The Rule of the Wide-Open Field: MYODBAKYHTY

Gender, Race, Political Affiliation, and the Wide-Open Field

Right now, the world I want to live in is being destroyed in front of my eyes by the people who think they’re saving it.

Being different and trying to force people to respect how different you are by agitating for laws to require respect for your difference has become a cause célèbre.

Problem is, we are ALL different.

I don’t mean just a little different. I mean “holy shit, are you kidding me?” different.

Because no matter who you are and no matter what you want and love and think and desire, you are on the polar opposite end of the universe from not just one person you’d consider a freak, but by a whole lot of folks who think YOU’RE the freak.

Everybody is different. Hold on to that, because I’m going to come back to it.

And BECAUSE everybody is different, I think the case needs to be made for Real Individual Freedom, which is obtained by MYODBAKYHTY, otherwise known as the Philosophy of the Wide-Open Field.

And I am an excellent person to make this argument, because I am deeply and weirdly different, and BECAUSE of my own differences, I have been the beneficiary of the Wide-Open Field.

Right now, whole bunches of folks want a special law to protect their little bits of “special and different.”

And the thing about laws is, they create fences, and the more fences there are, the more impossible it becomes to get from who you are to who you want to become.

The very best law legislates as little as possible, with the broad rule that anything not expressly forbidden is permitted.

permitted
See all that green in the Wide-Open Field?

What is good and right and honorable in American law started here.

The absolute worst law legislates as much as possible, with the broad rule that anything not compulsory is forbidden.

Chinese Communist law, Russian Communist law, and the laws of all totalitarian countries start here and live here.

forbidden
There is no Wide-Open field in this picture.

Right now, I see a lot of people trying to create laws legislating how people THINK about gender, and race, and political affiliations.

They want to FORCE respect for their point of view, for their alignment, for who they are.

They want to FORCE people to think that however they are is right, good, normal, okay.

And you can’t. People are going to think whatever they think, and you cannot do a single thing to force them to be better, but by trying to force people to think thoughts YOU approve of, you can make the situation a whole lot worse. And not just for them. For yourself.

You can’t make people like you, you can’t make people respect you, and you can’t make people believe that whatever way you are that’s different than the way they are is good, or okay.

You can create an environment, however, in which everyone has to start demanding their own laws to protect their own tiny bit of turf.

But Law create more fences, not more field.

laws-create-more-fences

So you can be part of the problem by locking down pieces of freedom with pieces of “compulsory action” and “compulsory thought.”

Or you can embrace the Philosophy of the Wide-Open Field, which starts with “Everything that is not forbidden is permitted,” and which is protected by the Rule of The Wide-Open Field:

MYODBAKYHTY

Pronounced Mee-YOD-bak-YHET-ee.

the-rule-of-the-wide-open-field

MYODBAKYHTY: Mind Your Own Damn Business, And Keep Your Hands To Yourself.

If you leave the Wide-Open Field wide open, there will be room enough in it for you to be whoever you are.

If you push for laws to try to force respect and obedience from those who don’t respect or like you, realize that the people YOU don’t like or respect can also get lawyers, and they too can push through bad laws that fence off thought and action and lock down parts of the field of individual rights and personal freedom until you cannot speak without doing so illegally, and you cannot think without committing a crime.

Please consider that there are four-hundred-million-ish people in the USA, and maybe as many as eleven of them HAVEN’T said, “There oughtta be a law…”

The Honest English translation of “There oughtta be a law…” is “I wanna shove MY view of the world down YOUR throat.”

When you support more laws, you start forcing people who never gave you a second thought before to hate you, because the law you favored put them in a box, and made them criminals for their thoughts.

MYODBAKYHTY.

Say it with me. Mee-YOD-bak-YHET-ee.
It is the simple rule that grants broad and amazing freedom. When you live by this rule, and this is the rule enforced by the law…

No one else needs to like you.

No one else needs to respect you.

Bastards can fucking HATE you… IF they mind their own business and keep their hands to themselves.

Which you make possible by doing the same thing.

The moment you realize that if you like and respect yourself and are living the life you want to live, or are at least pursuing the path you’ve set out for yourself to get there, you are FREE.

When you’re earned your own respect by living the life that matters to you, what other people think of you doesn’t affect your world.

And being able to walk across the Wide-Open Field that the freedom of broad individual rights creates allows all those narrow-minded bigoted jackasses you detest (the ones who don’t know you’re cool and who hate everything you think and love) to stand in their own place with their own issues and find their OWN path across the Wide-Open Field.

Probably well away from yours.

Maybe you don’t want them to have that freedom – the freedom to hate you from a distance.

Do you want the freedom to hate them from a distance, though?

