As with almost every one of these crusades the left goes on, it ain’t what they’re saying it is. And those of us on the right(ish) who think that it’s all part of a master plan to destroy society so the great communist utopia appears automagically aren’t precisely right. I mean, most people on the left would welcome collapse, because, yes, they believe a communist matriarchy is ONLY waiting for the “oppressors” who create capitalism and patriarchy to vanish (oblivious to the fact that “capitalism” is trading, which seems to be a natural condition of the human monkey and not eradicable by any regime real or imaginary; and that “patriarchy” doesn’t exist in the west.) But that’s not the point, because they don’t think they’re bringing about collapse. They think they’re fighting injustice.
When we say “merit” and “meritocracy” they think we’re using “code words” to say “white males”. There are reasons for this, besides the fact that the left is heavily into Manichaean thought systems that go something like: identify problem — find a person who MIGHT be responsible for/benefits from the system as it exists — assume that if that person were removed, the problem would be gone. See, French Revolution.
The initial confusion on the left arises from the fact that they might never, in fact, have witnessed meritocracy in their dealings or those of people around them.
This is because, as part of the long march, and to secure absolute control of all fields and institutions, the left has a mythology (the Manichaean thing again) that anyone who disagrees with them is evil. And of course, you don’t hire evil people.
The problem with that type of hiring is that you’re NOT hiring the best. And most people know they’re not the best. And hire someone less bright than they are. This in four generations takes you to the level of management/operation that takes monarchies twenty generations of inbreeding to achieve.
Right now, in everything but the hard sciences and STEM (and they’ve gotten into some of those, and can’t always be routed around.) the people in power would consider pouring piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the sole a feat of unachievable genius.
Most of them are so vacuous they don’t even know they’re incompetent. Or, like Michelle Obama in her essay on why everyone was mean to her at Harvard, they assume everyone else is just as incompetent.
The reason they get hired, stay hired and continue to get push/accolades/power is that they have the “right picture in head” by which you should understand “the left picture in head”. They view the world exactly as they were taught to view it by their Marxist teachers and professors. Reality is Manichean, and if there is any issue at all, you find the person who might be causing it (hint, usually you find the person who is a heretic to the left, even if in a minor thing) and you attack that person. If the person is not immediately obvious, you look for deviationism or examples of hidden thought crime.
It’s appalling, and in a society with no protection for the individual, it fills mass graves, but it is the way their minds — for lack of a better term — operate. They’ve been trained to operate that way. Not to look at human nature, or the conditions in the world, or even the limits of engineering and materials (what’s holding us back on batteries, for instance. They prefer to think oil executives, personally, are holding back the all-electric solar cars we should already have.) No. “Find the culprit” “Eliminate him/her” “Everything is beautiful in the garden”. Seen in this light, the Green Nude Heel makes “perfect sense”. And is a genius work in scope. Which is why she got all upset at criticism and thought that it only meant people wanted her to find all the little subculprits and work out all the details of the pogroms necessary to make it work. Not getting that people were saying “Not in this world, not with these humans, not in this REALITY”.
Sarah Hoyt, “Just Deserts”, According to Hoyt, 2019-06-06.
June 11, 2023
QotD: The revolt against “meritocracy”
April 30, 2023
Sarah Hoyt – “I told you so”
At According to Hoyt, Sarah reminds us that she was right and won’t apologize for being right … and will say “I told you so” as often as necessary:
Only infants and the mentally incompetent could look at locking up the vast majority of the population and think it would have NO effect on the economic well being of this country. Worse, only infants, the mentally incompetent and indoctrinated Marxists (BIRM) could think — after the numbers from the Diamond Princess were out there for everyone to read — that either COVID-19 was the end of the world, or that we should put the entire population under house arrest to prevent people dying of it. As though it wouldn’t become endemic anyway.
And it took a particular level of bizarre insanity to believe that COVID-19 would kill you at your favorite restaurant or church but not in Walmart.
We won’t even get into the specialness that caused a bunch of you to tell me that it was okay for the homeless to be congregating in every street corner (and in Denver in proliferating encampments EVERYWHERE with all the shared needles, trash, etc. of such encampments) WITHOUT dropping like flies, because they lived outdoors and were “particularly hardy”. Dudes, if you ever work in any emergency room, you’ll learn that not only aren’t the homeless “particularly hardy” but that they have the most bizarre medieval diseases. Yes, there are jokes about “tooth to tattoo ratio” and that low/high means they live forever, but in truth if you see before and after pictures, you know homeless people tend to die early and hard and not just because most of them are crazy and drug addicted (though that’s a contributing factor.) IF THIS HAD BEEN A REALLY DANGEROUS PANDEMIC, the kind those videos from China — some of which were manifestly fakes, like where people put out their hands to break the fall when they “drop dead” in the street — suggested, the homeless would have first been very sick, then dead.
Also, note the same people then said it was very important to wear masks OUTSIDE WHILE JOGGING because this virus was some kind of magical and could hang suspended in the air outside in a “cloud” so that if you walked through it hours later, you could catch the dread disease.
AND let’s not forget treating us like lunatics when we explained that the masks did nothing, and that yes, they’re used in operating rooms — where they’re changed every few minutes, btw — to PREVENT THE SURGEON from coughing on an open wound.
And I want to award no prizes, and may G-d have mercy on your souls to those that told me that the Diamond Princess‘s numbers were as low as they seemed to be because “They have the best of care in cruise ships”. This when cruise ships are known as floating illness barges and the population aboard is the oldest of any gathering in the nation.
Oh, oh, oh, and a special mention goes to everyone who ran around with their heads on fire because “the ER is at 95% capacity” when it is at 100% capacity every flu season, AND also all the “special wards” built for “overflow” patients saw not ONE patient. All these facts were available and easily looked up.
