Just because they’re ridiculous doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous…..
BLUF:
There is no backing down. We can’t. Not if we want to survive.
It’s going to get very rough from here on out, and I want you to know that. Prepare, prepare, prepare, and gird your loins.
Just remember in the end we win, they lose.
Be not afraid, but don’t be rash.
Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.
This weekend, I found that the truckers who have had enough of Little Castro’s Justin Trudeau’s insanity, enough to drive to the capital in convoy and who appear to be supported by a majority of Canadians are “really” Russian agents dressed like truckers.
My first reaction to this was to laugh so hard my son, who had just come into my office, thought I was having a stroke or heart attack or something. BTW this morning he tells me that now the NYT is running with the idea that everyone who is against mandates is “really” a Russian agent.
It’s all SO FAMILIAR. So deja vu. So full of repeat. So where have I heard that before.
Frankly, I almost titled this post “All the Truckers are Russian Agents, or How I became a White Mormon Male.” which would be a very accurate title, and also way too long, and would give whiplash to anyone who hasn’t been around for a few years.
Also, not completely accurate, because as well as a white Mormon male, I was also racist, sexist and homophobic (which is probably making some of you laugh till you hiccup) and and one time — briefly — a robot and a Russian robot. (I don’t know is Sad Robot Puppies is still active on Twitter (I never go there) but it was started by one of you adorable maniacs when that accusation came out.)
For those not around at the time, a lot of crap happened around and between, and if you guys feel you need clarification, ask someone in comments. Other people can explain. I woke up very late, and we were dealing with business taxes which makes me too cranky for words.
The 100 mile overview is that a number of us got very tired of the things that sf/f awards went to. Look, I’m semi-literary in reading tastes half the time, and I don’t even mind a lot of the more involuted stuff, but a few years ago, it went silly. No, really silly. To me, the foam at the mouth moment was “If you were a dinosaur my love” which did not take place in this world (at all. Our working class doesn’t drink gin) and was written at a level of cringe that would make 13 year old me hide if I had written it. Anyway, so Larry Correia said the award stuff made puppies cry (you know it wasn’t me, because it would be kittens) and we decided to do lists of stuff for people to read and consider voting on. And you know other people — including Locus — had been doing this for years, but suddenly what we’d done was create a slate, and we were evil racists and fascists, and we were against women (!) gays (!!) and people of color(!!!!) writing science fiction. In fact, we were denying them awards so they’d give up in discouragement. We were “Gatekeepers” and did I mention white supremacists. It all went very bad, and 2015 left a bunch of us with significant scars that still affect us. The attacks on us were as nonsensical as they were epic. People who’d never given a d*mn about science fiction or science fiction awards were suddenly running exposes and naming me as part of this evil cabal. My kids, in online gaming, had to defend me from total strangers.
This is what I thought of when I read the accusation that the Freedom Truckers (Truck off, Trudeau) were “Russian Agents.”
First of all, what’s with Russia! Russia! Russia? I mean even Putin said he backed Biden. (For good and sufficient reason. The last thing he wants is a functional USA.) Second I know how it started. Once you hang around the progs for a while, you realize they’re really simple creatures, kind of like those flatworms. They know pain and no pain and that’s about it. Anyway, their decision to accuse Trump of Russian collusion is because they are simple — stupid — creatures, who think we are the same.
They never understood our opposition to communism, so the fact we were suspicious and leery of the USSR must be because we hated RUSSIANS. Personally, you know? So, if they told us Trump collaborated with the Russians, we’d hate him too.
It didn’t work. But of course they might not know it didn’t work, since they convinced themselves that they won legitimately (Snort, giggle) so they are now trying to turn us against anyone who champions freedom by claiming they’re Russian. Because we hate Russians, see. Face>palm. Octopus face>palm, because it needs more hands.
At the same time there is the usual “racist, sexist homophobic.”
Look, the problem we have here is that the left today is a religion. It’s a religion that buys into a system that explains EVERYTHING and promises glory to those who embrace it.
There’s only one small problem: it has no contact whatsoever with reality. As a religion, it’s at the level of the People’s Temple: a scam run by corrupt paranoiacs on the vulnerable.
But it made itself a positional good by commanding the heights of culture: universities, media, entertainment. Only people who mouthed the platitudes were allowed in, and the more absurd the platitudes, the more you were required to mouth them LOUDLY.
This, as an article I read this weekend and can’t now find said, creates a form of self-hypnotism. The more you hear yourself lie to others, the more you believe the lie yourself.
So we have people walking around who whole heartedly believe in the arrow of history which points to perfect communism (Now apparently called the great reset, where you’ll own nothing and love it — while the tireless civil services roll in piles of gold, I suppose.) They believe that everyone — of course — wants this. And that this is rational and sane — look at all the studies, from respectable universities!
And they’ve been told that the only ones opposing this are “white males” who were “all powerful” and don’t want to give up their power.
Which is how I became a white Mormon male. I have to be. Or else, how could I object to a beloved genre becoming a blah pulpit for stupid ideas?
The truth is far more complicated. Of course it is. It involves humans.
It starts with the Marxist solutions have never worked ever, and there was never their original paradise where humans didn’t own property. Hell, our studies lead us to believe even apes have private property, for a given definition of it.
Trade and the free market and money have emerged over and over in human history, everywhere on the world. There is only one, exclusively European, colonialist imposition on the rest of the world, as far as philosophy goes, and that’s Marxism.
It goes on to I’m now almost sixty, and in my entire life, in the US, white males have had absolutely NO advantage. My husband is mostly white (as much as any human being can be. But he well…. he doesn’t tan.) and time and again he was held back by this fact alone. Jobs and promotions went to women or “people of color” (EVER so much more sensitive than “Colored people” innit?) or preferably both, regardless of ability to perform. Because the federal government was only interested in the numbers, and not the fact this wasn’t good for anyone, including the supposedly “favored.”
In science fiction and fantasy, specifically, I grew up reading women. And again, I am almost sixty now. And in trucking, 20 years ago, a friend told me most of the young truckers were “ethnically diverse.” (It ain’t a great job. It’s brutal and dangerous. But it does pay.)
A friend recently said that the erasure of women and ethnically diverse people that have gone before is so thorough he expects next wave of lefty idiots will claim to be the first WOMEN. There were no women before they were born. …. I wish I could say that’s unbelievable.
However, what we have to understand that for the other side this is reality. They have auto-hypnotized to the point they can’t see reality. They have no clue HOW anyone could disagree with their perfect, seamless theory. They have no contact with the real world.
And so the opposition must be Russians, or white supremacists. Or sexists. Or homophobes. Or white Mormon males.
And they’re honking us off. So, I’m glad the truckers are returning the favor.
But internally this feels like the sort of thing that can’t go on. They are effectively erasing us, refusing to believe that opposing points of view can even exist.
It’s funny, if you have a very dark sense of humor.
But it’s also a psychological break, a point of no return. And we too have reached the point we can’t back down.
We can walk away from awards, from games, from needle arts. But now they’re coming for the life blood of our economy: they’re messing with food production, with energy, with transport, all while screaming that there’s no supply issues or inflation.
There is no backing down. We can’t. Not if we want to survive.
It’s going to get very rough from here on out, and I want you to know that. Prepare, prepare, prepare, and gird your loins.
Just remember in the end we win, they lose.
Be not afraid, but don’t be rash.
Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.