Take a moment to consider that if the people you can’t stand are NOT forced by restrictive, field-narrowing laws to bow and grovel before what they hate or be criminalized for their THOUGHTS…

…the people who hate you (or at least what you stand for) might meet you in the field and come to like you, even if they discover you’re different, in whatever way you’re different. And no matter who you are, you’re at least different than someone, because odds are pretty high that whoever you are, you’re not like me.

And if those narrow-minded, bigoted, straight-gay-cis-trans-black-white-yellow-brown-red-rightwing-leftwing-middlewing-other-path assholes don’t like you?

Fuck ’em. Ignore them. Enjoy hating them in the privacy of your own unrestricted life.

As long as the rule is MYODBAKYHTY, and they’re following the rule, and you’re following the rule, and the government UPHOLDS the rule, the fact that they’re assholes doesn’t hurt you.

The Wide-Open Field gives freedom to everyone. Having a wide-open field lets you, me, and everyone else find our own way home to who we need to be, without having to fight through any laws, any restrictions, any punishment for being different.

‘Cause here’s the thing you gotta remember.

Everybody is different.

And when the Wide-Open Field is all locked down, EVERYONE gets locked up.

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39 responses to “Gender, Race, Political Affiliation, and the Wide-Open Field”

  1. David Sims Avatar

    Hi Holly. I think that I’m going to like reading your books. I haven’t yet, but I will begin soon.

    I wanted to add a thought to what you said, with reduced anger, in reply to Laura. You said, “And now people like you are doing their damnedest to destroy any hope we have of taking ourselves to that better world, by making the color of skin a factor of preference again, by trying to push legislation to make saying things like what I’m saying here illegal.”

    Taking ourselves to a world where race doesn’t matter isn’t possible, and it never has been. Racial animus isn’t entirely a matter of politics or bias or obduracy. The races aren’t equals: scientific research and relevant statistics shows that they differ in intelligence, in character, in the spread of behaviors they exhibit in any given circumstances. Poor whites don’t behave as poor blacks do, for example. The IQ gap is real, too, and it has been around for almost a century; furthermore, it is mirrored in academic test scores in every school in every country throughout modern history.

    The real provocation of racial animus isn’t racism. Racism is the result, not the cause. The cause is ENVY. Joseph Sobran put it well.

    “The concept of envy – the hatred of the superior – has dropped out of our moral vocabulary. The idea that white Christian civilization is hated more for its virtues than its sins doesn’t occur to us, because it’s not a nice idea. Western man towers over the rest of the world in ways so large as to be almost inexpressible. It’s Western exploration, science, and conquest that have revealed the world to itself. Other races feel like subjects of western power long after colonialism, imperialism and slavery have disappeared. The charge of racism puzzles whites who feel not hostility, but only baffled good will, because they don’t grasp what it really means: humiliation. The white man presents an image of superiority even when he isn’t conscious of it. Superiority excites envy. Destroying white civilization is the inmost desire of the league of designated victims we call ‘minorities.’” —Joseph Sobran (April 1997)

    There is no fix to this envy. It will always arise when unequal races are mixed together in the same society. The races will forever be unequal. There will never be the sort of harmonious mixed-race society that you might be hoping for. We might wish that things were different, but they are not. The world you said that you hoped for is like a house of cards; even if you achieved it momentarily, it would dissolve back into interracial hostility if anyone said the wrong thing or if the other side wrongly interpreted the meaning of what was said, or the motives of the speaker. You hear, now and then, a leftist complaining that one racist, with a single remark, wiped out decades of “social progress.” That leftist is right, but he doesn’t appreciate what his own remark really means.

    Also, I’d like to make a few remarks on capitalism and on socialism.

    We agree, I think, that socialism doesn’t work. It has a well-known failure mode that writers such as Garrett Hardin and Herschel Elliott have called “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Ayn Rand also gave various descriptions of how socialism fails. So let me let those others suffice for socialism, so that I can move on to a critique of capitalism.

    Let me say that laissez-faire capitalism is a wonderful economic system, which is, perhaps, ideal in every respect except one. Laissez-faire (or free market) capitalism rewards hard work, smart work, creativity, ingenuity, the courage to take well-calculated financial risks, and other virtues. The only flaw, however a fatal one, is that it never endures. Things never stay laissez-faire.

    Why not? Because there always comes a time when the capitalists who have become richest during the laissez-faire period of capitalism discover that they are now SO rich that they can buy the law, corrupt the government, and recruit the coercive powers of the state to their own purposes. And, when that moment comes, these capitalists NEVER HESITATE.

    And why should they hesitate? All their lives, they’ve acted according to the idea that selfishness is a virtue, that greed is good. When they discover that a form of fascism (government empowered corporatism) will boost their incomes and their power, are they going to restrain themselves for altruistic reasons? No! They’re going to buy the law, corrupt the government, and secure the use of the state’s coercive powers to their own purposes.

