Tag: news

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.

DOES Everybody Know It?

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I’m an American, so there are some things I believe at almost a religious-faith level: I believe in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

I believe a miracle occurred in Philadelphia.  I believe freedom is better than slavery.  I believe in an honest day’s work.  I believe there is no challenge we can’t surmount if we just get off our duffs and roll up our sleeves.  I believe we have the ingenuity, the know how and the sheer cussedness to overcome any trouble – if we only want to.  I believe the future is better than the past.

What I don’t believe is ninety percent of what is thrown at me by media, entertainment, schools or “experts.”  Why not?  Because all of these people have been lying to us since mass media has been mass media.

Oh, come now, Sarah – you say – do you think there is some giant conspiracy where all these people get together and decide what lies they’re going to tell?

No.  I’m disinclined to believe in massive conspiracies.  I think when those exist they come out sooner or later.  Although lately the discovery that some massive conspiracies had been going on – jornolist, hide the decline – and kept secret to an amazing degree has made me wobble a bit, but no, I don’t actually think there is a massive conspiracy to lie to us.  Not in the sense that they get together and get directives from somewhere on what to tell us every morning.

There might be a core of that going on, here and there, in some places – editorial boards, both journalistic and in fiction, might actually decide what’s acceptable and what isn’t as an opinion.  A core of teachers of education might get together and decide what to put in books, what to say in curricula.  Some scientists with access to publications might decide that it’s a good idea to twist the results a certain way and discredit everyone who disagrees.

In fact, to some extent we know all of this happens.  We can point to instances.  I’ve been present, for instance, at a meeting in a con, years ago, where three chance-met editors were discussing a story they’d all rejected but which ALL OF THEM still remembered and which they all agreed had been very well written, even though the author was an unpublished nobody.  Now, none of them came out and said that they’d rejected it for politics (even though none of them knew I could hear them.  It was one of those sitting arrangements of hotel lobbies where I – sitting quietly and waiting for Dan to come back from going to get the book for my reading – was practically invisible.) However, there were tells, phrases like, “I tried to tell him we couldn’t publish it. I mean, it’s not the sort of opinion we promote.”  “It was over the line, of course.”  “I wouldn’t even dare take it to meeting.”  AND the final, big tell, “I dared to suggest he might want to try– ” voice drops to a whisper, shocked at itself.  “Baen.”

So these people were discussing a book that was so great they all remembered it, even though it had come through slush and the name, therefore, was unknown to them.  But it never occurred to them that the reading public might want to read it.  Or if it did, it was a thought so forbidden it wouldn’t be mentioned.  As for the reason the book was that offensive?  Well, they’d suggested the only house that publishes every political opinion.  (BTW to this day I wonder who this was.  The book’s title and the author’s name were not actually ever mentioned in my hearing.  I hope he found his way home, as it were.  Hey, maybe it was Larry Correia.)

I’m sure my friends in journalistic, academic or scientific fields can point to instances of the same thing.

But these are no grand conspiracy.  In fact, these are downstream from what causes the problem.  Group-think isn’t caused by conspiracy.  Conspiracy is caused by group-think.  These people trying to work around logic, self-interest and self-preservation – like the editors I mentioned – are in fact not able to think about things clearly.  Group think has edged their mental map with “do not go” areas.  They don’t dare consider, for instance, that other than the “approved” opinions might be okay to hold.  They don’t dare consider that other than the “approved” opinions might be allowed to go out to the public.  No.  They can’t think about that, because then they’d have to think about how people hold these opinions.  They’d have to think whether they make sense.  And that would risk them falling into apostasy and being shunned by their group.

Better to pass up on a bestseller.  Better to commit what even they must have known was gross injustice and pass up on major talent and buy instead the mediocre and safe that they can make a bestseller by investing tons of money.  Better to stay in the group.  Better to echo what everyone in their group believes.

That’s what is at the center of it all.  People, you see, are social animals.  People want to fit in.  Throughout history we’ve had astonishing examples of people doing the most bizarre things to fit in with their group, from sacrificing their first born, to cranium deformation, to giving up washing, to voluntarily giving up on reproduction.

Possibly our strongest instinct is to fit in with our family, our tribe, our group.

And mass media, mass communication – such as it existed in the early twentieth century – made this a dangerous instinct.

Where the great dystopians of the twentieth century failed was thinking there needed to be constant surveillance, that big brother needed to watch you.  Pffffff.  Big brother might need to watch one or two or ten of the more influential people and remove maybe a hundred trouble makers.  Then all he needs to do is convince people that this is what every sane person believes.  Who wants to be thought insane?  They’ll fall in line of their own accord.  They’ll police each other.  They’ll police themselves and every word coming out of their mouths.

