Sarah A. Hoyt's Blog, page 350

Stand up and be heard – Amanda S. Green

Stand up and be heard – Amanda S. Green

Last week, I asked “how far down the slippery slope are we going to go?” As the Iowa Caucus nears and the political rhetoric ratchets up another degree or three, that question becomes even more relevant. Do we vote for a man who denies that he is a career politician despite the fact he held his first elected office in 1981? Or do we vote for the woman who not only went shopping for a residence where she could be elected after her husband finished his la...

Borders, Immigrants and Invaders

Back when I was giving birth to second son (when I gave birth to first son, it took too long and I don’t remember most of it) I went to that hyper rational, coolly detached place I go when I start getting drunk. And I realized with blinding clarity that birth pain was necessary. If we didn’t have that, what would it mean is that women might genuinely forget that they’d given birth. So evolutionarily, birth pain serves a purpose.

I remember twenty or thirty years back, some kid died during haz...

Enslavement of the Mind – Cedar Sanderson

Enslavement of the Mind – Cedar Sanderson

The human mind is capable of great complexity. It is entirely possible, to be happy and sad all at once. It is only in embracing that paradox that we can hope to fully understand our fellow humans and empathize with the past and present, while looking forward into the future. It is not easy, which perhaps is why some people seem to think that they can only possess one thought at a time.

This singularity of thinking lies at the core of political correc...

Remedium peius morbo

So, yesterday my friend, Larry Correia gave his reasons not to like Trump. I will quote it here in full. However my worries about Trump go beyond his, because so to put it I’ve seen this movie before, and I can see the makings of the same situation in Trump’s candidacy. Is it intentional? Is the plan the same? I don’t know. Even if there isn’t a similar plan, it will have the same effect.

But beyond that, as with journolist, I’ve seen international coordination of plans and details (for insta...

An Epistle From Sam Anderson to the Defeatists

An Epistle From Sam Anderson to the Defeatists

[Lifted with permission but under protest from one of Sam’s comments in a private FB group]

Oh, damn it all, Mr.B., we’re STILL a proud people. We just lost the cold war, is all.

We thought to beat the Soviet Union all we had to do was, well, beat the Soviet Union. We didn’t appreciate that we had to beat the ideas that made the Soviet Union suck as bad as it did over the head, repeatedly, every time they came up.

We ought to have played the in...

You Can’t Fool Economics — And She IS A “Mother”- A Blast From the Past Post April 2012

You Can’t Fool Economics — And She IS A “Mother”- A Blast From the Past Post April 2012

Pardon me, if this post seems to go near politics. I don’t mean it, except that it’s impossible to talk economics without talking politics – or at least implying them. It’s also impossible to build believable worlds without being aware of the basic facts of economics (which is why so many of the acclaimed science fiction books get thrown against the wall repeatedly and at least two have gotten tossed in th...

The Supermarket Index – Francis Turner

The Supermarket Index

Francis Turner

If you want a single concept to judge how successful a modern economy is you could do worse than look at the quality and quantity of supermarkets it supports. These days, some 70 or 80 years after they were first invented in the USA, just about every nation on earth has them, with the possible exception of a few socialist “paradises” and perhaps a couple of utterly undeveloped nations somewhere. Supermarkets are, I would venture to say, one of the mo...

A State of Fear

Should we agree right here and now that people’s political opinions have nothing to do with how they do their job? Even when their job has an intellectual and emotional component.

There are — or should be — good teachers of all political stripes, more or less in proportion to those political stripes in the nation. And there are — or should be — artists of all political stripes, more or less in proportion with the existence of those politics in the nation. Also same proportion of psychiatrist...

How far down the slippery slope are we going to go? -Amanda S. Green

How far down the slippery slope are we going to go? -Amanda S. Green

The other day, Sarah had a post that created a lot of discussion, both in the comments and elsewhere, about the reality of living in Communist Russia. The result of those discussions had me thinking back to a time when, it was still the USSR, that I happened to spend close to two months behind the Iron Curtain. Until then, I had read as much as I could about communism and Soviet Russia (I’m a history buff, what can I say)...

DAYS OF WHINE AND FIRE – A Blast From the past post May 2012

*Only the ones of you who’ve been here from the beginning will remember the context for this post, which was the fifth or sixth in a sustained blog war with a non-fiction writer whining about how “real writing” was vanishing from the world with indie. Turned out her problem was that she’d no longer get paid research trips. The rest of us who never had paid research trips (not being special flowers) pointed and laughed. She got nasty and said we weren’t real writers. But this post goes beyond...