February 11, 2023
Americans tend to think other countries are just like America, but with weird accents and quaint clothing
Sarah Hoyt on the common problem Americans (and to a lesser extent, Canadians) have in trying to understand other nations even if they’ve done some international travel:
I also see every country, regardless of their history making the assumption that the modus operandi and motives of other cultures and organizations is exactly the same as theirs. I’ve now mentioned about a million times the idiots who went over as Human Shields to Iraq because “they can’t even provide drinking water for their people, how would they have missiles” thereby completely missing the fact that other countries — dictatorships at that — have different priorities than say the US or England, even. In the same way, Portugal assumes that every country is as fraught as corruption as they are. Which works fine for other Latin countries, but fails them when it comes to other places, because as corrupt as we are … yeah. It’s nowhere near there yet. Russia assumes everyone moves, breathes and thinks only about them, and that everyone’s intention is to threaten them or conquer them, because they are obsessed with their dreams of national glory, and they think they should rule the world. And the US by and large goes around like a large vaguely autistic child who really, really, really doesn’t understand how different it is from other nations, or if it does assumes it’s worse.
Look, it’s part of the reason our intelligence services are so sucky. To completely understand what other countries are doing and why, you have to know they have very different cultures. They’re not you. Most countries can sort of extrapolate other countries, but America is so different we suck at it. This is why we tend to think places like the USSR (Russia’s party mask) were totes super powers. Because for America to do and say the things they did and said, we’d have to be very sure of our power. But other countries aren’t America. So we go through the world acting like gullible giants.
In fact Americans have one of the weirder cultures in the world. It’s just not in your face weird as China (whose history reads like they should be extra-terrestrials.) It’s subtle and more in the mental furniture.
Because of this, and because we’re a continent-sized nation, born and bred Americans (as opposed to imports like me) read not just the rest of the world but history hilariously wrong. (The history part is because at least when I went through school here — one year — American schools suck at teaching history. It’s all names and dates, not “Why did France do that?” Yeah, probably not worse than the rest of the world, now that all the books have just-so Marxist explanations, but still stupid.)
I had friends in my writers’ group back when who were writing, say, ancient Egyptian families and couldn’t understand in most of them the teens wouldn’t be/act the same as American teens now. Heck, my dad’s generation in Portugal, less than 100 years ago weren’t “teens” really. Their equivalent was under ten. Because by 12 most of the boys in the village were apprenticed in the job they’d have for life. (And dad was in school, yes, but it was way tougher than even I had.) They didn’t have time. And even I — and you guys know my basic disposition — didn’t sass my parents as American teens do, because there was a deep “fund” of “respect the elders” in the culture. I still have trouble calling people older than I — even colleagues — by their first name.
And then there’s the hilarious — or sad — misunderstandings like the Human Shields mentioned above. It’s sad, because they will buy other countries at face value, but are willing to entertain their own country might be evil. Which is why we have a large contingent of open-mouth guppies who think that the US invented slavery. Even though places around the world still have slavery. Including China, where everyone is a slave, it’s the degree that varies, of course.
The problem is made worse — not better — by idiotic travel abroad.
To understand the differences in a country, you need to live with them, as one of them, for a while. You need to speak the language well enough you understand overheard conversations. Etc.
My experience coming over as an exchange student for 12th grade was about ideal. I lived with an American family, as one of their kids, and attended a school nowhere USA (okay, a suburb of Akron, Ohio) and yeah, I had slight celebrity status in the school — being one of three foreign exchange students — but not that much. So I got to experience the normal life of normal people in normal circumstances, which was an eye-opener.
I always wanted my kids to follow me in this experience, but you know, things got complicated around the time they were of age to do it. So they didn’t. They still have experienced life as an every day foreigner when we visit my parents. In fact the issue there is that they never get past the irritation “What do you mean we can’t do that” and towards “oh, it’s just different. Still sucky, but different.”
Going over for two weeks, with or without the guided tour, staying in nice hotels and associating only with people at your social level and not past the level of polite interaction does not enlarge the mind. Instead, it gives a false sense of knowing what the world is like. This is where we get the “socialists” who know it’s good, because look at all the magnificent buildings in Europe, and the fact everyone has time to sit in the coffee shop and socialize with friends. And look at all the amazing public transportation. And and and. If you lived there, or knew history, you’d know most of the buildings created by socialists in the 20th and 21st century are already crumbling. (Some start before being finished.) You’d know people sit around in coffee shops either because they are unemployed, they pretend to work and their boss pretends to pay them, or all of the above. And all of it is paid for in a significant reduction in lifestyle and just the general comfort of life. (Take it from me. Their lifestyle is two social economic levels down from us, for the same relative “income level.” So, you know, upper class is middle-middle class here.) And you’d know the frustration of waiting for the bus on a rainy, windy day, getting soaked, but the bus is late because all the bus drivers went out for a pint together. And suddenly there’s five of them in a row, but you’re already soaked and starting to cough. More importantly you’d know the public transport only works because everyone works in the city and lives in crowded suburbs, in stack-a-prole apartments, while the countryside is relatively empty. And the people who live there need to buy gas at ridiculous prices, so they can barely afford it.
February 4, 2023
QotD: Leftists against humanity
Here’s the list as to why:
NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE LIST:
1) Pushing to maximize abortion
2) Pushing to maximize homosexuality
3) Multiple different initiatives to make child rearing more difficult and expensive including
a) Ramping up the intensity of social services scrutiny, effectively necessitating high intensity “helicopter parenting”
b) Turning schools into indoctrination factories that don’t prepare children to function independently but do prepare them to have constant fights with their parents over their indoctrination
c) Making healthcare more expensive through constantly ramping regulation, making the actual having of children more difficult and prohibitively expensive
d) Pushing to nationalize healthcare, granting them further power over who lives or dies – allowing limitation of IVF, and also
e) legitimizing legal euthanasia while also pushing to make healthcare decisions for the public (see Canada right now)4) Pushing from other regulatory angles to make the de facto standard a two-income family, ensuring children are raised in daycares and further pushing family budgets to the brink
5) Using the student loan system to turn the bulk of reproductive age, upwardly mobile people into collateral in a deal that passes billions of dollars directly from the US government to the same system that then indoctrinates those kids to the point of full societal dysfunction; encouraging, as much as possible, the use of sex as entertainment ONLY
6) Turning sterilizing yourself into the hot new fad for kids
7) Turning the simple identification of gender into a minefield so that even sex between people who aren’t mutilating themselves is suddenly difficult to even consider
8) Willfully manipulating nursing homes into putting elderly people in a position where they are MOST LIKELY to die during COVID
9) Adopting COVID policies which foreseeably shut down cancer diagnostics and treatment for almost two years, which is the most likely cause of the 10 fold increase in the rate of cancers since the COVID lockdowns (although I can’t entirely discount that the vaccines themselves are partially responsible because, sing it with me now, you can’t ensure the long term safety of something that hasn’t been around long enough to have long term safety data, which is why we do clinical trials and not mass experiments on the general public. I note in passing that the drug companies are so trustworthy they demanded legal indemnity as a condition of participating, while swearing blind that the product was safe and effective even though it was physically fucking impossible for them to have data to back that up due to minor problems like the requisite quantity of time not passing.)
