I think I have proof that the current state of public education is actually a level of Hell Satan managed to get bumped up to Earth—and the bureaucrats running the lives of teachers and students alike are his minions.
I feel another DEVIL’S POINT novel coming on. Read this and see what I’m talking about.
This article is the first in a series on the US government’s parental rights grab, in which the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided parents had NO right to direct the upbringing of their children beyond the doors of a public school.
Please read the article; please sign the petition. I have.
ADDED MUCH, MUCH LATER: For the sort of thing that has ALREADY appeared in some public schools, and that parents would lose the right to opt their children out of, follow this link. (Added later because I had to do a bunch of back-checking to make sure this had really happened—the level of venom and hysteria on some sites made me think it might have been made up. It wasn’t.)
No less a writer than Norman Spinrad has hit the publishing death spiral, and with a flip of the bird to those who tried their damnedest to ruin my reputation when I laid out the whole evil “buying-to-the-net” process back in December ’06, I’ll simply say:
The question of the morality of writers making a living from their writing has landed in my in-box and in other locations I’ve frequented a few times in the past, and it will no doubt come up again in the future.
I got an angry, nasty email from one writer clearly against writers being compensated for their work, though, and this particular foaming-at-the-mouth weasel-in-a-blender tirade got me thinking about writers who want to be paid for what they create—and the shit they take for admitting it. The writer of this e-mail ignored my clearly and publicly stated policy of NEVER reading anything submitted to me by anyone but my agent. He sent me something he had written, requesting my comment, and following my stated policy, I deleted his work unread.
To which he sent the following missive (in my response to my I Have A [Writing] Dream e-mail and post):
You need MY help? But your the great genius Holly Lisle, why would u need little ‘ole me’s help? Oh, i see, it isn’t a writing dream you have anymore, it’s a money-making dream. So you need all the little idiots to help u with that. I needed help too, Holly Lisle… “I send u little letter, needing one maybe two line of response but there was no response, i get sad and think holly lisle not friend any more, that holly lisle like all other American capitalist, she want only my credit card number and no care about my own dream. holly lisle bad, holly lisle corrupted, like robber baron in my own country who steal from poor and make peasant go hungry…” I get this kind of blather all the time here, you people trying to make money off the idiots; speaking good words, but having no intention of backing any of them up unless a credit card number is forthcoming. shame, shame, holly lisle, you corrupt American businesswoman. you go, girl; you’ve come a long way. i did read one of your little essays, about not changing the world. are u serious? * if u got the time to think up all that crap, u got too much time. don’t bother replying, there’s nothing more to say.
Now, understand that the person writing this is a competent native English speaker and someone who actually aspires to be a professional writer (I have to guess he’s American from the lack of British spelling anywhere in his email.).
Why he chose to present himself in such a stupid way eludes me, but there you have it.
Look past the fact that my e-mail was not about me making money—I’ve been supporting my family with my writing for the last eighteen years—but about me getting to a point in my life where I want to help other writers make a full-time living from THEIR writing. He was pissed because I didn’t respond to his manuscript, or whatever it was, and he decided he was going to flame me. It happens. Fairly frequently. It wouldn’t happen if people read the goddamn FAQs, but that would assume most people were willing to work for their knowledge, rather than demanding someone who did work for it hand it to them on a silver platter.
That’s not why we’re here. We’re here because my frothing correspondent reveals a nasty (if prevalent) resentment of people who make money by creating things.
Capitalists.
Of which I am one, and fervently so.
So I am going to talk about money, and the making of money, and why, if you are someone who creates, you have every right to work toward being compensated—and compensated well—for the products of your mind.
Most people are surprisingly foggy about this. People currently running the US government are VERY foggy about this, to the detriment of the country.
Money is not a thing. It is an idea. Money is the amazingly brilliant and civilized idea that if two human beings agree on a standard unit of measure that can represent the value of unlike items, people can trade with each other freely for anything, without the use of force.
