Tag: education

Absolute Inalienable Rights

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I put up a fun meme on twitter and facebook. Well, fun in so far as it’s also horrifying, considering the google searches portrayed. It was this:

This ah…. bronzing up of the concept of censorship, btw, is part of the push of the industrial-idea-complex topped by the international oligarchs of the WEF. Their latest shitfest love in symposium was all about how the speech of the peasants and the information the peasants (everyone but them, of course are peasants) should be censored. The peasants should in effect be lied to so they would willingly go into the 15 minute cities, and eat the bugs and be controlled conception to grave.

That they said that out in the open, and then expect us to think there’s an organic movement FOR censorship is both hilarious and sad. It’s also part of how they have “grown” since most of them are about 10 years older than I.

This drive to silence the masses is actually a good sign. No, listen to me. When I was younger, the left always pretended it was against the second amendment but pro the first. In fact they wanted to put the first beyond the reach of private citizens wanting to, say, shield their kids (more on that later) in very limited and private circumstances. They were very determined you should be able to say anything, even the patently evil and stupid.

They were right in what they said, (except for usurping parental rights) but not in what they did. Because you see, what they proclaimed they did only because they had full control of the dissemination of information, from fiction to news to the discourse in universities. So complete that nothing they didn’t want said got any traction. It might be allowed, but only in a deformed/denounced shape.

It was safe for them to push for ever more free speech, because they had full control. They shaped what was allowed in the public sphere. And mostly what they were defending was their right to flood the zone with stuff few people wanted.

Now they are trying to fight the first amendment as hard as they fight the second, and it’s a good sign, because it means they lost control. They no longer can keep the information confined and under their aegis. And they’re revealed as the horrendous totalitarian weirdos they’ve always been. They don’t like that. They want the control back. So they’re openly advocating for censorship.

Which means the ideas are horrifying and — as in everything else — we’re going through a horrible time, but — believe it or not — it means things are getting better. This is kind of like when you’re so ill you can’t stand it, but it’s actually a sign your immune system is fighting the infection.

Anyway, I posted that meme on facebook, because I felt like that, but my first comment was…. weird. At first I misunderstood him, then I thought that he was arguing in good faith but touched in the head. At this point, after thinking about it for a day or so, I think he’s arguing in outright bad faith.

This person has been a commenter on my stuff forever, and one of my earlier facebook friends. It is entirely possible he is a leftist or has acquired some major dysfunction in the meantime. I don’t have the time — I’ve barely been online, as you guys know, as we’re trying to clean up/fix things in the aftermath of the flood main water pipe break. (Yes, that was the porch rebuild project. We had to redo it, because it had to be pulled apart to get at the pipes. And though the plumbers put it back so we could walk on it (ish) they were obviously not carpenters, so it had to be redone, properly.)

Anyway, he came in hot and heavy in the aftermath of my posting that to tell me that censorship was appropriate in some cases. After all, no one should be free to post libel or child porn.

I was so out of it (I’m really getting tired of friends dying suddenly and unexpectedly. Y’all stop it, okay?) that at first I understood him to say “giving the children porn.”

So, my answer at first was to tell him that he really should not bring up libel, which is de-facto legal in the US, in the sense that you can be libeled but you can’t do anything about it. (Wikipedia has a highly libelous post involving me. Yeah. You know exactly what it is. We had a car saleswoman ask us about it, after seeing my name and looking it up. That was fun.) I mean, there are rare wins, like the Covington kids, but the libel law in the US has no teeth. You can’t libel someone who is “famous” (“a public personality”) and in this day and age it’s easy to make someone famous BY libeling them.

But theoretically libel is a crime, because it’s not speech as such. It’s speech directed at destroying someone. It is a lie highly targeted to rob someone of their livelihood or life. So, in a way it’s like a widespread Swatting.

Should it be legal? As I said, it is de-facto legal. And it is a curious intersection of tech and reality. It wouldn’t be possible without some concentration of speech control in the hands of a like-minded faction aided and abetted by governmental and quasi-governmental institutions. (Credentialing factor– I mean universities. Which filter who has access to the public megaphone from the news to entertainment to government.) It is in the process of fixing itself, in a way. Because when bad speech can be countered with good speech just as quickly, it becomes irrelevant.

On the other hand, mind you, I’m temperamentally inclined to introducing dueling laws to allow us to duel the rat bastages. Because that would stop them for good.

Anyway, my answer to letting the children see porn was not as coherent — I was very tired, and as I said, I feel like someone hit me on the head with an anvil, just with the spate of bad news — but what I MEANT was essentially that parents’ rights supersede governmental rights and orders, and if the parents decide to keep porn out of kids’ hands, they should be able to. I didn’t mention, obviously, that the schools to the extent they exist and are available (I’m sure federal involvement in the schools is a bad, bad idea) should be under the control of the parents who are responsible for those kids. And in the home the parents should control what kids see and listen to as a matter of course, because children aren’t self-actuated in any meaningful way, being not aware of the perils in the world.