Sarah Hoyt, “I Don’t Believe in Aliens”, According to Hoyt, 2022-10-31.
January 26, 2023
Are memes the natural communications channel of non-progressives?
Sarah Hoyt on having to explain memes to her husband:
His time is more limited, and his time off — he does the taxes for all the family businesses and I’m not the only one with three — usually ends up being spent researching HIS obsessions, like music or some obscure movie thing that fascinated him for no reason I can figure out, or something about early 20th century history.
But he definitely never hung out on political blogs. Which means when I’m trying to explain why something is immediately obvious — like, DIL in training doesn’t like to eat sandwiches, so I immediately said “But you’ll still make them for my son, right? Otherwise, it’s just unnatural” three of us laughed and my husband looked confused. Because “women as sandwich makers” was not part of his mental archive. And then I had to explain how it started in the blog fights of the early oughts — I end up, more often than not having to get galoshes and a spade and go digging, until he gets how we got here.
And then I suddenly feel a weird sympathy for the left and their absolute belief we use “dog whistles” and are in the middle of some form of conspiracy.
It’s not just that they can’t meme, or are humorless (though dear Lord, that’s part of it) but the inherent structure of politics in this country — and parts of the world, though they’re behind us by a few decades — makes the two sides very different in how they communicate.
The left STILL commands all the traditional communication channels. And because they are and assume they are the “accepted” mode of being in the culture — because they have the cultural megaphones from media to education, from government mechanisms (even when nominally not) to entertainment — they communicate in the open. They just slap their “I support thing” as virtue signaling over everything, plus some. They — and this is partly personality attracted to the side — seem to change their programming over night and all talk about “new thing” in unison.
This means their mode of communication is detached from reality (often) and rests on shaky ideological/economic foundations but it’s out in the open and blared from a megaphone.
They make jokes that aren’t jokes, merely pointing out they support the thing. And they say things they think will shock the right, but they have no clue what the right is or what would shock us.
They are in a way the young girl just released from a convent school trying to shock the kids in public school. They get weird looks. We understand them, but they don’t get us at all.
Meanwhile the right comes from years of silence. Years of being silenced, and not even being able to explain it to anyone. If I had a dime for every time I told someone in the nineties or oughts “yeah, most bestsellers are left because the right ones who are known to be so are stopped early” and got back “Nah, the left is more creative, because they’re anti-establishment and blah blah blah.” (HOW the left, in control of everything, is supposed to be anti-establishment is a good question. I mean, sure, they do a lot of things they think are shocking, but wouldn’t shock anyone who wasn’t born in my grandparent’s generation. Look, people, naked Shakespeare was OLD HAT when I was a kid in the late sixties. Now extrapolate from that.)
At least now most people know — it took Twitter, I think — that the right was being hard-silenced.
Which means most people my age who are the oldsters of the “we talk back” generation came to our own conclusions and thought we were crazy to dissent from what “everyone knew” for the longest time. No, really. We were out there, thinking we were along, but we could see no other way to make sense of things, so we stood. Alone, we thought.
A lot of my generation discovered they weren’t UTTERLY alone due to Rush Limbaugh. (I was never a big listener. I just am not. I don’t listen to podcasts, except maybe once a week. Even the audio books I listen to are usually things I already read. I don’t hear very well, and need to be sure I can “catch” what’s said, even if I miss some words.)
And most of us hit the nascent right blogosphere with two feet in the early oughts. Which is where a lot of the early memes like the “girls make sandwiches” meme comes from.
But the blogs, and particularly the blog comments, being a wild west type of atmosphere, where people who developed their opinions in isolation came together and figured out how it all fit for the first time, is a completely different form of communication from the top down, revealed truth talk on the left.
On the right, the clash between right feminist and right not particularly enthralled with feminism gave rise to “Make me a sandwich and get me a beer” as response to screeds on how you’re disrespecting some feminist shibboleth. (Particularly when women on the right hadn’t fully realized how much of the feminist “current thing” was really Marxism in a cute scarf and high heels.) And from that it got meme-fied into short hand, so you could drop a picture of an early 20th century mesmerist levitating a girl and label it “And like that this sandwich maker becomes an ironing board” and it was immediately funny, both poking fun at feminist outrage and the troglodytes or pseudo troglodytes (I’ve been known to be one of those) on our side who think women are inherently house-keepers. (And a lot of this is self-conscious mocking of the person by him/herself.)
We had to develop a sense of humor about our internal battles, including our own opinions, and we had to be able to communicate we weren’t ossified in our opinions really quickly, to prevent minor disagreements becoming blog or alliance shattering wars.
A lot of memes come from that. Because they can communicate “Yeah, this is what I think, kind of, but I’m aware it’s also funny.” Or “This is how I see your opinion. Care to clarify” in — usually — a non-offensive, quick-hit manner. A manner that allows the other person to come back with “Yabut–” Or “Funny, but in fact–”
The left doesn’t do that, because no scrapping allowed in the ranks. They value unity and directives come from above.