    Every time. There never has been, and their never will be, an exception. This failure mode for laissez-faire capitalism is at least as consistent as the tragedy of the commons is for socialism.

    How do you know when your country’s economic system has crossed from laissez-faire capitalism into the quite different and much less virtuous state sponsored corporatism? When any business is deemed Too Big To Fail. When taxpayers are dunned for the bailout of banks.

    I’ve commented enough. I’ll leave it here.

    1. Holly Avatar
      Holly

      On reading my books, let me know how it goes. 😀

      On all the other stuff — there is no fixed balance. Life is followed by death, hardship is followed by plenty, which is again followed by hardship, and the best we can hope for in any given minute is to be able to get ourselves through that minute to the next, still breathing.

      Ayn Rand identified as capitalism individual men in charge of businesses they built themselves. She identified the individual entrepreneur as a capitalist because he invested his own capital, both in the form of money and in the form of physical labor, into his business. What she actually admired as capitalism was entrepreneurship.

      She failed to differentiate individual entrepreneurship from what is actually capitalism, which is a business run by a board of directors who operate it not for the good of the business, or for the good of the customer, but simply for the good of the board and the shareholders.

      The Wide-Open Field can only run on entrepreneurialism — so is invariably doomed by the existence of those businessmen who cash out their entrepreneurial creations so they can benefit from money without labor.

      1. David Sims Avatar

        I certainly will let you know how well I liked your stories. At the moment, I’m reading G.G. Kay’s latest “All the Seas of the World.” That fellow has never written a bad book, and he’s a master of the beautiful tragic scene. But your stories begin to appear on the first page of my Kindle’s library list.

        I don’t know whether or not there is a system of politics and of economics that can stay gold longterm. The search should go on, I think, but each proposed new system should be treated with cautious skepticism and a fair bit of suspicion in regard to ulterior motives on the part of its aficionados.

        Robert Heinlein proposed an alternative system in Starship Troopers, namely, citizenship must be earned by public service, which usually is a period of military service. It sounds good in theory, but there’s really no substitute for doing the experiment. I doubt that serving in the military is any bar to becoming a scoundrelly politician later in life.

        1. Holly Avatar
          Holly

          My take on politics is this — anyone who wants the job is immediately disqualified.

          1. David Sims Avatar

            Yeh.

            My reading status: Finished Kay’s “All the Seas of the World” and have begun SA Corey’s final book in the Expanse series. I figured that I had to do that since it’s the only book in that series that I haven’t already read. Then I’ll begin on Arhel: Fire In the Mist.

            1. Holly Avatar

              With the warning that it was my first novel, that it is nonetheless better than the second and third in the series, and that I have learned a lot since then, I do still like that one.

              I hope you have fun with it.

          2. David Sims Avatar

            Oh. I forgot to mention that I’ve written some fiction too, though it isn’t presently for the market. If you read it, you’ll see why. It begins with an 11-year-old girl about to finish the fifth grade and the first book tells of how she begins turning into a goddess (like the Greek pagan goddess Minerva or Diana) as she goes through puberty. The cause of the transformation is genetic and doesn’t actually break any physical laws, though it certainly seems that way for a long while. The series will be science fiction, with the heroine saving humanity from an asteroid impact and apparently losing her own life in the process, but survives and goes on to build, and to rule as empress, the Solar System Empire, “an absolute imperial monarchy whose territories include all the space and all of the mass within one thousand astronomical units of the Solar System barycenter, excluding only Earth, which is the property of its inhabitants, and the Sun, which is the common heritage of mankind.”

            https://mewe.com/group/626b551167ca5d112fd42944

            1. Holly Avatar

              I went to look, but I don’t do social networks.

              It sounds cool. Nice potential conflict between the Empire and Earth set up by your worldbuilding parameters.

              1. David Sims Avatar

                At some point, one of Earth’s countries (probably the United States) will try to take control of the Solar System Empire. Brenda will have to discourage them by proving military superiority. She launches 1000 nuclear missiles that skim over Earth’s upper atmosphere and go on past Earth another 250,000 kilometers, where they simultaneously explode, spelling out the words TRY ME in nuclear fire. The offending terrestrial government is thus taught to mind its step because it is no longer the toughest dog on the block.

                You might not like this, but the Solar System Empire is a racial project with a eugenics spin. It is the white “Zion” that is denied existence on Earth. Imperial favor is assorted on the basis of how productive the people are and how smart their children turn out to be. That is, although no colony is taxed, there is differential support by the Imperial government. Colonies that produce valuable things and smart kids are first in line to get extra living space in the form of another large space station, or graduate from a few space stations to an Assemblage of conjoined space stations, up to 540 of them. By rewarding ability rather than neediness, the Empire gets more ability and reduces neediness.