However, I sternly oppose any widespread censorship to “protect the children.” Because children should be protected by parents and guardians. And any laws put in “for the children” amount to trying to restrict the adults in the name of the children. In fact the shitweasels in our legislature are trying to do the bidding of the WEFfers by putting in a law to protect the children from “social media.” The fact that they started this with Facebook, the domain of grandmothers and old farts (like me) tells you it’s bullshit. The fact is they’re terrified of the free-er (but not fully free, mind you) playground that Twittex has become, and really really want us proles to start sharing “disinformation” which is of course not LIES, but a commie-coined word to mean “things we know are true but which our totalitarian bullshitters don’t want people to know.”

Anyway, right after I answered I realized he meant child porn. And was kind of stopped. Because — guys — child porn is evidence of a crime, and therefore the dissemination of it is being an accomplice to a crime. It is not in any way shape or form mere “speech.”

There was a kerfuffle in the oughts about whether we should allow child porn done with rendering programs, and I suppose that will come back again as deep-fake images and video become more sophisticated. And I can’t get into the absolute right of it, because the psychological waters get very deep and almost all research in the last oh, 50? years is more or less bullshit.

If child porn is created without injuring any children and further harming them by disseminating it, we have to consider the question of whether viewing child porn diffuses the urges of those likely to offend in that way, or if in fact it makes them more likely to harm children. I don’t know, can’t know, and it’s literally above my pay grade in more ways than I can count. On gut feeling, though, I’d consider such production/viewing as a very good reason to watch someone like a hawk, because for sane human beings every feeling revolts.

And while we are not in any way supposed to punish pre-crime and while urges aren’t crimes, and many people probably (I don’t know and neither do you) learn to re-orient and control themselves, I’d still say anyone who makes or consumes that vile stuff SHOULD be watched like a hawk.

At any rate, I think the debate subsided because it turned out the people thus inclined want the real thing, not the fakes. And the real thing is ALWAYS evidence of a crime. It’s a crime to produce, and consuming it is evidence of being an accomplice. In the same way it victimizes kids by being disseminated. (There’s a reason the faces of children, victimized by more normal crimes are fuzzed in the news, okay? Including children of criminals when the only photo available is a family photo.)

Anyway, child porn is not in the same realm as “free speech” or “censorship.” It’s in the realm of crime and psychological and physical violence against children.

The reason I decided the commenter isn’t speaking in good faith is his immediately reaching for “child porn” which is a way of saying “if you support free speech you’re a pedophile.” And that’s not arguing in good faith. In fact, it’s bullshit insanity of the type that says “we must stop “disinformation” and force the peasants to eat the bugs.” If his mind has simply been captured, may his chains rest easy on him, but he is not a free man.

His answer was the equivalent of “but there must be limits on the second amendment otherwise my neighbor will buy a nuke.” While there might be such a time, and I and a friend, when we were both younger and stupider seemed to fall into “designing vending machines for nukes” whenever we got a little alcoholized. But in the present day your neighbor isn’t going to buy a nuke, unless your neighbor is Kim Jong Whoa Fat. And frankly your neighbor would probably be safer than some of the totalitarians running with nukes, including the ones in Iran that the Bidentia seems to be sure they should give nukes to.

It is not arguing in good faith. It’s a comment designed to stop all argument or consideration.

I do realize that that we live in an imperfect world, and that our G-d given rights that a free government elected by the people (ah!) is supposed to safeguard and keep, won’t have perfect expression.

HOWEVER in the limits of reality and the world, the rights enshrined in the bill of rights are as absolute as is possible to make them.

Forget taking our guns from our cold dead fingers. We will be screaming our free speech in the fact of the WEFfers to the end of the world and beyond.

Because we’re Americans. And the cure for bad speech is good speech. Not censorship.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

After reading Kate’s post yesterday, something started bubbling up from the dark recesses of my mind (and, oh, let me tell you, my mind has dark recesses) and that was how the word respect started being shoved down my throat at every turn about… twenty years ago or so.

Respect the professionals; respect the training, respect the uniform, respect the office, respect the teacher’s position; respect the degree; respect the authority, respect… respect… respect…

And to all this I have but one thing to answer: WHY?

