Who doesn’t go Nazi?

Marvel Comics needs a refresher course on their Dorothy Thompson.

Read the article linked above first, if you’ve got the time, and then keep that in mind when you read all about Marvel’s decision to bring Steve Rogers back from the dead just to have him Hail Hydra.

There’s some speculating that this is a “long con” by the character to infiltrate and destroy them from within. My own thought is that actually killing Cap wasn’t enough for the Gatekeepers, who have decided that they have to desecrate the corpse as well by trying to kill his ideals.

It’s being passed off as a political commentary, of course, but whether through willful writer’s malpractice or a woeful lack of craft, they’ve only betrayed their own thoughts about America – and shock of shocks, it’s that America sucks. And I don’t buy for one minute that this has anything to do with the political rise of Donald J. Trump, official GOP nominee for the Presidency. They felt this way going into it, and they’d be doing the same thing if Ted Cruz took the nod. The writer has already gone on record in saying that the Republicans are all evil, so why not ruin their favorite freedom-loving symbol as well? It insults them AND ruins the guy who has (until now) unapologetically loved his country, to the point of punching Hitler in the face in his first comic.

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On the Move

And all the monkeys aren’t in the zoo
Every day you meet quite a few
So you see, it’s all up to you…
You could be better than you are
You could be swingin’ on a star

Via our blogfriend Morgan, musing on the Year of Review:

This paradigm shift of figuring out you need to re-evaluate the solution, that you’ve been chasing after the wrong one, is never a comfortable one. It is the scraping of the blade of theory getting shaped and sharpened against the stone of practice. And 2015 seems to have taken form as the year of the Great Sharpening.

The sharpening is not over. The blade is still dull. This year, after all, saw a man win the title of “Woman of the Year”. You can’t get much less-real than that, since men are not women. But on this I refer to a particularly inspiring sentence we heard from the audio book version of Glenn Beck’s The Christmas Sweater. Paraphrasing from my increasingly fallible memory, now loaded up beyond capacity with useless holiday details. The passage pointed out that the most challenging part of a journey is before the first step, wherein the traveler makes the decision that he is worthy of the journey.

I know nothing of Beck’s story, but for me, the important question isn’t whether we’re worthy of the journey. The simple answer is that we are not, and will never be – unless we take the journey. Therefore the question becomes, “Is the journey worth taking? Are we content to be always unworthy, or do we risk what little we have, do we invest the time and effort to be more?”

A lot of people don’t dare. They’re content to rub along. As long as enough other people are clearly on the move, these folks can sort of be carried by their surroundings, making small improvements here and there, and be quite decent folks. They take on the general tone of a society around them, in much the manner that tofu takes on the flavor of the surrounding spices and sauces and becomes sour or spice, sweet or savory. That’s not particularly awful, but you need a good dish to begin with, good flavors assembled by a skilled chef.

In a society such as our current one, however, there is an active, hostile cohort of people who resent the idea of betterment and, by extension, anything that reminds them that they’re fully-invested in going nowhere and doing nothing with themselves. Nearly every current strain of -ism and their strident acolytes is arrayed in open warfare against people wanting to be better selves.

I used to be quite confused about the methods often employed: the whole spectrum of nastiness, pettiness, and constant umbrage-taking; the grim thin pleasure of getting one’s own at all times, savoring every flinch and whimper of the victims. How could it possibly appeal to the average person? Here, be miserable like us! On top of that, they’re the ones accusing other people that their normalcy is really just hatred, their joys stultifying, and their happiness repression.

It’s impossible to miss that this is the direct opposite of reality. In society’s kitchen these would be people spiking the soup with paint thinner and using floor polish in the saute pan. Even if by some chance one could get unpoisoned food, one still couldn’t enjoy it because it would be intentionally left to wilt and spoil under the heat lamps, or else served raw. No kitchen would do this; why do they?

The sad truth is, they aren’t interested in making converts, really. One really doesn’t need too many people in such a movement. The true believers will self-select from the herd to carry on the work. The work itself is purely destructive – they just want to burn it down. After a certain point they don’t need that exhausting mask of pretense, the cover of “avante garde cookerie” or what-have-you. They want to put you off the idea of food entirely, and whether you starve yourself or let them poison you, you’re just as dead and they’re just as satisfied.

And if one should learn how to find and prepare actual meals, good ones, nourishing and refreshing? You’re the enemy, and be prepared to have them descend en masse, shrieking about imaginary health-code violations. That their own food is deadly makes no odds; did you know that guy didn’t wear gloves when he handed you the check?!?