I know.  TRUST ME.  I went through school, in the humanities, at a time and in a place where even questioning one of the shibboleths of Marxism would get you failed and routed out of the educational system and into “manual apprenticeship.” Not that the teachers were bad people, but they all knew Marxism was true and socialism the perfect society, so if you didn’t believe that way you were too dumb to be in school.  Later, holding the opinions I do, I survived in publishing in the bad old days, I KNOW.  So does anyone who has ever lived in a totalitarian regime.  Or who has ever worked in corporate America or in the entertainment-industrial complex.

It’s all social pressure and the influential few, and the “cool kids” whose opinions are the same we hear repeated everywhere.

It’s gotten so that if something is anything “everyone knows” I doubt it.  We talked yesterday in the comments of the Red Scare and McCarthyism.  These are words that we’ve been trained to hiss and boo at.  Why, Hollywood has made movies about how bad it was.  And yet, all I can say about it is: I don’t know what the truth was, but I doubt it was anything as it is depicted.

Why?  Because if it were anything as is depicted it wouldn’t now be depicted that way.  Look, in the entire time I’ve been aware of that period of history, I’ve heard exactly one dissenting opinion about it.  Mind you, that opinion was a doozy.  Robert A. Heinlein, no lesser person, let drop in the middle of an essay he had no problem with McCarthy.  We were at war and what he was doing was no more than was required to identify the sixth column among us.

This had all the more strength since for much of his early life Heinlein was a sympathizer with many of the goals of international communism, including one-world government and a controlled economy.  (Yes, this changed.)

However by that time I was already getting an uneasy prickle at the back of my neck because… look, Hollywood is as much moved by group think than anyone else.  More so.  They’re cultural showboats with very little substance who want to be admired for the courage they don’t have while they take absolutely safe positions.  If it was safe to talk about how evil McCarthy was then enough people whom he had “persecuted” must have survived in the machinery of power to make being against him the safe position.  (You’ll know we’re living under tyranny when Hollywood falls in line to kiss the tyrant’s boots.  No?  Have you ever HEARD them criticize a tyrant?  Castro?  Lenin?  Where are all the movies about Stalinist errors?  Oh, Hitler.  Sure, Hitler is the safe one to attack the designated hit.  But why is Black Fascism the source of all evil and Red Fascism is almost idolized?  And there’s, btw, another indication that maybe there wasn’t a red under every bed – but there were enough reds to make the despicable horrors of communist regimes “cool.”)

I’m a libertarian.  I believe in freedom of opinion.  I get a creepy-crawly feeling about anyone being interrogated about their beliefs.  But I’m realistic and I grew up during the cold war.  I get a creepy crawly feeling about Americans, born free, choosing to betray their own to international communism – a beautiful mirage that brings only death.  So, was Joe McCarthy as bad as they paint him?  I’ll tell you one thing – he was ineffective.  For all the rest I’d have to do primary sources research which I don’t have, so I’ll withhold opinion.

More and more I feel that way about what everybody knows.  Most of the idiocy is so in your face, so obvious, that all you need is to ask yourself a few questions.  Of course, if you do you will fall into apostasy.

But take the fact that “women are better than men.”  There is nothing men can do that women can’t do and do better.  That’s a fact, right?  It comes at us via books, movies, news…  Everything.  The only reason women were kept in a subservient position for centuries was that men held them down.  Now they’re excelling beyond men because they were always better.  This is true right?

WHY?  Why would you believe that?  First there is the bare, open fact – what I like to call “your lying eyes” fact – that men are stronger than women in the physical sense.  Every profession that requires strength now admitting women has lowered its requirements.  No, I’m not saying that Suzie is not stronger than Bobby.  For a given Suzie and Bobby, Suzie can carry him under one arm.   I’m saying that if you pick the strongest men and the strongest women then pit them against each other in feats of strength, I wouldn’t put my money on the woman.  She’ll lose almost every single time.

Yes, okay, but that’s brute force, not of great importance in modern society.  What about intellect?  Women are smarter, right?  I mean, look at it, we removed the barriers and they’re getting into colleges in much greater numbers than men.

Except that, say, forty years ago, with no real barriers in place, men got into college in much greater numbers than women.

Oh, yes, you say, but that was discrimination.  The learning and teaching style was more geared towards men.  That’s cheating.