It was part of the argument of the blog-invasion by Desperate Teen Brownshirts (an upcoming reality series) “You should respect our teacher because she’s a TEACHER.”  They couldn’t explain to me why this was worthy of respect beyond how that teacher might do her job (or lack of respect beyond how that teacher might do her job.)  Nor could they explain why I should “respect” whatever she did, just because she was in a position of authority over them.  She was not in a position of authority over me and I will match my credentials with hers school room hour by school room hour and books read by books read – without even mentioning capacity for reasoning.  (Like the little worm Heinlein talked about, who bragged of being a brontosaurus on his mother’s side, a teacher who sends half-formed adolescent to defend her from a largely imagined insult by being rude and crude in public might not have anything else to be proud of.)

My children, of course, as soon as they entered school, (and because they’re mine from the top of their little horns to their little hoofkins, which they don’t got) started telling me “you know, when a teacher comes in demanding respect, you know he/she will have nothing – neither knowledge nor ability, nor even a lively teaching style to justify it.”  (This is different from a teacher who displays dignity.  They rather like those – teachers with enough SELF-respect to demand silence in the classroom during class and to teach as though they know more than the students do.  Their second least favorite teacher is “call me Joe.  We’re all friends here.  I’ll learn more from you than you’ll learn from me” idiot.  Interestingly those are also often the ones that flip and start yelling “you have to respect me.”)

But it went beyond that.  The very first cozy I wrote and submitted came back rejected because I had a funny policeman in it.  “You can’t have that,” the rejection said.  “The police are professionals.  You can’t make fun of them.”

I thought this was very odd, having grown up on the Saint and even on Miss Marple and Poirot and … all the others.  I thought “It’s this house.  They’re insane.”  And then I got books on how to write mysteries, and I found that the very FORM was being barred by decree from above.  “Cozies are not real mysteries, and besides they’re unbelievable.  How could an amateur be better than a trained professional?”  This from houses that claim to publish fiction.  At the same time, both written and TV mysteries tried to show policemen as near-infallible professionals who followed on clue upon clue.

Oh, yeah, the other thing, if you disagreed with “scientists” – like the clowns who have for thirty years pushed a lethal food pyramid down our throats – you were “anti-science” because the “scientists are professionals.”  If you disagreed with your doctor, he’d ask you if you had an MD (and they don’t like being told “Well, no.  But I’ve had this here body for almost half a century, and you haven’t.”  And yet, it’s true.)

Suddenly the world was full of experts whose opinion was irrefutable because they were experts.  Listen to the experts, kowtow to the governor.  Kiss the baton.

The oldest civilizations known to men were all that way.  Perhaps it is a way human civilizations go, when we’ve been civilized too long.  Perhaps…

Or perhaps it was the result of an elite who knew they didn’t deserve their lofty positions and were trying to hold on with coordinated razzle dazzle, to change our culture, to make us into what we were not, so they might have power a little longer.  I read somewhere it started with the student revolts in the sixties – that these happened at all the better colleges, and students changed the curriculum and learned near nothing, and then when they move into life all they wanted was respect, so no one questioned the deep dark pit beneath the pretty paper.

I know that I, myself, was taught by post-sixties standards.  All the students who asked that things be thrown out as no longer relevant, like western classics, classic languages, long hours of formal training, extensive reading, modes of deportment, screwed my generation over.  We never got a chance at saying “but we want to learn that.”

Heck, because the immediately previous generation, at least in Portugal, were often our teachers, sometimes we didn’t get the opportunity to learn anything.  I spent an entire year of language arts painting a mural outside the middle school with my class.  (Because it taught us revolutionary… oh, BALLS! Because the teacher was barely literate due to all the “classroom occupations” and “student demands.”)

Were all the people of the generation before mine that way?  Oh, heck no.  Virtue isn’t generational.  But the bad apples did carry the day and make it bad for everyone.  My brother’s classes had so many “student strikes” that one year he almost didn’t have classes.

The rest of us, who weren’t striking or acting like loons could react one of two ways.  I’m not virtuous, either, but I am curious, and have an insatiable need to feed what Heinlein called The Elephant Child (in an allusion to Kipling.)  Oh, yeah, and I like reading.  So I set about to repair a lot of the omissions on my own.  It worked, sort of.  Or it is working.  I have holes in my knowledge, and besides math is a devil to learn on your own.  (However, for all the auto-didacts out there, Great Courses is the way to go.)  A lot of people did that.

A lot of others didn’t.  And going into the workforce – now two generations since the great burning of the mental tools of Western civilization – they were conscious that they could pretend, but the real knowledge wasn’t there.  And then they started talking about “respect.”

This is a simplistic explanation, and it doesn’t cover everything.  There’s also the growing power and scope of bureaucracy, and the desperate need anyone who even aspires to, much less has attained, a position of unwarranted power over other individuals, has – as a sort of reflex of their personality – to have you “respect” their ideas, their opinions, their very existence.