Prior to the creation of money, people who wanted something had the following options for getting it:
Money is the means of exchange for men and women of integrity and good will—because of its standard and broadly accepted value, you do not have to come up with a dozen live chickens of egg-laying age and three bushels of wheat to purchase a table and two chairs made by your neighbor, who needs only chickens and wheat.
You can work at whatever trade you choose, receive your compensation in standard currency, and go out to buy a table and two chairs from someone who can then use your currency to buy a dozen live chickens and three bushels of wheat. Or an X-Box. The two of you don’t have to dicker back and forth about whether the wheat is good or kind of old and so not as valuable as you say it is, and you don’t have to figure out how to walk around with twelve live chickens in your pocket.
Money is moral, and the most civilizing element created by humankind.
And is it made (invented, summoned from nothingness) by people who create things that other people value.
If you have an idea, and you sit down to write a story—and your story doesn’t suck (VERY important point)—you have created something good and worthwhile that did not exist before. You have created something of value, you have added to the wealth of the world, and by doing so, you have invented money from nothing.
This is how the Gross National Product (or Gross Domestic Product) of any nation grows. Not by government action, but by the efforts of individuals.
Governments do not add to the wealth of the world. They create nothing. Rather, they take—either by the consent of the governed, or by force—wealth that others have created. Moral governments use the wealth taken to carry out the will of the people, and nothing more. Immoral governments expand the reach and scope of the government, and decrease the rights of the people governed.
Governments who deal with debt by printing more money (while not creating more wealth) dilute the value of existing money. This causes inflation—and it’s what’s coming next in the current US economy.
You can judge the basic morality or immorality of any philosophy by how it deals with money.
Money gives people the power to live their own lives, to choose their own paths, to be independent individuals. Money promotes good will by allowing value to be exchanged for value—for allowing both parties to “win” in the trade. Money releases people from lives bound to scratching out a meager existence growing their own food, building their own homes, and weaving their own clothing, and allows them to work in whatever fashion they desire, and to trade easily for those goods and services they do not create themselves.
Philosophies either promote freedom and independence, which are made possible by money; or they promote dependence and force, and revile money as a tool of evil or the possession of wicked men and “robber barons” because it moves people away from whatever form of force the philosophy is pushing.
“Don’t struggle to think your own thoughts—we’ll tell you what to think and save you from all that messy confusion.”
“Don’t act for your own benefit—serve our demands under our direction and we will take care of you as we see fit.”
“Don’t create. Consume.”
“Don’t value your own life—value everyone else’s lives and sacrifice your own for the greater good, as defined by us.”
“Don’t be an individual. Be a collective—because we can force collectives to do what we want, and individuals are pains in the ass.”
“Don’t expect value returned in exchange for value given. Give us everything you have that is worth anything while you’re alive, and you’ll be rewarded once you’re dead.”
“Take by force from those who create, give without interest in merit to those who don’t create to bribe their loyalty.”
“Stand on your own two feet, choose your own path, earn your own way, create value and trade honorably with value given for value received.”
So yes. I’m a capitalist. Fervently, ardently so. I believe in the value of the individual, in the beauty of human creativity, in the right of human beings to hold their own lives as worthy of living to their highest potential and to pursue their own dreams.
Because this matters to me, I put some of the money I have earned from my own work (I invest some of my profits, in other words) into creating ways to help people who also value independence and creation make their dreams into their reality, the way I have done for myself.
My ability to help others is dependent upon my making a profit—if I don’t have enough to feed my family, I don’t have enough to invest in anyone else. This is true for ALL capitalists, and it’s the reason jobs are disappearing right now. Not because capitalism is evil, but because a program of taxing those who create into poverty kills the creation of wealth for everyone.
Are there corrupt capitalists? Of course. Human beings don’t always live up to their highest ideals, and some resort to theft, trickery, manipulation, and force because these are easier than honorable exchange. Those who do these things do not represent the spirit or philosophy of capitalism when they do, though, any more than a murderer is a legitimate representation of what it means to be human.
Are there corrupt socialists, corrupt communists, corrupt anti-business governments? Considerably more than there are corrupt capitalists. The use of force breeds corruption.