This is me looking at you.  This is me looking at you and inviting you to think why 75% of men succeeding is cheating and 75% of women is “just fair.”  Have you ever thought the learning/teaching style is now simply adjusted to favor women.  No?  WHY NOT?

The truth is that men and women aren’t equal.  One of the ways in which they are NOT equal is in neural development.  Another way is in learning styles.

I’ve herded two boys through the American school system as it is now, and let me tell you, despite the fact both of them test on the high end of IQ measurement, it was a slog.  It PARTICULARLY was a slog in middle school when most boys fall behind.  Part of this is that middle school directives as far as I know countrywide require a lot of putting tab a in slot b at precisely the right time.  I.e. teachers who claim they are teaching the kids “responsibility” set a homework turning in schedule and require it it to be turned in on the right days WITHOUT FURTHER REMINDERS.

If you’re nodding along with this, you don’t realize that girls develop – neurologically – earlier than boys, and that boys do not get the “future time schedule thing” till much, much older.  Like, around 18.

There are other issues.  Women are social learners.  They do best in groups.  Women are best at learning through repeated acitivies.  Men are better at the big concept, then trying it out.  Women are better at sitting still…

Look, the data is not top secret on this.  We know the relative IQ distribution of men and women.  Enough tests have been done.  Neither gender is smarter than the other on aggregate, but the distribution is different.  Men cluster at either end and women cluster in the middle.  This means men have more morons than women, but they have more geniuses, too.

(All of these are statistical – I for instance, learn like a male.  The American school system as it is now would have made me a sixth grade drop out.  It almost managed that with my boys.)

If more women than men are making it to college, we’re targeting our education to the learning styles and preferential cognitive modes of women. That doesn’t make women better than men.  It makes the game rigged.  And it can hurt us as a nation and as a species in the long run.

You don’t think so?  You would voluntarily throw away brilliant for “middle of the road” – WHY?  And what does it mean for humanity at large?  Who knows – but that’s what we’re doing, because everything from the media to books to commercials tells us girl power is the way to go and men are poopy heads.

Peer pressure can kill you.  The “truths” you don’t examine can kill you.  It can drives us to voluntary self-extinction.  I know several people who have voluntarily sterilized to avoid “overpopulating the Earth.”  First, this would only work – even if overpopulation were a threat, which as you all know, I don’t think it is – if some number of people all over the world chose to do this.  Second, HOW DO YOU KNOW THE EARTH IS OVERPOPULATED?  Do you have a couple of strangers camping on the sidewalk because there’s no other room for them?  Oh, food production.  Indeed.  This is why food is so scarce that…  No?  In fact in countries that aren’t run by the worst possible of Kakistocracies the problem is too much food?  THEN HOW IN H*LL do you know we’re overpopulated?

Oh, numbers.  Yes.  But as Mark Twain reminded us, there’s lies, damn lies and statistics.  Who collects these numbers?  Who writes them down?  What are their biases?  Do you trust them?

(I would enjoin everyone who believes population numbers to look at the numbers of deaths from AIDS in Africa, and track if they’re shown in population figures – bet you they aren’t.  I’ve heard from friends in places like Mexico city that for them to have the population they supposedly do they’d need different water sources and much more of it. As in what they have now would permit the bare survival of about HALF the population they supposedly have.  Heinlein thought Moscow was much smaller than the population figures the Soviets gave.  Turned out he was right.  When the Sov Union fell we found that their population was in the process of collapsing, not expanding… and yet, I BET YOU those numbers were never revised down, and progression has been applied to expand them.  I don’t have time to poke into these things – not and write – but I bet you we are already contracting.  Incidentally, as a bit of specious reporting, someone in the news yesterday in The American Interest was banging the drum of “overpopulation and global warming” in reference to the present drought and the fact it will cause famine in poor countries.  No mention was made of the fact we’re burning grains to make ethanol to burn in our engines.  By government fiat.  Bah.)

I believe in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  And I believe it is every thinking human’s duty to poke behind what everybody knows.

Our society is too large, too distributed.  You could be doing something that will kill you or destroy your society in the long run because “everybody knows.”  So don’t.

Resist the group.  Dig your feet in.  Ask the inconvenient questions.  Useful ones are “Why?”  “How come?” and “When did this change?”

Now go forth and cause trouble.

(And if right now you have that uneasy feeling at the back of your neck that I’ve gone nuts, because how can I doubt that stuff? — Yeah, that’s how we’re all controlled.  It’s no grand conspiracy.  We’re monkeys.  We want to fit in.  Dare brave that creepy crawly feeling.  Examine premisses.  What everybody “knows” can kill you.)