And then there’s those who, through luck, contacts, stealth, or the sheer fact that the people older than them thought they were ‘the future’ took over the commanding heights of art and mass communication and who, once secure, spent their entire time holding the political color line and keeping anything and anyone they disagreed with out.  Oh, and promoting this weird idea of respect for the position and that you had to have credentials to do things which, until recently, you didn’t even have to have formal schooling to do.

They had to know some of the people they were keeping out could outthink them and outcreate their darlings five ways from Monday.  So they created this idea that believing like they did was a sign of intelligence and therefore anyone who believed differently was dumb.  Just another cry for R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

And once the virus of “respect” is in place, we’re asked to respect all sorts of absurd things: symbols, pieces of paper, positions.

Look, I’m not a sans-coulotte, even though at various times when I look at policies being implemented, I’ve been known to mutter that we need more lampposts with arms, so we can hang the aristos from them.  I do respect some forms and some places – those that have a history worthy of respect.  I respect our form of government which sucks, but sucks less than all the others.  I respect the places where our history has been forged and the monuments that symbolize it.  I even respect the constitution of the United States (a work birthed by geniuses who produced it while half-dead of heat stroke in a place with almost no human comforts) to the point of respect extending to the paper it was written in.

But I don’t venerate the paper above the content.  And my respect for the oval office might or might not extend to the man in it – why should it?  A lot of the men in it have not respected the office either as a charge or as a location.

I wonder how it would all have ended without the internet.  (What a marvelous world this is, which has such electrons in it.)  Badly, I suspect.  Hell, it might still end badly.  We’ve now raised what?  Three generations? With this stupid idea of “respect for the position.”

But I don’t think so.  I don’t think so, because the establishment is on the run and the aristos are trying to hide behind walls of “you must respect me.”

I first noticed how the internet discomfited my older colleagues, the vaunted lions of a generation that has yet to produce a world bestriding giant of Asimov’s stamp – let alone Heinlein’s –  when one of them went into a spit-flecked rant about Amazon allowing “just anyone” to review books.  After all what credentials did these “reviewers” have?  Why should they be allowed to voice their opinion?

This was the first time I realized that not only were their amazing reviews in fact controlled by their publishers (yes, most of them WERE paid for) and the prizes they awarded each other hollow of any significance – but they KNEW it.  Meanwhile I, back then, as a completely naive beginner writer, was thrilled every time I got a new review because it meant someone else had read my words, and I treasured the good ones, even the dopey ones that praised characters who weren’t actually in the novel.  And, as a reader, I’d already found that those reviews, once you filtered out the obvious nuts (best exemplified by the buying of things other than books, at Amazon – you know, the review that says “this might be an okay coffee maker, but it doesn’t work at all as a steam shovel, so I’m giving it one star.”), were a much better guide of what I’d like to read than all the “expert” reviews in the world.

Now, of course, with indie publishing, the screaming has got deafening.  “Why are they allowed to publish anything?”  “Publishers are professionals.”

Other mavens of the establishment are going equally unhinged.  The “scientists”, say, whose emails got leaked, and who proved to be far less worthy of respect than the con men of my childhood who deceived the farmers with shell games but who at least were willing to work at it and perfect their crooked trade.  The “Journalists” whining that they can no longer change the national conversation – as though this had ever been part of their job description.  The doctors who sue someone for describing – on his blog – how he lost weight (which incidentally is how my husband lost over 150 lbs and is keeping it off) because it doesn’t accord with their doctrine.  The “businessmen” who apply to the government for subsidies because they’re too big to fail – after proving the only way they can run a business is into the ground.

All of them are screaming “RESPECT ME” at the top of their lungs.  Which is all the proof you need to have that they don’t deserve that respect.

Unearned, office-associated “respect” is something given to priests and shamans, to guardians of a mystery religion.  Respecting the “office” and the trappings of the office is a thing of ancient monarchy.  It is not something that should even be talked about in a free society.

In a free society, we respect those who have earned our respect.  To them I’ll give full measure of respect and brimming over.  Take Ric Locke – he went from wanna be to colleague with one book.  I have other friends and acquaintances who haven’t even had the success he had.  But I’ve read their work, and they’re my colleagues.  They earned it.  They don’t have the position, but they already have my respect.

The others?  The lords of empty pomp and circumstance, hiding behind their credentials?  Don’t make me laugh.

Whether they’re petty teachers demanding pomp and circumstance from their classes, or heads f publishing houses trying to impose their taste and opinion on a tired public* – they don’t deserve and they don’t get my respect.  For them I’ll paraphrase Marlowe: Heyla you pampered jades of the establishment!  We’re coming to get you.

*No.  Of course I DON’T mean Baen.  Baen caters to the public.  And has been called “lowbrow” for it.  And the grace with which they laugh their way to the bank HAS earned my respect. (Grin.)