If you want to live your life on your terms and pursue your own dreams and create something wonderful, if you want to stand on your own two feet and earn your own way in the world, don’t snarl at the businessmen who make profits and invest them in jobs and the creation of opportunities that benefit everyone.
Money is not evil. It’s the best and most liberating idea human beings ever had.
I just lost three hours of editing on Section 1 of THE WRITING CRAFT: How To Motivate Yourself.
Application crashed. All gone. I still have the original recording. Now I get to do all the video cutting and resizing and retaping of stuff that I messed up the first time AGAIN.
Argh.
(NOTE: This is not the most current “Write a book with me” post. This is me being grumpy. The most current Write A Book With Me post will be the top post linked here.)
As noted elsewhere—I hauled ass like nobody’s business for eight months to create a way for me to write the novel I wanted to write without having to do it to anybody’s specifications but my own.
My mad plan worked, and for the first time since I was an RN, I had a regular, reasonable income that did not depend on me writing at a hard run in order to keep us all fed.
I got started on the Dreaming the Dead—the novel of my passion—and I was having a wonderful time with it, sitting down late at night every night and getting as many words as I got before I fell asleep. No pressure, no specific deadline (a vague one in the back of my mind only), and not even any dedication to the idea of writing to a market or marketing the book when it was done. I was writing for the sheer love of writing—to spend time with characters I could not find anywhere else, to explore a fascinating problem, to uncover mysteries and wonders.
Yes, I fully intended to send it to my agent. When it was done. When I was damn good and ready.
And then…
And then…
Brief aside here: You might have noticed, if you’ve been around here or in Think Sideways, that I … ah … am not a good relaxer. I am very good at deadlines, very good at pushing hard toward goals, very good at driving myself.
Taking my time? Taking it easy? Doing things just for fun? Not my best skill. I know this about me, but I sometimes forget it. End Brief Aside.
I forgot why I had worked so hard last year and part of this one. I forgot that THIS book was supposed to be special, different, NOT the same ferocious race to the finish line, doing the absolute best I could in the absolute least time humanly possible so that I could get paid and we could eat.
I forgot. And I set what seemed like a reasonable deadline for myself. 2000 words a day, more or less.
I also forgot that my life is different now. When writing fiction was all I had, writing fiction WAS all I had. I could put the rest of the world aside for long stretches and just push for the finish line.
I wrote, I got frustrated and guilty because I wasn’t getting other things done. When I got other things done, I got frustrated and guilty because I wasn’t writing. Over the last couple of days, I got hammered by headaches, stress, and guilt, my productivity on everything dropped to miserable levels, and I started hating life. In one week. From one change: the decision to write Dreaming the Dead to a “publish it” deadline.
I sat down this morning and took stock of what I have going on that is NOT the novel—stuff I love and am thrilled to be doing and want to complete.
You can look at the mindmap I did here, or the outline version here.
The fact is, my life is full of cool and wonderful work. And writing fiction is the cool and wonderful play I had planned for the end of each day.
I need to get back to my original plan.
In light of the recent reader-generated digressions in comments to a previous post, that’s a fair question. It was asked to me privately by someone I like who was asking out of concern for me—out of fear that I was being too much myself on my weblog, and not enough the sort of person readers would expect me to be.
So I’ll answer from that angle—to the person who likes me and is afraid my honesty and bluntness are hurting me.
My writing diary/ weblog is not some carefully packaged promotional tool that I use to “build readership,” “market my books,” or any of the rest of that crap. It’s the place where I discuss writing and other things that are important to me.
Let me say that again. It matters.
This is where I discuss writing and other things that are important to me.
I’m going to take a moment to explain why that matters, and I’m going to break it down by section, so you will see where I’m coming from, and understand why, on occasion, I am not gentle or “nice” with someone who comments here.
Aside from my love for my family and friends, writing is at the core of how I make my life meaningful to myself.
Words matter. Words and what they mean and how you relate to them change your thinking, your actions, your philosophy, your existence.