Beyond giving them a tragic inability to meme (Seriously, we should start a fund to send them to meme school) it also leaves them with the conviction that the right is always speaking in “dog whistles” or “code” and that we’re plotting horrible and scarifying violence against them, in these bizarre coded words.
January 4, 2023
Sarah Hoyt on some of the dystopian futures we’ve avoided (so far)
Sarah Hoyt outlines a few of the grim future scenarios that appeared to be the future to people who earned a living writing about possible futures:
1 – World government.
To be fair, it seemed an absolutely sane and inescapable prediction for people who had seen the centralized nation states of the twentieth century consolidate. With faster communication, would come total union, right?I note Heinlein stopped believing this after his world tour. In fact in Friday he has a fractured USA.
That second vision is more likely. There are too many cultures in the world and too many competing interests to have a world government. Even on the administrative side, a world government might be absolutely impossible, unless it’s a nominal government and the sub-governments do everything really.
In which case, you know what? It’s no different than what we have, except we call any war a civil war.
The only people this idea still makes sense to are people who think they can change reality by changing the words.
Of course, just because there isn’t a formal world government doesn’t stop national governments and legacy media organizations from pretending that there is some supranational body whose directives they must always follow … at least when they want to do something the voters don’t want them to do. Lockdowns, anyone? Vaccine mandates? Social media censorship at the micro level? Oh, we have to do them because the WHO/UN/WEF/etc. insist.
2 – Overpopulation.
Yeah, I know what the population “counts” are, but we don’t have overpopulation. We don’t have any of the signs of overpopulation, and it’s becoming plainly obvious, country by country, locality by locality that there’s no overpopulation.Malthus was an unpleasant fatalist. he was also wrong. Humanity doesn’t keep reproducing like mindless rabbits.
To be fair, this makes perfect sense because we’re a scavenger species. For scavenger species the population curve is the bell curve, not an exponential climb.
It’s funny how third world governments can “accurately” report booming populations — at least partly because foreign aid from the west is often directly tied to those reports — yet many of them don’t even know how many civil servants they employ. And western governments and aid agencies just pretend to believe them.
3 – Total depletion of resources leading to the “rusty future” in a lot of eighties science fiction.
A lot of resources are in fact depleted, but we have found others This is something that the “Greens” seem unable to grasp. Humanity is a continuous depleting of resources, and discovering new resources and new ways to use them. For instance, given our population, I don’t think we have enough flint to knap for knives for all of us. It’s an obvious crisis.In the same way, do you think it’s even possible for all of us to have a horse? Our cities would be hip-deep in horse poo.
But we are the ape that adapts. Things change. And the future will be as shiny as we want it. Unless fashion calls for dull, of course.
If you’ve been educated in a zero-sum economic picture, then it’s difficult or impossible for you to recognize that when resources begin to run short and prices rise, individuals and companies look for more efficient ways to use the now more expensive resource or to consider substitutions. This is why economies who try to suppress normal market signals, like rising prices due to diminished supplies, end up far worse off … humans in aggregate are adaptable and will try to find alternatives when they can.
4 – The world isn’t a communist state, or filled with communist states.
There are some yes, but the ones there are are in obvious trouble, and only the propagandized and the ignorant believe it is a way to live, or a way that brings about paradise. In fact, most of today’s communists are merely wanting to reign in hell.
They know they’d unleash hell, they just think they’d be king.
As bad as it is that people are still fighting for this, it’s miles ahead of the status quo till the eighties, where people actually believed planned centralized states were better.
We still have a fight ahead of us, and we might still fail, but there will never be a whole-word communism. and those of use devoted to freedom will eventually win. It just will take probably more than my life. At least on a world-scale.
Among the governments most likely to resort to market denial (and autarky) are socialist and communist states. Central planning is one of the fastest methods to starving your population aside from total war. Central planners are always confident that they “know better” than filthy capitalists, and with proper “scientific” planning they can avoid all the “waste” that market societies produce. For a detailed look, consider the plight of poor, imaginary Wyatt, a factory manager under GOSPLAN in the old Soviet Union. If anything, Sev underestimates the economic disaster that Soviet central planning perpetrated.
5 – We don’t have some sort of central authority that contols all of something: genetics; who is arrested; etc.
A lot of places have crazy authorities, but not the whole world. we’re not enslaved by the Tech Lords (and what a pitiful lot those turned out to be) and the agencies trying to subjugate us are not all powerful, more along the lines of a bunch of venal chuckleheads. Annoying, with no morals and insane, but not all powerful. It could be worse.
It certainly could be worse, and useful idiots in western governments and legacy media are doing what they can to bring everything possible under tighter control, but as I’ve pointed out repeatedly the more a government tries to do, the worse it does everything.
November 10, 2022
The headscratcher that was the American midterms outcome
As the voters went to the polls on Tuesday, it was easy to find doom-and-gloom-mongering among Democratic stalwarts and most of the mainstream media (BIRM), and chest-thumping triumphalism on the right. Both sides seemed to agree that the outcome was going to be somewhere between a red landslide and a red wipeout. So … how do we square the expectations of both sides with what actually happened? Chris Bray makes an attempt:
Eight percent uptake of the much-touted bivalent booster, 75% wrong track sentiment, pretty good night for the party in power. Multiple signs of a total loss of trust and respect for the existing order equals a decision to more or less stay the course.
Tribalism is the first explanation, sure. If you shat on a sidewalk and ran it for office with a D behind its name, Democrats would vote for it; if you shat on a sidewalk and ran it for office with an R behind its name, Republicans would vote for it. John Fetterman is headed for the United States Senate. Go ‘way, I’m ‘batin’.
And I agree with the argument that Republicans didn’t offer much of a plan or a vision, a premise you can check by reading Kevin McCarthy’s Commitment to America. More mush from the wimp.
But the other thing, and you can argue with me about this, is that the society of the spectacle madness of messaging without regard to reality actually achieves its purpose, no matter how absurd it is. We have to add $3 trillion in extra debt-funded spending to the economy to reduce inflation! If you vote Republican, they’ll kill our children!