                The local polities can govern themselves pretty much as they like – reasonable limits apply – and the imperial government leaves them mostly to their own affairs. Brenda really doesn’t like governing. She’d rather be designing starships that can travel at 7% of the speed of light.

                The Solar System Empire is only the first stage of a project to colonize the universe out to a (light travel time) distance of 800 million light years, which will involve about five million Milky Ways worth of matter and take 30 billion years to complete. I have a rough draft manuscript that is part of a subseries having the working title “Brenda Lynn Jones and the Colonization of the Perseus-Pisces Supercluster.”

        2. David Sims Avatar

          I’m curious about something that I just noticed. I’m at the part of Fire In the Mist where Faia is being introduced to her (snooty) roommate in the university’s great hall. You called either the hall or the dining event a “midden,” a word that means “dung heap.” Was that on purpose? Maybe to imply that the food there tasted very bad?

          1. David Sims Avatar

            Middens is used later in the book to mean what it usually does.

            I’ve finished Fire in the Mist. I enjoyed the story. You did a good job with building suspense over the war in Ariss. I’m beginning Bones of the Past now.

            1. David Sims Avatar

              I finished Bones of the Past. Very good story; better than Fire in the Mist was. Those people-eating trees were scary. I’m into Mind of the Magic now.

              If this series were science fiction, instead of fantasy, there would be a point on which I might criticize, that being the amount of time the Tide Mother (moon) eclipsed the sun for someone in Arhel. If the planet has the same size and density that Earth does, and its sun is the same mass as our sun is, then the moon would have to be much bigger than our moon is, and it would have to orbit the planet at a distance much greater than our moon orbits Earth. In fact, the separation between moon and planet might be greater than the Hill radius of the larger body. Maybe. If Tide Mother is, say, a gas giant planet like Jupiter or Saturn, it might work, but it would make Arhel a part of the satellite, and Tide Mother would be the primary body.

              On the other hand, since this is fantasy, we can just suppose that some sort of magic takes care of the physics and just wave it off.

              1. David Sims Avatar

                Finished Mind of the Magic. All things considered, a pretty good trilogy. The quick turn-around by Deus ex Machina (The Dreaming God announces his Presence and saves Arhel, neatly removing the villainous Thirk) at the end of Mind of the Magic was probably inevitable, given the situation the heroes found themselves in.

              2. Holly Avatar
                Holly

                For what it’s worth, it wasn’t supposed to be a trilogy. It was the world I was going to write in for twenty or so books.

                And then, well into the writing of Book Three, I got the Publisher Boilerplate Pronouncement of Shit and Misery — I have this thing burned into my soul, I heard it so often):

                “Book Two did not do as well as we had hoped, so end the series in Book Three.” The WHY behind my memorization of this is in the Ordering to the Net article I wrote here.

              3. Holly Avatar

                That series was my first, and the worldbuilding was my first. I was in my late twenties when I wrote the three of them, and I was…

                Well, in my late twenties. My worldbuilding was more exuberant than thoughtful. My entire process was pretty much… ah…

                WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

                Not making excuses. Just describing the whats and whys.

              4. Holly Avatar

                First, I’m very glad you enjoyed the series. I loved writing it, loved the world…

                The quick turn-around by Deus ex Machina (The Dreaming God announces his Presence and saves Arhel, neatly removing the villainous Thirk) at the end of Mind of the Magic was probably inevitable, given the situation the heroes found themselves in.

                Choppy, shitty, wrap-em-up endings are what happens when the author has the next several books in the series brainstormed and the publisher says, “That didn’t do as well as we had hoped. No more Arhel books. Write in a different world now.

              5. David Sims Avatar

                Believe me, I understand. I have the advantage of knowing in advance that the woke publishers won’t pick up any of my stories in the first place. The moment they read Divine Heritage Chapter 1 Section 2, they’ll toss the whole MS in the trash can. One day, the world will change and my stories can be published, but it probably won’t be within my lifetime.

              6. David Sims Avatar

                I’m reading The Judging Eye (Aspect Emperor book 1) by R. Scott Bakker now. It’s a good story, if somewhat ponderous. I’ll read your World Gates trilogy after that. Then back to Bakker for one book. Then, maybe, Secret Texts (starting with the prequel).

      2. David Sims Avatar

        I began reading A Fire In the Mist today. That Faia certainly has get-up-and-go. Rand al-Thor took several lengthy books to go from farmboy to a magic-user able to wipe out a town. Faia did it in the first chapter. Also, I was surprised by her casual randiness with shepherd boys and by her mom’s approval thereof. If she were 30 instead of 19, I’d be less surprised. A solid start to the story, though. We have a plague, lots of death, two surviving teenage refugees, and some very worried mages trying to find the “enemy” who burned Bright.