I don’t write for you. I write for me. I write to create the stories I want to read, the stories that I cannot find on bookshelves, the stories that are about more than just a relationship, or just an adventure. I want to read stories written from a coherent, well-thought-out viewpoint, where the worldbuilding has been created and not copied, where the characters are doing things important to them, where the underlying theme is about something important.
I don’t want to read about puppets of destiny becoming king of the world, and I don’t want to read about helpless, stupid women being rescued from their lives by good-looking men with no brains. Especially, I don’t want to read about those women and those men if them hooking up is the whole story. What are they about? What is their story about? If neither is about anything I consider valuable, I don’t need them.
So I am writing stories that I personally consider important, and I am fortunate that what I love is what enough other people want to read that I have been able to make a career of writing.
If you like my books, that’s fantastic. If you don’t, there are countless other books by countless other writers where you’ll be able to find what you do like. Or, if you’re a lot like me, there won’t be any, or many, and you end up writing the books you wanted to read and couldn’t find anywhere else.
My life is joyful and exuberant because I am doing what I love. There is enough of the missionary left over from my childhood that I want to be able to share the best of what I have discovered about writing and how to be good at it with people who also love to write. And who are willing to do the work themselves once pointed in the right direction.
I’m not big on handholding. If you want to be a writer, you have to be willing to do the work, and there’s a lot of work involved.
If you’re willing to work, though, I’ll bend over backwards to show you exactly what I’ve done, what has worked for me and what has failed for me, because I know that even though a writing life is financially hard sometimes, (especially if it’s your actual income), it’s a great life in which you wake up every day glad to be alive—and if you want to do that, I think you should be able to. And I’ll make what I’ve learned available to you in a variety of forms so that you can create your own best life.
I still won’t read what you’ve written, (unless I ask you for a sample, as in the Writer Crash Tests), and I still am not available for one-on-one mentoring at any price because I have my writing, I have my writing courses, and I have my family—and that’s a full plate.
At the core of who I am is the knowledge that our lives matter to others whether we choose to make them matter to ourselves or not. If you choose to make your life matter by making it valuable to you and acting for your own personal highest good, other people as well as you will benefit. If you think your life is of no value, then you will suffer, the people who love you will suffer, because you will act in self-destructive or outwardly destructive ways. If you choose to force your own values on others, destruction will again result.
From this basis, I hold sacred both freedom of religion and political freedom, because each of those freedoms allows every individual to pursue his own highest good without oppression.
I detest both religion and politics because both demand a “buy-in”—the revocation of personal reason either through a requirement for faith in the unprovable, or in agreement with a party platform “for the greater good”—and both religions and governments are institutions of oppression that coerce behavior from the unwilling through overt force (voluntary income tax?) or the threat of force (a.k.a. “You’re gonna burn in Hell for that one, Sparkie.”)
So I speak here about things I see going on in the world around me from this viewpoint. I riff on the idiocy of the global warming theory, I point out drifts I see from freedom toward oppression in such legal issues as the right to die movement or abortion, I point out the intellectual dishonesty of a women’s movement that has drifted from equal pay for equal work to declaring a woman who murdered her children a “victim.” And I note the inexorable creep of political parties and special interest groups to create division among people, encouraging everyone to pick sides against those different from themselves, playing the politics of race, religion, and special interest as a classic Roman “divide and conquer” ploy that, no matter the party in power, always leaves more power in the hands of the government, and less in the hands of the people.
You are encouraged not to trust those different from you, because they are out to get you. The guys on the other side of your personal issues, whatever they may be, are encouraged to do the same. Meanwhile, the government steps in and says, “Here, let us protect you from them.” And you lose your rights in return for safety from something that never threatened you in the first place.
This is my space. It is an extension of my living room, where you are an invited guest. This is, however, my place to say what I think, and I won’t pretend to be someone I’m not in order to appease some small god of marketing who thinks my sales would be better if I were plastic and fake.
And in my place, I have a few rules.
First and foremost, freedom of speech belongs to the one who owns the press, and this place is mine. I reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason. Most I will let stand, but I have no intention of letting troublemakers and jerks run rampant across my comments, any more than I would tolerate such behavior in my home.