Amazingly, this turns out to work pretty well. The available evidence suggests that we have a sizable population that cannot assess fact claims. I propose that we test this with sample messages to voters: If you vote for bubblegum trees, the sky bees will give you a diamond-crusted ribeye! (Ohh, I have to vote for bubblegum trees!) If you’re out in public, look to your left; then look to your right. At least one of those people thinks Karine Jean-Pierre makes some pretty good points.
Sarah Hoyt strongly believes that the busy midnight vote-finders of 2020 were just as busy on Tuesday night:
As I write this late on the 8th, the tsunami is resolving itself into a wavelet.
Or rather, the tsunami has been overfrauded into a wavelet. And it might be frauded away to a Dem win before I wake tomorrow.
This shouldn’t be a surprise to any of us who were awake and remember this:
And we know damn well it was a Trump landslide before that.
So for the Republicans to have picked up any seat, this was the tsunami to end all tsunamis.
I know the usual idiots are out there, already saying “It was abortion: the Womyns came out in force to vote dem.”
Are there women who are single ticket abortion voters. Sure. Most are older than I and are determined to make sure their actions and choices are validated a posteriori. They’re an ever dwindling minority. Married women vote more and more for the right every time. Single women? Who knows? But I suspect there’s been a shift in that too after the last too years. And most of them don’t see that career path ahead they once did.
Then there’s the other bs which is of course “The people don’t want to be free.” That’s bs. The people, every time they can express their displeasure do so. But having the vote taken away from them via fraud means THEY each individual thinks he or she is alone.
Things like “Let’s go Brandon” sweep the nation, but there’s no major legal or financial movement to protest the fraud, because each person thinks “I guess all these idiots are so beaten down they like beaten down, and I’m the only one who is angry.”
Meanwhile the perpetrators know what the people think, and erect barricades in DC to protect themselves from the anger they sense but can’t seem to bring out into the open.
Yes, we’re getting the house, and probably not the senate. Which means a good five/six seats fraud. I’m in a group right now with people crunching numbers, and the fraud is evident. The races the democrats cared out got flipped by turning just those votes for the dems. That’s the flexibility of Dominion at work, and the way they can turn a vote into the other.
At Founding Questions, Severian is appropriately sanguine about the notion of “adjusted” or “fortified” ballot counts in disputed races:
So the “elections” were fun, eh? By far the best “news” from the Dissident perspective is that they did, in fact, pull out all the stops for S-s-s-Strokey. As I think it was Based 5.0 who quipped below, it looks like dual-passport-holding Muslim carny barkers aren’t going to be making America great again. Here’s hoping they’re stupid enough to fall for the “Dr. Jill” trap twice — now they’re stuck with Strokey the way they’re stuck with Tapioca Joe, because Giselle is Dr. Jill on steroids (perhaps literally). Eh, Dr. Jill had 40 years in [Washington, DC] to get a taste of the finer things; Giselle’s price is probably far lower. But until Strokey resigns for health reasons and is replaced […] the image of a tatted-out, brain-damaged hobo in a hoodie shuffling around the Senate floor is so on the nose, no novelist would dare use it.
[…]
I bet if we look back on it, we’ll see the state (lowercase s) Media freaking out first, dragging the Official State (capital S) Media with them. It makes sense, given the perverse incentive structure of the Media. Stick with me here:
Joe Schmoe (D) is running for Congress in Flyover State. Obviously The Media wants him to win, because (D). And they’re sure he’s going to, because his opponent is some “ultra-MAGA” yahoo. But Reality is what it is, and suddenly the yahoo is getting closer and closer …
At that point, The Media’s perverted incentive structure kicks in. The “reporters” at the biggest local rag in Flyover State, the Toad Suck Times-Picayune, only care about one thing: Getting the fuck out of Toad Suck, trading the Times-Picayune for a slot somewhere higher up the chain. Now, there are only two ways to do that: Be a hard-hitting, straight-shooting newshoun …
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! Oh Jesus, I’m sorry, I thought I could type that with a straight face, but I can’t. Give me a minute …
… ok, there’s only one way to move up in The Media, and that’s by proving yourself a more zealous cultist than the next guy. So our Heroic Journalist starts doing what he thinks the Inner Party wants, which is of course “propping up Joe Schmoe for all he’s worth”. But here’s the rub: He’s not privy to what the Inner Party actually wants. Of course he’s not; after all, he’s riding a desk at the Toad Suck Times-Picayune. And of course everybody in a similar position, nationwide, is doing the same thing …
… but they’re all at least kinda sorta privy to the real polls that come down from the big organizations (recall that there are maybe three companies that control all the newspapers in the US), and so he knows things are looking grim for Joe Schmoe. More importantly, he sees that Tapioca Joe himself is out stumping for Democrats, and not in battleground states — they’re putting Brandon out there in supposedly safe Democratic districts.
So our man at the Toad Suck Times-Picayune consults his own personal political tea leaves, and he concludes: We’re gonna lose. The “red wave” is real. So again, he starts doing what he thinks his masters want, the thing he thinks will get him noticed at the higher levels: He admits the truth, or as much as he personally can stomach, and starts laying in the groundwork for #TheResistance, same as in 2020. Oh, Kari Lake is ahead 8% over Abortion Mouse there in AZ (give Ace of Normies this, he coins a good nickname), well obviously that’s because of bigotry MAGA yadda yadda and don’t forget the Russian hacking!
But here’s the problem with that: It does get him noticed by the Big League club, but in the exact opposite way. So long as everyone stays on point, you can brazen it out through the inevitable “fortification”. Had everyone stayed on point, a “worryingly tight race” — they’ll admit that much, for verisimilitude — can easily be turned into one of those 3am miracles the Dems are famous for. Hey, whaddaya know, all the mail in ballots were for Joe Schmoe. What a surprise.