  2. Vicki Avatar
    Vicki

    Holly, I hope I haven’t left it too late to reply to you on this discussion.

    You say, “Every time leftists anywhere in the world get power, the result is the same. Horror, slaughter, genocide, the enslavement of the population, and the destruction of the economy and the livelihoods of the people who supported the leftist as well as those who didn’t.”

    I don’t think that this argument holds because the thing which Stalin, Mao and Hitler have in common which they don’t share with other “leftist” ideologies is totalitarianism. They were control freaks.

    But from the point of view of those of living in “leftist” Europe, things do not look as bleak as you might suppose. I know from fairly extensive contact with American sites that many of you class nearly all European societies as “socialist”. I particularly remember one women saying, “You are all socialists, which explains why you are such cowards.” Evidence of cowardice was there none. Here in the UK where are our troops were dying fighting Bush’s war in Afghanistan that remark did not go down well.

    Still, mention the National Health Service, which remains one of the great national achievements which are the pride of Britain, on an open American site and the perceived abuse of personal liberty and the imagined horrors of our Death Panels will get heated – and occasionally abusive, posts galore. And after “socialised medicine”, the words “socialist” and leftie” are usually the most prominent.

    We are not the only ones; across Europe, in different forms and to different degrees, we all regard some degree of universally available healthcare, paid for out of taxation, as a natural part of a civilised society.

    I read, back in the 80s, a post on a Compuserve forum from an SF writer who had gone bankrupt trying to pay for cancer treatment. Amongst his creditors was the hospital which had seized the intellectual property of his most popular series character. They seemed to think that they could find a writer who would write more books about that character. The original writer said, “They would have done much better financially, to let me get on with it – but they didn’t see the argument.”

    Cancer still robs people of earning potential here, but not because they have come to the end of their health insurance. Across Europe (and Australia and New Zealand) this sort of “leftism” has not resulted in, “Horror, slaughter, genocide, the enslavement of the population, and the destruction of the economy.”

    I hope that the mention of cancer is not taken as any form of personal attack. I did think at least twice before including that in my argument, but I am simply reflecting on what seems to me to one of the most prevalent horrors (as seen from this side of the pond) to the American way of healthcare. I have also looked to your personal blogs to seek reassurance that you are still on top of your own cancer nightmare.

    I would like to go further, especially on the matter of free speech (where I probably agree with you to an extent which would make some of your own American university students shun me as a tool of fascism), but I did want to try to refute the quotation I started with. And I must now leave this post to be re-read after dinner.

    1. Holly Lisle Avatar

      I’m dealing with cancer now by desperately struggling with finances…BECAUSE we now have mandatory insurance, and the laws of economics state that when you increase the demand but do not increase the supply, the price of everything goes up.

      If I have to have more surgery, I won’t be able to. Not this year, anyway. I’m still paying off the last surgeries. And I have insurance, the price of which has now gone up to $800/month, but for which I have to pay the first $10,000 out of pocket each year, and 20% of all other costs after that first 10K is paid.

      Because…

      Everyone MUST have insurance (because we’re in the midst of becoming a socialist country, too, when even the fucking spineless Republicans are trying to figure out how to make things “free” by finding someone else to bleed paying for them) Now everyone MUST have health care, including illegal aliens, but there are not more hospitals, and there are not more doctors.

      Increased demand. Massively increased demand. Same supply.

      So the price goes up, and up, and up.

      So no. I’m not on top of the cancer nightmare. I’m holding my breath that if there’s a recurrence, it’s after I’ve had time to put some money back in savings (that first $10,000, you know) and have paid off everything I still owed on the other surgeries.

      Silence does not mean everything’s okay. Silence sometimes means you’re too fucking scared to breathe a word of what you’re thinking.

      Nothing is free. NOTHING. Everything costs SOMEONE, and shoved down in the back and drowning in taxes are the people who are hanging on for dear life, working their asses off (frequently 60-80 hours a week like me) to pay enormous taxes from which we derive the benefits of military protection and infrastructure maintenance, while all the rest goes to the Socialist promise of “we’ll rob them to give things to YOU.”

      Someone always has to pay, somewhere, and the more people have to pay for what other people spend, the more jobs die, the more people need assistance, the fewer people there are to give it, and the grimmer and more horrible the system becomes.

      As an RN, I worked with a young British RN who was in the States on holiday when she had a recurrence of previous breast cancer. She was dying, and was going to be taken off blood the day I went in without being told she was dying. (This was legal back then — families were allowed to request that a dying patient not be informed of his or her condition. Ostensibly to spare his or her feelings. In truth to spare their own.)

      While I took care of her, we talked about the British health care system — about wait times and people not being able to be seen for weeks or months for critical surgery because the system was bogged down by “everyone must be seen for everything, no matter what.”