The distinction between poison and nutrition, or the distinction between health and illness, have obvious and immediate differences. Moral differences take longer to tell, but as The Great Sharpening shows us, that time is reaching its fullness. Completely unremarkable statements have turned into cause for blackballing and social uproar. Real death and destruction are visited upon the innocent without a peep from the same fragile narcissists who will let slip the yappy dogs of flame war if their ego is crossed even mildly in a college course or on social media.

Even in the face of all this evidence I was stumped. “If that’s what you want, fine,” I used to think. “Leave me out of it. You do you and let other people live their way. You shout that in my face often enough, so follow your own advice.” Because it seemed to me – and still does – that unless the larger society is healthy, it can’t long endure such openly antisocial behavior from any subset. If it all went pear-shaped tomorrow, with no power grid, no supermarkets, no first responders, and no mass communications, then nobody would have leisure to obsess over the problematic othering of trans voices in the fishing industry.

A society that behaves this way can’t survive. What I had missed before, but now realize, is that it isn’t meant to. These poor deluded young’uns are cannon fodder in this conflict – their masters don’t mean for them to be the keystone to a new, better world, but as the kindling for the old. And when the pyre is built and ready to light, they intend to lay upon it themselves. For their rage against anyone trying to flee the torch is nothing next to their rage at themselves. Those who want to set out on this journey only reinforce that there is an escape available to them that they reject. They hate the reminder because it means that they need not perish so shabbily. They know, perhaps earlier than anyone else, that they are not fit to travel, but they despair and give up, and mock the very notion – but anyone who sets out robs them of the illusion that there is any place else worth going to. They dress up in high-sounding language and convoluted sophistry, but the plain truth is that they choose their fate; their desire for lots of fellow victims is no different than any other cult leader mixing up the fruit punch, to try to make grand and tragic what is nothing more than a garden-variety suicide.

Bing was right way back in 1944 when he sang the words I quoted at the outset. He sang to a generation sharpened by economic devastation sandwiched by two world wars, and yet the song is chipper, optimistic, and encouraging. We, who barely suffered any privation in our generation even while fighting two wars in the Gulf, can’t bear such advice and deride it as simple and foolish – yet we need it more than ever.

We will never be worthy of the journey, but we’d better set out anyway.

This is my answer, nitwits

You all should have fun watching our resident Cuttlers twist themselves into impossible mental shapes in the vain attempt to pretend that two contradictory things are, in fact, identical – and that refusing to go along with this attempt is in fact our mental failure, not theirs.

Perhaps I’m bad and should feel bad for laughing, but I find myself increasingly open to author Sarah Hoyt’s advice: when obvious loonies say obvious lunacies, point and make duck noises at them. Refutation, as you can see, made no difference.

Why am I so on about it despite the Cuttlers’ predictable failure to

• understand what we’ve said
• grasp why they can’t grasp it
• notice the same mistake applies to how they see both the topic and the debate
• understand basic metaphors or figures of speech?

Because this is really important – not just the topic itself but the process used in turning the innocuous into the poisonous with the willing compliance of the victims. Allow me to indulge, below the fold, in an analogy…

Part of a sadly continuing series

Via sci-fi author Larry Correia:

However, it comes as a shock to reasonable people on the left when so emboldened the SJWs [Social Justice Warriors – NF] begin to do the same thing to people on their own side. Stephen Colbert says something they don’t like. Outrage. Patton Oswalt simply agrees with someone on my side. Outrage. Jonathan Ross might say something in the future. Outrage. Patrick Rothfuss says maybe fandom shouldn’t be so quick to outrage. Outrage. Wil Wheaton simply retweets Rothfuss. Outrage. So on and so forth.It doesn’t even matter that all of these people are staunch allies of the outrage crowd, the mob has been programmed to attack, so they do.

Sounds about right.

Full disclosure – I’ve never read any of Mr. Correia’s work. I hardly need to, however, to have a considerable interest in the principle involved. On general terms, I want to live in a world where differences of ideas and opinions are given full and fair hearing, and that people can get along with all sorts of people. On specific terms, if I ever really do buckle down and finish the Mother of Unfinishable Stories (or any of the others), I want my own ideas to have as wide an audience as they can find.

As some have pointed out, simply having an opinion doesn’t oblige others to listen to it. That is certainly true. It is also true that refusing to even hear the idea is a lousy method of understanding it, or anyone who might agree with it.