But now that the Toad Suck Times-Picayune is running stories about the challenger being ahead, the Big League clubs have to at least acknowledge it, the school of fish effect takes over, and pretty soon you’ve got the entire Media in panic mode. Which has the further effect of making the freelance riggers even crazier, so that the regularly scheduled 3am ballot drop is being disrupted by mysterious “hiccups” at key locations — you know, “cyberattacks” and whatnot (why the fuck is a voting machine connected to the internet in the first place?), and so on, plus all the mailmen and so forth dumping a whole bunch of ballots from red districts into the nearest streams, culverts, and landfills. Jimmy Hoffa is probably up to his eye sockets in Republican ballots out there in the foundations of Giants’ Stadium…
And so the weird shit we see above, and the odd “had a Narrative all ready” vs. “are clearly scrambling” coverage of different contests.
I can’t think of a better way to really shore up the idea that ALL elections are rigged than that. Wait a minute, the “red wave” was on last week. You guys admitted it. Early Tuesday afternoon, every talking head on tv looked like he was weaving a noose under the “news” desk; you’d expect “journalists” hanging from the rafters by 7pm.
But … ooops! Short of actually being caught on camera throwing Republican ballots in a bonfire, or openly xeroxing Democrat ones — and it’s only mid-morning of the day after, give it time — I can’t think of a clearer way of announcing that it’s ALL rigged than that.
QotD: Sarah’s rules of art
And why was this a bad idea, Sarah?
Mostly because I’m married to a mathematician. There is a certain … ah … compulsiveness that comes with it. If there’s something that’s numbered and has a route, we OF COURSE have to follow the route and see every single statue, even if that’s not what we set out to do.
This made things very interesting, since the wedding parties were blocking some of the statues, and others we could see from a distance were the sort of modern art that your kids could do with a backyard forge, meaning the actual level of artistry was about the level of a kindergartner, only they used metal instead of playdough.
This leads us to Sarah’s first rule of art: if people viewing it have trouble telling it from accidental formations, it’s probably not art.
The second corollary of this is: if you need an elaborate card pointing out to you that it’s art, it’s probably not art.
The third would be that if you need a placard explaining to you how daring and courageous this art is, and how it defied some tyrannical regime at great peril to the artist’s life, it’s not only not art, you’re in the presence of a self-aggrandizing conman.
Sarah Hoyt, “Art and Revolution”, According to Hoyt, 2019-05-31.
September 27, 2022
Sarah Hoyt on how Americans are mis-understanding the TV show Bridgerton
I don’t watch TV, so I haven’t seen the show myself, but apparently a lot of Blacks in the US are taking away the multi-racial casting of a parallel-universe TV show set in the Regency period as being a true representation of British history:
Anyway, all this came to a head with my watching the Bridgerton series. As other people know, it bothers the living daylights out of me to cast well-known historical figures as another race. Not because there can’t be decent actors of another race, but because I know there is a percentage of the population who takes fictional movies and shows as revealing “the truth”.
My mom, who is better educated (alas) than most American high school graduates is one of those. She will adapt her vision of the past according to some crazy movie she just watched. (The number of arguments I’ve had.)
For those who haven’t watched Bridgerton (bog standard regency romances, with gorgeous, if not period-accurate clothing) they cast a certain number of noblemen as black or indian or other “races” and the English Queen in Bridgerton is black.
The buried history in the mini-series (suggested and Heinleined in) is that black and white people coexisted in England side by side, until the king married a black Queen, and then suddenly mixed marriages were allowed.
This is obviously a fantastic parallel world history. Yes, there were black people in England in the regency. I’m sorry to tell you there were very few and 99% of them were slaves or servants brought by people who had lived in Africa.
There was no “black nobility” and no system of apartheid.
HOWEVER as we found out, American people absolutely believe this nonsense. They believe Queen Charlotte (mostly German, honestly) was “black” based on a very bad portrait and rumors of a Moorish ancestress. (Note this rumor was almost certainly political slander. Also that Moor at that time in the peninsula depending on whether in the South or the North might mean slim, small and tan, but did not mean AFRICAN.) Weirdly the best debunking I found was from Quora.
HOWEVER I also found endless pages of well-educated black-Americans celebrating Queen Charlotte for “Black history month”.
Let me also point out that both the Queen and her husband (Yes, mad King George) were ardent abolitionists and that did she have any legitimate hint of African blood ALL the opposition would have fixated on this, and the caricatures would have been next level. However this never happened. Queen Charlotte was and looked German, even if a portrait can imply “stereotypical” African features … As long as you remember that those features exist in a lot of other races, and that a lot of them are also Neanderthal.
Sure, if you go with the one drop theory, Queen Charlotte was black. So is everyone else. EVERYONE else, even those whose 23andme swears they’re pure Scandinavian. Because sometime in the last two thousand years all of us got an African ancestor, somewhere, on one of the many, many lines that fed into our family. (Note genealogy is also a lie to some extent, since it’s impossible to follow every single female (if you’re tracking the male. Vice versa otherwise) line that dropped into your family, and everyone who fed into every other of those lines.)
The problem is that it was the rats in the head of the American black producers of the series that led them to create this entire parallel universe which they THINK IS TRUE on the basis of “well the queen was black”. WITHOUT LOOKING.
And now those rats are reproducing everywhere, but most notably in black American heads, who now believe that “Well, the king married a black queen, so it must be true that the Americans rebelled to keep enslaving the black people”.
This is all not just arrant nonsense, but poisonous bullshit, and has no contact whatsoever with reality.
What can we do about it?
Correct it, ruthlessly, whenever we come across it. And keep pointing out that a queen who was blond and blue eyed was not in fact “black” unless everyone is. And that reading racial tea leaves is a pseudo-science, like phrenology.
I would very much appreciate if we could put this behind us so may family doesn’t keep getting asked “what is your racial background” by complete strangers. (And not just census takers, whom I like to answer with “human”.)
Look, in the end, the darkest African and the lightest Scandinavian have more in common with each other than not. To pretend otherwise is arrant nonsense.
Yes, our far-distant ancestors developed racism as a necessary survival tool (along with the uncanny valley discomfort) because you could fall into the hands of another hominin band and become “food”. (The chimps are less discriminating and will also eat babies of their own band.)