      I sat beside her and held her hand, and she was talking about what she was going to do when she was well enough to go home. She was thirty-one with a little boy. I was thirty-one with two little kids, and I thought, she’s not even going to get to say goodbye to him, and he’s right here, because she doesn’t know that they’re going to let her die today. She thinks she’s going home.

      So I fought with the doctors to tell her the truth, because I said she had a right to know that they were going to let her die that day, and she had a right to decide for herself that was what she wanted.

      It was a fucking fight, quiet and personal, between me and her doctor and two other doctors who were standing there, in which I told them what she’d said, and what I would want them to do if that were me in there.

      Her attending went in and told her the truth, and I went back in and held her hand while we both cried.

      And then I went out and started raising hell, which I was pretty good at back then, to find a way to get her back home, which was followed by another big fight in which my job was threatened by hospital administrators because I was acting outside of my authority in fighting for her against them.

      But nurses and the doctors (on our side this time) won against the administrators.

      She went home, she lived another week, and she got to say her goodbyes.

      That was almost thirty years ago now.

      What we did for her — that personal fight and that level of hell-raising — probably couldn’t happen now, because the system you’re cheering in Britain for is the system that’s destroying everything that was good in what we had here.

      Pretty soon, our medical care will also have wait times so long that people will die before they’re seen (which actually improves hospital success rates, you know, because if they don’t die in a hospital, they don’t count against the curve).

      Pretty soon, the really smart kids here will be staying away from the medical field because there’s no way to make great money if you’re brilliant, and medical innovation will die, and the folks who end up doing the work will be the ones who want the guaranteed security of a government job. Middle-roaders who don’t want to rock the boat, who just want to work their minimum hours and then go home.

      I’d love to say that I thought England and Europe were headed in the right direction. I’d love to say that I thought we were.

      But sucking on the government tit from birth to death — which was what the majority of Britons voted for in the most recent election, is not that.

      And if the US does what it usually does, and turns 180 from the last election by voting in a bunch of far-left assholes to combat what it perceives as the overreach of far-right assholes, this is just going to speed the direction of the country even farther left, into the wish-believe land of “Everything Is Free.”

    2. Holly Lisle Avatar
      Holly Lisle

      You say, “Every time leftists anywhere in the world get power, the result is the same. Horror, slaughter, genocide, the enslavement of the population, and the destruction of the economy and the livelihoods of the people who supported the leftist as well as those who didn’t.”

      I don’t think that this argument holds because the thing which Stalin, Mao and Hitler have in common which they don’t share with other “leftist” ideologies is totalitarianism. They were control freaks.

      Give it time. You’re just not quite far enough down the road yet. We have no room to nudge each other and wink though, because with our masked fucktards causing riots to intimidate those who disagree with them, and the idiots who think what they’re doing is legitimate protest, not terrorism, we’ll be joining you in hell shortly.

  3. Sue Avatar
    Sue

    Well, I liked your ‘rant’ and I agree with it … I never thought you were suggesting lawlessness, just simplify life to “respect me and I shall respect you” – agree to disagree – live and let live. We ought not be afraid of that which is different, it might just be a new spice that will add flavor to your life.

  4. Gregg Avatar
    Gregg

    I’m reminded of Christopher Stasheff’s “The Wizard in Spite of Himself” series. The hero was trying to establish democracy, and was opposed by both totalitarian and anarchist forces. I think there’s always going to be a tension between group vs individual rights and responsibilities. I see it even when there are only two people – just watch an episode of “Naked and Afraid”.

    The discussions on “Right” and “Left” annoy me. The definitions depend on time, place, and the person making the claims. Originally it was supporters of French Monarchy [+ Catholic Church] v opponents [democratic equality + secular]. By those standards, wouldn’t the US parties be considered moderate left and mid left?

    Good laws protect the rights of all against abuse. Isn’t that why the US government has 3 separate branches? It’s supposed to prevent any one branch from abusing power. Our right to free speech, bear arms, etc. is designed to protect the individual from the state. Those rights are limited to protect the group from an individual. Aagh. This has taken too much of my time 🙂

    1. Holly Lisle Avatar
      Holly Lisle

      I appreciate your perspective, though. Yes, in theory, the three branches of government are supposed to each act for the best interests of the people they serve, but with differing perspectives that oppose each other, thus preventing government overreach and protecting the rights of individual citizens.

      In fact, when Congress voted to make itself no longer subject to the laws it created, it broke the system.

