targets then turning off are zero. Or less than that. This won’t be “We get rid of those holding us down, then we are done.” This will be “We get rid of those holding us down, then the traffic cop who gave me an unjust ticket, then the football player who hit my guy too hard, then the guy in the coffee shop who was rude to me, then the guy who looked at me funny, then this guy who did nothing, but my hand hurts from killing so many people.” Which is why some of us are trying to hold it back, unless it becomes absolutely necessary (and alas it might) because we’re talking of Madame Guillotine and her insatiable hunger. And you know, sure, that was a proto-communist revolution, but it was also the payback of centuries of oppression, disparagement and mistreatment by a tiny minority. The anger was there. If you want to know how out of control it burned, you should read about it. People went to the guillotine because a neighbor thought they were too stingy with the potatoes served at the potluck and no, not joking.
Yes, maybe Americans will be different. We are in so many things. I still have to wonder what’s in the heads of the people streaming in. I know what’s in the heads of those bringing them in, and that’s that they’re creating their own private army. But that’s not how any of this works. If the restive population turns (so much rides on the elections. And no, the idiots have no clue) at the very minimum everyone who sticks out will be in danger. (As someone with a noticeable accent, ask how happy this makes me.) This is likely to be worldwide, which is why I tell you it’s a really bad idea to move somewhere you’ll stick out. But in the US we’re not used to it, and in addition to the sheer mess it will be, there will be recovering after, and dealing with what happened and the scars it leaves.
This is just to give an idea of the legitimate fear most people who think and can see past the next week are living with. Then there’s the free floating fear because we sense the anger, ours and others, and don’t know when it will blow up. And then there’s the fear and anger occasioned by knowing that our institutions and most of our press are in the hands of psychopaths, who’d as soon look at us as fillet us for breakfast.
Yesterday in a group fear was brought up, and Cedar — who some of you know has a … complex and not easy history, i.e. she’s a survivor of things most of us would have been destroyed by — said “you know what comes after fear? I come after fear.”
And I realized suddenly and clearly that this applies to me too. I am what’s here, after fear. After doing things that literally felt as though they’d kill me. Things that probably killed a lot of me.
Let me explain: I always laugh when I get called a happy warrior, for the same reason I always laugh when I get called an optimist. I can see how people get that idea, but what they’re looking at is not what I am naturally, nor what I started out with. It’s what came after. After the fear, after the trials, after doing things that I thought were impossible. After thinking I would die in all meaningful ways if– And then the if happened, and we survived. Something died, but something survived. Which one was really me is a good question. But a philosophical one. I’m still here. I came after the fear.
I don’t have the kind of background Cedar had. I had my own trials, some of them severe, but it’s not my story to tell, and a lot of it has to do with when and were I lived at the time.
However, by the time I was an adult, I was so conflict avoidant and agreeable that most people had absolutely no idea what I really thought. All the groups in college claimed me, including the communists, who were convinced I was really, secretly, a sympathizer. (I kept my hooliganism away from the college, because I could endure physical confrontation. Had learned not to flinch from it years before, but I could not endure even mild conflict with people I’d have to see every day.) Mostly I smiled and slid out from under any mildly threatening argument/issue. And, like now, I hated traveling. I hated being among strangers. I hated having to make new connections.
Marrying Dan was the first time I lost my mind. And it wasn’t my fault. When he proposed, I saw very clearly that it would mean losing all my connections; going to a place where my laboriously acquired and very impressive credentials meant nothing; a place where I’d always sound funny. Now, I loved the US, and at the time I had an offer for an assistantship at an ivy league and had been accepted for a doctoral program. But I’ll be absolutely honest, if I hadn’t fallen in love with Dan, the other factors would probably have meant I’d never actually leap. I’d probably still be putting off from year to year coming over, even as way after way offered itself.
However I did love Dan (still do that) and it was stark and clear to me that if I didn’t marry him I’d regret it the rest of my life. The connections and credentials thing was just the price. And sometimes the price must be paid.
So, I came over with a little suitcase and burned all my savings-to-date on the plane ticket. And survived. Then survived acculturating, which sometimes quite literally felt like I was falling to pieces/going crazy, as all the fundamental assumptions of who and what I was and my place in the world were questioned and broken and rebuilt.
And after years of not finding work, or finding work I hated with my whole heart, we had a kid, and I didn’t want anyone else to raise him, so the whole “get serious about writing” thing came up, and Dan said it was time. I’d been writing the whole time, just you know, never expecting to break in, or expecting it to make much money. I had job(s) for that. The writing was just something I had to do and it happened on weekends and evenings if we had time. I won’t say that trying, really trying, wasn’t scary. I mean, it was. But mostly I never expected to succeed.
Oh, and along the line there were other things that genuinely terrified me. We moved twice, once across this vast country, away from all the friends, family and familiar things and places we had. Those weren’t as scary as moving across the ocean, but they weren’t easy, particularly since we had no one to advise us or organize us or even help, so it felt like we were inventing the entire process on our own, as we went along. Oh, the same for looking after the kid and all the financial and other upheavals. None of it was as scary as moving and acculturating. None felt like I would die from doing it.
The only thing that came close was publishing. Particularly once I figured out (pretty much instantly. I have ears and used to hear very well, including conversations across the room) that anyone to the right of Lenin was persona non grata and considered practically a Nazi. (Which let me tel you was a weird experience for a libertarian.) Because I saw them drop people for saying the wrong thing, or not saying the expected thing, and since I didn’t know that indie would be a thing, I knew if I were dropped and cancelled and blacklisted, it would end up being all publishers (depending on the reason, to be sure) and then I knew I’d die.