We are now past that, and I would like it not to return. Yes, there are physical characteristics that go with certain character traits, but it’s harder to track than you think, and they’re often things that have nothing to do with race, let alone racial stereotypes.
We all have one drop of slaves and enslaved, or saints, sinners, murderers, murder victims, kings and peasants, ascetics and whores. And we all have all the inclinations of all of mankind in varying degrees.
It’s what you make of it and with it that determines whether you can wear “human” as a crown, or in fact get cast out of the human race for shoving in line.It’s time to stop with the nonsense.
September 23, 2022
Sarah Hoyt on the Overton Window
At According to Hoyt, Sarah considers the Overton Window:
Diagram of the “Overton Window”, based on a concept promoted by Joseph P. Overton (1960–2003), former director of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. The term “Overton Window” was coined by colleagues of Joe Overton after his death. In the political theory of the Overton Window, new ideas fall into a range of acceptability to the public, at the edges of which an elected official risks being voted out of office.
Illustration by Hydrargyrum via Wikimedia Commons
The Overton window is not natural to human society. It is the product of the mass-information-media-entertainment era.
No?
Sure, in some villages, or some other places, there are things you can’t see/say. That is usually because someone in that society, be it a village or a nation, is going to get under your nose for saying it. (At one point, you could get arrested in Portugal for shouting “Portugal is a sh*tty country!”)
Having “Unsayable” and “Unthinkable” and “if you say that in public you’ll be shunned” is always a sign of an oppressive society, whether the punishments are physical or mental, beatings or mere shunning.
Having beliefs that are beyond the pale — in fact, the existence of the pale — are a sign of an unhealthy society, one in which a truth is being enforced that is different from reality.
No? Fight me.
Look, yeah, sure, there are things people in all eras didn’t discuss in certain company due to manners or delicacy. One didn’t discuss sexual acts in front of children, not equipped to understand them, in most of the west since the onset of Christianity. One didn’t say certain things in front of elders either. “Gentlemen don’t discuss politics or coitus”. But that was a matter of — in a small gathering, or a confined society — keeping the social gears lubricated, and keeping disagreements at bay. What “couldn’t be said” varied.
However, the Overton window is something else. It is “you can’t report certain things, even if they are true, at the risk of becoming a social pariah”.
It avoids discussions of really important things, like how our kids are being sodomized by public education. Or how welfare really doesn’t contribute to the welfare of anyone. Or how Child Protective Systems is a money-laundering scam, in which kids die. Or how our government-funded science has become all government and almost no science. Etc.
It encourages rape rings like Rotherham, and has most of the black population of the US believe they are more at risk of police shootings than whites, which is plainly not true, but can’t be said, because the media has deemed saying so is “racist” (Somehow.) So people live in fear, rather than knowing they’re not at higher risk than anyone else.
And while speaking of risk, the media, and its control of information and encouragement of shunning dissenters, has led to fear of a “slightly more dangerous” flu, and led to elderly people living their last years in isolation and terror, and also led to our kids being isolated into loss of social function.
Furthermore, the only way to keep the Overton window over a whole country is to enforce strict control over the media, and even social media, and to ruthlessly crush down dissenters, so that everyone appears to agree, leading to shock-rejection of those who manage to break through the wall of government-encouraged-enforced lying.
A wall that they try to keep even when the lies are patently absurd and harmful. (Like the idea anyone who dislikes the Biden reign of terror is a terrorist or insurgent, or for that matter racist.)
The Overton window can suck what I don’t have.
July 16, 2022
QotD: No, your baby isn’t racist
The insanity of all the “your baby is racist” studies is thinking that babies prefer people who look like THEM. This is not the case. They prefer people who look like those they identify as parents. Take a Chinese baby, at birth, and have him raised by Maori and they’ll react badly to people who look Chinese. Think of it in terms of the band of human (or pre-humans.) If a baby found himself amid a group that didn’t look like its caretakers chances were it was dead and/or lunch. Sending up a distress signal in the form of wailing is its only hope its caretakers will come and rescue it. (“It” because I’m including pre-humans. This applies — with bells on — to baby chimps, btw, who are just human-adjacent.)
Sarah Hoyt, “They’re Out To Get You”, According to Hoyt, 2019-04-09.
June 27, 2022
QotD: Perfectionism
It has blighted more lives than autism, destroyed more potential work than brain damage, stopped more achievement than mis-education. It can devour entire civilizations, and arguably has. […] If you’re an artist or even just a “creator” or worker: a writer, an artist, a programmer, a cook, holy heck, even a house cleaner, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
There’s this odd tendency to be more dissatisfied with our work the better we do and then to decide not to do things because, what the heck, it will never be good enough.
The way it blights lives is … interesting. As in I’ve seen perfectionists utterly ruin themselves by doing nothing. Oh, you want to write/create/climb your work ladder? But you look at your work and you know you’re not good enough because you can see flaws, so why even try. And then you do nothing. And then … and then you’re 65 and you’ve done nothing and achieved nothing in your life, and it’s a miracle if you came close to supporting yourself. (And the only reason you’ve done so is because you did some job you considered was menial and didn’t matter, so your perfectionism didn’t infect THAT.)
If you’re a true perfectionist, you also never had any relationships. Because even though you’re far from the ideal mate, you judge every potential by tagging up defects. If you can’t have perfection, why bother.
The very smart are extremely susceptible to this, but everyone can fall into the trap. If you care or know enough about any field, the flaws in your own (and others) work will stand out glaringly and in relief and then you can’t do ANYTHING.
Of course, the more you practice and know the more flaws you see. And it eventually shuts you down. I catch myself in this trap frequently to the point of being amazed when semi-pro anthos buy my work, because I’m sure it’s the worst thing ever written. And I can shut myself down for years. (I’m not alone, I know you know other writers with this problem.)
Sarah Hoyt, “The Flaw in Flawless”, According to Hoyt, 2019-02-27.