  5. Laura Avatar
    Laura

    Yep, just like in Scandinavia, all those leftists slaughtering each other. Your view of the world is so hopelessly naive, Holly. You think “keep your hands to yourself” will prevent systemic inequality, that people won’t oppress each other? Maybe you don’t, maybe you just don’t care. It’s really not about being “different.” It’s about systems being deeply skewed against some groups and other groups benefitting from that. But, you know, why try to change the systems – fuck it, eh? The ‘people who run the businesses that pay other people, and who create the food that feeds other people, and who build the homes that house other people, and who risk their lives to protect other people” ARE the leftists, often. Are nonleftists useful and everyone else is just a waste of space in your world?
    I wasn’t going to come back here after your stupid rant about a game that portrays white people in a “racist” manner when you have never had anything to say about the whole theatre of racism against non-white people in both our countries. (Searched your blog and the ONLY racism you’ve ever called out is “racism” against whites.) I’ve been on your sites since I was 14. I learned to write from you. I know, I know – you don’t care that I’ll no longer be your reader and fan, I’ve seen how you dismiss the people who disagree with you. I also know there’s no hope of changing your mind. But i’m done listening to nonsense about legislation trying to “control thinking.” I know plenty of people hate me, at least in the abstract. I don’t think laws can be made to change that. But goddammit we can make laws about what people SAY and DO and the racism and other hatreds they ENACT and those who oppose that are just saying they don’t care.

    1. Holly Avatar
      Holly

      I held off on responding to this tirade when you first posted it, because while you managed to make yourself a complete asshat with your comments, I did not wish to respond in kind. I needed a little time to cool down.

      First, I’m not just against the far left. I don’t support the far right, either. The far left and the far right are the exact same people.

      The political extremes don’t sit on to opposite points of a straight line.

      They share the exact same spot on the opposite pole on a circle, with the individualist advocating for individual rights and freedoms (that would be me) on the other side.

      (Yes, the extremists of the Religious Right and the Liberal Left are the same. This isn’t about Republicans or Democrats. This is about advocating for the use of force against those who disagree with you, or advocating for individual freedom.)

      I made this diagram to explain my position to a friend. I’m reusing it here.
      The Political Extremes
      Actions speak louder than words, and the only two possibilities are to fight to preserve individual rights, or to fight to criminalize all rights when you advocate the use of force against people you don’t approve of.

      No matter how you slice it, the path that demands “special interest” rights and demands the curtailing of rights held by others leads to dictatorship, tyranny, oppression, and the destruction and slaughter of individuals in the name of some fucked-up claim of acting for the “greater good.”

      There is no good greater than the right of the individual to live the life he or she chooses, as long as that individual does not use that freedom to oppress others.

      after your stupid rant about a game that portrays white people in a “racist” manner when you have never had anything to say about the whole theatre of racism against non-white people in both our countries.

      This would suggest that you’re lying your ass off when you claim to be my reader.

      I express my opinions on race vehemently in my work. My main character of my favorite books, the Cadence Drake novels, IS black. She’s a hero — smart, capable, funny, tough. She lives in a widely settled universe where the good guys and the bad guys are of all races. Where the inventors and creators and movers and shakers are of all races. THAT is my beliefs on race, put into a form where they can be held up and viewed for as long as there are readers — that all humans are created equal in the eyes of the law, and deserve equal and just treatment for their actions and achievements.

      I looked at the world as it is, and wondered, “How could I show something better? How could I show a world where race is no longer an issue? Where people are judged not on the color of their skin, but on the quality of their character.” And then I built that world.

      And now people like you are doing their damnedest to destroy any hope we have of taking ourselves to that better world, by making the color of skin a factor of preference again, by trying to push legislation to make saying things like what I’m saying here illegal. You and people like you are trying to slaughter the First Amendment, the very amendment that protects every individual who chooses to speak his own mind against the immense and brutal power of the government.

      But goddammit we can make laws about what people SAY and DO and the racism and other hatreds they ENACT and those who oppose that are just saying they don’t care.

      Laws already exist to protect against “what people DO and the racism and other hatreds they ENACT.”

      You’re trying to bundle laws that already exist with the real atrocity you’re advocating for — and virtue signalling with all your righteous indignation to hide what you’re doing while you do it — but it’s bullshit.

      Here’s the poison you and the folks agitating with you are trying to shove down everyone’s throats with their righteous indignation.

      But goddammit we can make laws about what people SAY…

      THAT’s the one…

      What people say. Which is some version of what they think. That’s what you want to legislate.

      Legislating thought and speech led to the Spanish Inquisition, the gulags of Russia, the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, hundreds of people slaughtered and thousands imprisoned for protesting for more freedom in Tiananmen Square in China.

      You certainly can legislate speech. You’re a fucking fool if you do.

      1. Katja Avatar
        Katja

        Amen

  6. Elise M Stone Avatar

    Holly, you and I disagree on a bunch of stuff, but I am 100% with you on this. Or, as we used to say, “Live and let live.”

  7. Bryce Avatar

    Nashira, Holly said nothing about taxes, public services, etc. She only covered personal civil liberties. I think the personal protections against unfortunate case you mentioned fit in the “no” box that Holly put in her first graphic.