Next, I am as kind to my guests as they are to me.
You want to discuss things, I’ll discuss them as I have the time. You have questions, ditto. I will not seek an argument or pick a fight.
If you seek to debate, I may decide to play if you’re interesting and if I have time. I like to debate. I like to test out my philosophy against an opponent who holds an opinion different than mine, simply to see if I have it right, or if my opinion needs revision.
If I think you’re trying to pick a fight, I’ll either delete your post (if you’re simply obnoxious), or I’ll debate you, (if you’re obnoxious but interesting). I will not use against you any tools of words that you do not use against me first, so if you maintain a level of polite discourse, I will do the same.
If you lead with sanctimony, condescension, or insult, or if you are not willing to back up your statements with facts, I may decide it would be more fun to sharpen my logic on you and use you as an exercise in debate and an example of what not to do here rather than just delete you, or ban you. If you make a real jackass of yourself, then I’ll ban you.
If that makes me mean, okay.
I never claimed to be nice. I can be kind, but I detest niceness—it is pretending to be someone you aren’t in order to gain social approval. I’m not looking for anyone else’s approval. I already have my own.
The writer of this is Quaker (I used to be) and a visiting scholar at Yale Divinity School. My personal take on any religion is “no, thanks,” but I am a firm supporter of freedom of religion. And of tolerance, defined as follows: I will tolerate you, your quirks, and your beliefs, if you will tolerate me, my quirks, and my beliefs, and if nothing you do imposes on the rights of others to life, liberty, and the pursuit of lawful happiness. I, in my part, will not impose on your right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of lawful happiness.
I will not pretend to be someone I’m not in order to have you like me under false pretenses. I ask that you return the favor.
And I don’t tolerate child molesters, rapists, murderers, or factions of religions whose only happiness can be achieved if I am subsumed into their religion, or killed for not joining.
This is, I think, a reasonable definition of tolerance. It may not be perfect, but neither am I.
And with that thought, I give you Sarah Ruden writing for the Wall Street Journal on Yale’s Christian/Muslim Reconciliation Conference.
Some of what she had to say made me think of Talyn. Some of it made me think of Hawkspar.
Thanks to Jim for the link.
Back to global warming, and the following astonishing article. (Thanks to Jim Woosley for the link) The world has never seen such freezing heat
I was reading comments on one other article about global warming—in which the sad state of the global warmists increasingly frayed argument was being discussed—and one snarky young thing said, “It isn’t global warming anymore, you idiots, it’s the Global Climate Crisis!”
We have three options here.
Option One is that the world is faced with dangerous overheating, which would be proven by steadily rising temperatures worldwide, steadily decreasing glaciation worldwide, and steadily rising sea levels worldwide. We do not have that triad in place—for every location that has warmer temps, there’s another with colder temps, and the falling average temperature the past couple of years makes global warming a hard sell.
Oh, and we would also have worse hurricanes every year than the year before. I’ll pause while you consider the hurricane seasons of the past couple of years.
The “global warming is caused by humans theory”, if true, would show a measurable, steady increase in temperatures, dangerous weather, and rising sea levels everywhere, all the time. Increases would necessarily be small, but they would be observable.
We do not have this.
Option Two is that NOW the world is faced by dangerous overcooling, which would be proven by steadily falling temperatures worldwide, steadily expanding glaciation worldwide, and steadily falling sea levels worldwide. We don’t have THAT triad in place either.
Again, for it to be true, we would see small, incremental, MEASURABLE changes everywhere.
So I’m going to define Option Three for you now, since the folks selling the panic phrase Global Climate Crisis fail to define this crisis.
Option Three—Global Climate Crisis—means that we will have rising temperatures around the world, followed by falling temperatures around the world—all going on at the same time—with storm systems, hurricanes, tornadoes and so on happening somewhere all the time. The ice caps and glaciers will expand, and then retreat, and then expand, and then RETREAT!!!! (Oh, God, whatever shall we do?)
The other name for the Global Climate Crisis?
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
Here’s everything else I’ve written on this particular subject.