June 23, 2022
QotD: Mis-preparing our kids for the future
We’re preparing the new generation rottenly for this, too. Look, every generation is educated according to what their grandparents thought was desirable. Which is why I had the education that would have helped an upper class Portuguese Lady in the mid 19th century to make a good marriage and shine in society. For practical purposes, other than diplomacy […] the only use for my degree was academia by the time I took it. Though business desperately needed translators, we weren’t being taught office skills, or the terminology we needed to translate science or industrial stuff. (I learned those on my own, through running into them head first, as I learn practically anything.)
Kids now are being educated to the dreams of the early twentieth elites: for a communitarian world with a strong central government. They’re being told this is the future and what to expect, because when that idea made it into academia, and slowly worked itself through to curriculum and expectations, that was the future everyone EXPECTED. Even conservatives thought that the future would involve central planning. They just wanted to keep a little more individual freedom with it.
I remember blowing the world of Robert’s third grade teacher apart when we informed her that no, in the future there wouldn’t be a need for MORE group work, and that all creativity wouldn’t be communal (which frankly is funny. Creativity doesn’t work that way) but that it would be more individual, probably with people working on their piece of the project miles and miles away from the rest of the “team” and having to pull their weight alone. Dan and I explained why based on tech and trends, and all the poor woman kept saying is “that’s not what we were taught.”
Our kids were prepared not only for a world that doesn’t exist, but the world that idiot intellectuals (all intellectuals are idiots. They mostly don’t know a thing of the real world or real people) thought would come about, somehow, automagically. Think of Brave New World, but everyone is happy and doesn’t need the soma. (rolls eyes.)
And then we sneer at millenials for not finding their way, when people my age, who are self-directed and battlers, and have vocations, find ourselves caught in the grinding gears of change and get our goals and work broken over and over again, and yeah, also don’t find it easier to find our way.
Talk to the kids. Help them find something they’re “meant” to do (that’s not how it works, so make sure they know there isn’t only one goal and only one vocation, but there’s almost always something that their skills and ability are useful for RIGHT NOW. And the ability to learn more to change.) If needed, hook them on multiple streams of income. Help them see it’s possible. Dispel their illusions that life was ever easy.
Sure, in the past there were people who got “the one job” and stuck to it through thick and thin to the golden watch at the end. But I don’t think they were ever the majority. And by the time I came along, you couldn’t have any loyalty to your company, because it would have none to you.
Sarah Hoyt, “Finding Your Way”, According to Hoyt, 2019-02-18.
May 31, 2022
QotD: Chaos, the ancient enemy
I was probably one of the few people not at all surprised that Jordan Peterson’s seminal work was subtitled “An antidote to chaos”. Because of course that is our ancient enemy, the enemy of everything that lives down to the smallest organized cell.
Perhaps it is my Greek ancestry (in culture, via the Romans, if nothing else. I mean 23 and me has opinions, but they revise my genetic makeup so often I’m not betting on anything. Also, frankly, they base it on today’s populations, so that if say every person in an extended family left Greece to colonize Iberia, today I’d show only Iberian genetics. [Spoiler: I don’t. Europeans are far more mixed up than they dream of in their philosophies.]) that makes me see Chaos as a vast force waiting in the darkness before and around this brief bit of light that is Earth and humanity, ready to devour us all.
I can’t be the only one impressed by this image, as I’ve run across echoes of it in countless stories both science fiction and fantasy. If you’re reading the kind of story that tries to scrute the ultimate inscrutable and unscrew the parts of the mental universe of humanity to take a metaphorical look under the hood, sooner or later you come across a scene where the main characters get to the end of it all and face howling chaos and darkness. Only it usually doesn’t even howl, nor is it dark. It’s just nothing. Which is the ultimate face and vision of chaos. And most of us know it. Perhaps writers, most of all.
I have a complex relation with chaos, in that part of me seems to be permanently submerged in it. Some of this is the culture in which I was brought up. You know, the Portuguese might have crime, but no one can accuse them of having organized crime. Or indeed organized much of anything.
It’s not just the disease of “late industrializing culture”. There’s something more at work. For one, the Portuguese pride themselves on it. They routinely contrast the British habit of queuing for everything to the Portuguese habit of queuing for nothing (And you haven’t lived till you see a communion scrum with the little old ladies having their elbows at the level of young men’s crotches) by describing the way Portuguese do not queue as “All in a pile and may G-d help us”.
Sarah Hoyt, “The Ancient Enemy”, According to Hoyt, 2019-04-05.
May 24, 2022
QotD: Portuguese art and creative genius
Then the economy recovered, they got jobs, a lot of them connected to or linked to government and all of that stopped. And of course with the EU there are no illegal stalls. I mean Papiere, bitte and all that.
And somehow, perhaps because the new generation knows they have all sorts of “benefits” and “support” coming to them and have never felt the bite of chaos, the crafts and arts in the stores are either startlingly mundane or bizarre. I’m still rather puzzled by entire “scenes from life” (including one that was an operating room) sculpted with penises instead of humans. I mean … who even buys that? Okay. We know who buys that. But do the German tourists and their nostalgie de la boue think they’re tapping into something uniquely “uninhibited and free”, some kind of wild Portuguese sexuality? Raises eyebrow. The Portuguese have been civilized land long before the Germans traded their furs for a place as Roman soldiers. And sure, the Romans could be startlingly and inappropriately sexual (I call to mind a mural, not out of place in a Roman middle class home that had monkeys copulating with children) but it didn’t mean that the culture was “free”, rather that they had different rules. Frankly, the sixties attempt to erase history has corrupted real art and … well, everything else.
Which is kind of the college student thing. Chaos and free time allows you to be very creative, but then you’re not organized enough to parlay that into a career. (I mean, if they’re destined to be the touristic “warm port” of Europe, perhaps they should consider letting real art flourish. Or even encouraging it. Grants for small businesses and young people. It beats the jobs that don’t exist. Just demand they be actually creative and accomplished, instead of giving grants for art that my kids could do at age two and about as interesting.
Sarah Hoyt, “The Ancient Enemy”, According to Hoyt, 2019-04-05.