    And Storm, when you talk about people “denying me the right to live MY life”, the only way they do that is by passing laws and creating more “no” boxes.

    And your entire rant basically says that you believe you are right and other people should be forced to follow the rules you set forth. If it is wrong for others to do to you, it is wrong for you to do it to others.

    1. Holly Lisle Avatar
      Holly Lisle

      Nicely said.

  8. Nashira Lyons Avatar
    Nashira Lyons

    If we all minded our own business would we have schools? Or fire departments? Or roads? I agree, I never understood why anyone would care what adults do in their own homes. Wait, that’s not true. I called the police when I heard a neighbor abusing his wife and I didn’t want to be one of those people you read about who heard screams and did nothing. I would love to live in a world where we could all live and let live, but too many people take that to mean those with power get to do what they want.

    1. Holly Lisle Avatar
      Holly Lisle

      Limited government that is in control of the individual citizens who vote is necessary and has absolutely nothing to do with anything I said above.

  9. Storm Avatar

    Here’s the problem that I see with this. It would be great, if people actually DID mind their own business and keep their hands to themselves. But they don’t. And when someone insists on denying me the right to live MY life so that they can have THEIR perfect vision of the future, something has to give. And if I need a law, so that my ability to live the life I choose is protected from the people who make it their business to shut it down, then that’s what I’m going to push for.

    I’ve been active in alternative communities for most of my adult life. I’ve watched as the people in those communities have dealt with everything from actual MURDER for their beliefs and practices to being beaten, abused, and tortured — and to less physical, but more damaging long-term actions like putting laws in place that were designed for nothing more than to deny the people in the groups that I participated in the right to their pursuit of happiness. The right to decide for themselves who to love, where to live, and how to make a living for themselves. I’ve watched people legislate away their right to their children, their right to congregate, their right to love whom they love and get the rights others take for granted (over 1100 laws that benefit married people, for example) for themselves and those they love.

    It is a nice fantasy to say ‘just mind your own business and let people live their own lives’ but it isn’t realistic. Unless you can get people to stop firing me because I’m disabled without laws to enforce it, or get people to agree that if I love someone of the same gender, I should be able to legally marry them just like someone who is marrying someone of the opposite gender, or if my skin is dark, I should be able to live in the same pretty neighborhood as other people who don’t like people with dark skin if there are no laws that say that they -have- to let me in, then it is naïve to say “Don’t make laws, because too many laws are stupid and won’t make people like you anyway.” It isn’t about making people like those of us who are different. It is about making people accept that they have NO choice but to back off from trying to destroy us and our lives — about making people accountable for their bigotry, because if you say ‘just MYOB, nobody will, and people will continue to be abused for the choices that are their own choices (or the things about them that are different and that they have NO choice over) as long as someone else can profit by denying them a future.

    1. Holly Lisle Avatar
      Holly Lisle

      Murder is already illegal. Enforcing the laws that exist needs to be the priority, NOT making some murder more important than other murder in the eyes of the law.

      There are already equal opportunity laws. There are already “anyone can live in any neighborhood” laws.

      Enforcing the existing laws equally across all races and creeds and ages must be made a priority. THAT is a fight worth fighting. Demanding new laws for your own special interest is the path to having no rights at all.

      Realize, China is a leftist government. Cuba. Venezuela. Nazi Germany was a liberal left-wing government – socialist was right in the name. Hitler was a vegetarian, non-smoker, non-drinker, animal right activist (I’m not recommending the site, just the article).

      Every time leftists anywhere in the world get power, the result is the same. Horror, slaughter, genocide, the enslavement of the population, and the destruction of the economy and the livelihoods of the people who supported the leftist as well as those who didn’t.

      And the lie they tell to get power is the same every fucking time. “We’re going to protect YOU from THEM.”

      And “them” is ALWAYS the people who run the businesses that pay other people, and who create the food that feeds other people, and who build the homes that house other people, and who risk their lives to protect other people.

      Wake up.

      1. Clare Walker Avatar

        Well said. People do tend to forget that Nazism is / was a LEFT wing ideology. Calling a conservative or a Republican or a “right-winger” a “Nazi” or “Hitler” is all sensational emotionalism. Probably has something to do with the fact that education is so badly done in this country all they can count on is that people will at least remember that Hitler was a bad guy. Anyone compared to Hitler is guilty by association, even if the association is spurious.

      2. Trixie Avatar
        Trixie

        C.S. Lewis expressed this same sentiment beautifully:

        “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

        1. Holly Avatar
          Holly

          Precisely. Thank you.

        2. Clare Walker Avatar

          Ah! Exactly. After I left my comment above, I thought of this quote from CSL and was going to come back and toss it into the discussion. But I see that Trixie has already done it. 😀

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