Science fiction has long been a bulwark of using fantastic trappings to talk about the human condition, with a long tradition of speaking against discrimination and narrow-mindedness.  That people can be lifelong fans of the genre and yet seek to enforce their own orthodoxy within sci-fi – even to the point of trying to determine who is permitted to write or read the work – is a gruesome irony. Love of the thing itself has been surreptitiously hollowed out and replaced by love of being a fan of the thing, having power to confer True Fan Status on others, vetoing what they may or may not enjoy.

The pods, it is true, are not violating the First Amendment.  But as the xkcd cartoon’s alt-tag window states, if that’s the most that can recommend your position – that it’s not technically illegal – it’s a huge concession.  It is also not usually what free speech defenders are actually arguing.  They aren’t using free speech to defend a particular unpopular position, only their right to have a position that’s different.  Where Munroe glosses in his cartoon is precisely this distinction.  Correia isn’t appealing to free speech to win his argument, only to have the right to make it.

It’s the alleged free-thinking and open-minded Tolerators who are indulging in “The Debate is Over” Syndrome.  And they’re fooling themselves by saying, as in the fourth comment on that thread, that “While we might be wary of a panic leading to persecution of people holding a minority viewpoint, this hardly seems to be the case.”

You can scroll down from here to see why you’d want to be wary – it never stops with the first person silenced, ever. That’s what Correia observed in the quote above, what he demonstrated happens when people first learn to be shut-uppity and start to enjoy the rush of power they get when they first succeed in controlling what opinions are acceptable. They become quite jealous of that sort of power and seek to confine it as closely as they can.

Worst, that mindset finds a natural outlet in a place like a DMV or Homeowner’s Association or some other small, insular group of people who may have a legitimate need to wield authority, but who have let it get to their head. Instead of the actual function being the goal and the authority being the tool, the authority takes over and is no longer tethered to a larger purpose. When that happens, no law or guideline or principle designed to restrict that power will have any hold on them. And when that goes on long enough, well… then you get things like the BLM trying to enforce “First Amendment Zones” at the point of a gun, or the IRS systemically hindering and punishing ordinary citizens for their opinions, or agencies as diverse as the CBO, Department of Labor, and the Census Office gaming the books and massaging data to pursue a partisan goal.

Is it the right of the entertainment industry to seek a monolithic point of view? It must be their right if they so choose, in order for the country to function and its citizens to be free. That doesn’t make it healthy. Eventually you stultify if you only hear one kind of thing all the time – as they never cease to remind “right wingers” or “god botherers” or “cisgendernormatives” or whatever buzzword is yet to be crafted to justify willful ignorance. As if we on the right aren’t exposed daily to a culture and mindset that is alien to our own!

Besides this, the Tolerators aren’t being honest with themselves. Having long ago confined their own minds to that airless little box, they want everyone else’s heads crammed in as well, and are busily burning down free speech and free thought in order to save it. It’s impossible for so many people to be so blind and dumb as to miss the illogic, so something else must be happening, and I think that it’s this subtle replacement of the Love of Something with the Love of Things About Something. The temptation is to care less and less about telling a great story than it is to be an Approved Official Storyteller, to gain the imprimatur of the correct class of people and belong with them, and to be recognized by lesser sorts for one’s expertise; eventually, to be the Inner Circle of that class and determine who else is admitted or rejected. As CS Lewis wrote in The Four Loves, a group that gathered around an idea is always tempted in this fashion, and their proper rejection of ignorant people’s ideas about their field or profession soon grows to a rejection of the idea that they should pay their debts and act civilly in public. The ego that attaches from being really elite at something soon attaches to things that have nothing at all to do with it. That’s precisely when the good is lost.

In this case, of course, it’s made even sillier because this ego is now attaching not to the actual creators but merely to those who enjoy reading the work; it’s as if a mirror was proud of how brightly it shone in the sunlight and sought to keep other mirrors forever indoors in dusty rooms.

When will now be then?

Soon.

As a word of explanation: on either side of my family, I’m the eldest of my generation.  My mother’s sister got in the next three, and then there’s a gap of eight years or more between me and my brother.  From there, the various cousins and siblings range well younger than myself.  As a result, sometimes I tend to lapse into “get off my lawn” mode with the youngsters, a situation that annoys all parties, and one I take pains to avoid when I can.

Still, I notice even when I manage to keep it to myself, and what I primarily noticed in the Czar’s Monday missive is the uncanny resemblance to many of my generation.  This meant that I wasn’t keeping it to myself this time.  The Czar kindly let me ramble, but even that was cut down.  My interest was more than abstract.  What got me where I live is the part I’m putting after the jump.