Spoiler: I didn’t die. It was unpleasant, but I didn’t die. No matter how many years I’d been terrified of it.
And then there’s this blog, and coming out politically. Which of course, this blog wasn’t supposed to do. It was supposed to be a publicity vehicle. I was supposed to write cute little things about my daily life, and what I was writing, and–
Yeah. At some point I … okay, I can’t explain it, but I had to come out politically. I just had to. For one, I couldn’t continue down the path of staying quiet and letting them assume I agreed, much less affirm the crazy and evil things I knew were crazy and evil. I could literally see the point at which I’d lose my soul. And as much as I love writing, and as much as being published is needed for that, because writing is communication, so of course you want to be read, I couldn’t go on without becoming unable to look at myself in the mirror.
That felt like dying.
My few, in retrospect rather timid posts in this blog horrified me and terrified me. I usually had to show it to three or four friends/friendly acquaintances before I had the nerve to press publish.
As things got fraught, and I started to take attacks from the left (and sometimes the crazier right) a lot of them bizarre and out of nowhere and claiming things I couldn’t understand (irrationality scares me more than just about anything else) how they’d come to think, it felt a lot like dying. The impulse of the still very conflict averse and agreeable person within was to shut up and go away. Only I couldn’t. So I didn’t. Even when keeping going felt like coming apart and dying.
Does it still feel that way? Not most of the time. Not unless I personally care or at least like the person I’m arguing/fighting with. And that’s not very common.
It’s still not pleasant, but scar tissue — though less flexible than unscarred skin — is less sensitive. It doesn’t hurt as badly, and it’s not scary. Even knowing the enemy lists I’m on is not scary, though to be fair that never was. There’s prices to pay and you pay the price and there’s no reason to be afraid of it, no matter how bad. It was the emotional confrontation that terrified me. (And no, I can’t explain that. Maybe I’m naturally snow-flakish?)
The life I wanted, what I thought I was setting out to, was being a reclusive fiction writer, who wrote my little stories, and sold them, and made enough to justify not having another job. And no one ever knew my politics or how I felt about things.
That dream — that person — died somewhere along the line. The fear died too. THAT fear at least.
And I’m still here.
There is life after the fear. Like Cedar, and perhaps with less justification, and in completely different circumstances, I am what comes after the fear.
I just thought you should know. The fear, itself, and the thing that causes the fear, even when the fear is justifiable, and thing horrible — like being cancelled from one’s life-long avocation — are survivable. It’s possible to stand after the fear.
And maybe the anger if it explodes will burn itself quickly — we are American anyway, and therefore unpredictable — and maybe — well I was vouchsafed a certainty it would be so — the Republic is ideal or closer to ideal on the other side.
But we have to face whatever comes, and we have to know that we can get through it. We can get through the fear and the anger. And we have to have hope. Doomerism never solved anything. And doomerism has never been right either. Yes, in certain times and places thing have gotten and will get very bad indeed. But the ultimate defeat of the forces of good hasn’t ever happened. And communism, the particular hobgoblin we’re facing, has never triumphed anywhere. And no — hattip to Don Surber — I don’t think it will be seventy years. Seventy years is what it lasts with external support. We supported the USSR in many ways, financial and not. Even if we were to go full stupid, there is no one with enough resources to support us. There isn’t a USA to support the USA should the USA suddenly go non productive and idiotic. The limit on that seems to be closer to 14 years. Maybe less.The Nazis lasted that long because there were countries they could invade and whose resources could support them. Again, there isn’t a country vast enough and rich enough to support us. We could invade half the world, and it would just cost us more resources.
All totalitarian regimes are warmongering. They have to be. It’s how they survive. But we can’t get anything by wars, except expense. The math doesn’t work. 14 years. Maybe less.
And yes — like Don Surber — at my age that’s likely my remaining life. Or more. But history doesn’t move at human pace. it moves at the pace of large groups of people. Which means, slow and stupid. On our side — and against us, both — is the fact the left by and large is older than us (their young are both stupid and by and large ineffective) which is part of the reason they’re so desperate to “win.” And why each misfire drives them nuttier. Which means they’re likely to get even crazier than locking down the whole world to steal an election. Which means this might be over earlier, just extremely ugly. There is probably no way to avoid the extremely ugly.
But there is a reason to stoically accept the fear, trust we’ll be here when it’s gone. And to not let the fear fuel the anger, and not let the anger burn out of control. Yes, it’s possible they’ll do something so monumentally stupid it all collapses without the anger getting its say. (That is something else to contemplate, because what happens to all that anger then? I don’t know.) And we can hope and pray for that. But if the anger must be let out, let’s try to keep it small and targeted, and effective. (And no, this isn’t a call for violence, Fed the Fred. It’s a call for hoping it doesn’t come to pass. And if it DOES, to keep it as targeted and small as it can possibly be.)
Don’t be ruled by anger and fear. If I hadn’t been so conflict avoidant from the beginning, my career would have been completely different and possibly much better. And perhaps the anger wouldn’t have built up, and I wouldn’t have ended up out of the political closet. I think I am where I’m supposed to be.
But in general, and in group movements letting your fear and your anger decide what you do is bad. And leads to bad things.
So, have hope. Doom is not coming. Something like it might come, but it won’t be doom. Not THAT doom at least. And even if it did, we’d survive. Or our children/grandchildren/young people in our nation would/will.
Waste no time on fear. What will happen will happen. And we’ll come after the fear.
In a way, we won’t be us — trust me on this — what we are will die in the conflagration anyway. But we’ll become what we have to be. And what we have to be — as individuals, as a nation, as a civilization — has a good chance of being better. And it will go on.
According To Hoyt 