Let Hitler Speak

Years back, I was reading a periodical, I can't recall whether it was Analog or Isaac Asimov's magazine, and someone said something bad which occasioned me to write to the editor. My point then and now is that one does not defeat bad speech with censorship, but with reasoned counter-argument.

Let's suppose you think my advocating Whigs is not just disagreeable, but downright evil. And rather than counter my words, you scream shut up, and censor any utterance of them.

I think that is wrong, and instead, you should reply to my Whig speech with your own anti-Whig speech. If you disagree, say why you disagree. If you claim I'm evil, make your case to that effect.

Then, our respective audiences can decide for themselves whether Whigs deserve their place in the dust-bin of history.

In the case of Nazis, there are better reasons than, "They lost WW2," to believe they are wrong and evil.

Every person must take action in this life convinced what is right and what is wrong. We need better reasons to think the Nazis were evil than the guy in Indiana Jones pulling out a folding hangar in a menacing way, and then getting his face melted off when he looks inside the Ark of the Covenant.

What do you do when you find out that JFK admired Hitler? If all you know is "Shut him up! They're evil!", then you might think JFK was evil, too. However, if you understand that some things Hitler did were good and other things were much more evil, then you can sympathize with JFK's admiration for the good he could see, and give Hitler the doubt about the evil he did not yet see.

Transgressive things can have a sort of appeal to the ignorant. When I was a kid, parents were shocked and appalled at sex, drugs, and rock & roll. And kids went for it. Can those things kill you or ruin your life? Loud music can cause hearing loss I suppose. And alcohol is a legal, recreational drug.

You can't just say, "shut up," but you can teach discernment. And discernment requires more than Reefer Madness.

No matter how deeply you bury Hitler's evil, it has a way of coming back and citizens need discernment to recognize it when someone who doesn't sound or look like Hitler says the same things as him. For instance, the sloganeering of both John McLame and Barack Obama had a great deal in common with Nazi sloganeering. Are the GOP and Democrats both Fascists? You need discernment.

I say you get that discernment by letting the evil Fascists have free speech to make their case. But you don't stop there. They are evil. You have to follow up with your own free speech to make the opposing case that they are not only wrong, but evil. This means you have to know why we fight.

When I read Liberal Fascism and I got to the chapters about the present day, there was an Elephant in the room, and it was obvious that Mr. Goldberg was uncomfortable with the definition of Fascism he'd spent the rest of the book crafting fit Mr. Bush's "big government" as well as Mr. Obama's.

That is the reason against educating people about why good is good, and why evil is evil.

If a thing is evil because your party boss says it's evil, and good because your party boss says it's good, then you can wake up one morning like American Communists did on 23 August 1939 to find that Nazis are no longer evil, but good. And then when Hitler invades Russia, oops, your party boss has to tell you they're evil again.

This sounds ridiculous, but keep in mind the guiding principle of both Democrats and Republicans elected officials: "if you give us enough money, we vote like you like."

In this case, it isn't the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact or Operation Barbarossa that redefines good and evil, but whose check is larger. If you have reasons to believe good is good, and reasons to believe evil is evil, then party bosses have to be picky about whose checks they cash.

This can be an inconvenience, but I think it should be a necessary inconvenience.

Write A Book

This is part 1 of a bigger collection of posts of "How to publish an ebook."

First you have to write a book. If you have paid attention to Robert Heinlein's five commandments, you've been doing just that. I strongly suggest you NOT try to publish your deathless prose until after you've written a million words.

In addition to your deathless, prose you may want to think of ebook design.

I suggest you use your favorite word processor, but you only want to use a subset of its formatting capabilities. Microsoft Word is a big bloated beast of a program because it enables a ton of different functions you won't use. You won't use multiple columns in an ebook. Things like tables and drop-caps are troublesome--avoid them.

The rationale is that you're going to end up with either a MOBI or an ePub file which are both built on top of XHTML. If you don't see a cool typesetting feature in a lot of web pages, you probably can't put it in an ebook, either. In later steps you'll be converting your book into XHTML and if the converter program barfs, you have to back up and revise your book to avoid the typographic thang which caused the barfage.

Easier to start with a vanilla word processing file. I'm assuming you will be starting with a DOCX file generated by Microsoft Word.

I've never used Scrivener, but if someone reading this has any strong opinions about it I'm all ears. Just keep in mind that whatever you use has to have some mechanism for generating XHTML.

Typefaces are not fonts, but fonts are specific implementations of a particular typeface. If you're not into typography it behooves you to learn just enough to not-suck at book design.

Typefaces come in three flavors: serif, sans-serif, and display. Use sans-serif for forms and signage. Use serif for body text. Use display for headers and titles. This is because centuries ago the monks copying texts found that adding those tittles at the ends of letters made reading faster/easier than without them. Besides, when the Romans carved words in stone, they took pains to make them look nice. That's why many serif typefaces have Roman in their names. And when people used to read newspapers, they often chose the London Times or the New York Times. That's why many typefaces have Times in their name, too.

However, just a word or two works in sans-serif. Popular with Nazis, Communists and highway departments, sans-serif is the typeface of totalitarians. 

There are other times when you want your text to evoke a time or place. Ferinstance, a book about camping might have its title rendered with letters that look like bent pieces of logs. An Algerian face evokes thoughts of the Victorian era, and the Star Trek face evokes a Science Fiction vibe. These are all instances of Display typefaces. They vary to an incredible extent and you don't care about Display typefaces until you get to cover design.

You need to pick a typeface for your ebook that is supported by your e-reader hardware. If you are using Microsoft word, use Times New Roman for everything. That's not exactly what Kindle or the Nook uses, but it's so close you have to be a typeface designer to know.

Next you have to worry about which letters you use in your ebook. You want to use 'single quotes' or "double quotes" and not use ‘single quotes’ or “double quotes”. If you don't replace all these characters, you'll end up with unsightly blocks where these characters are used in your text. Same goes for several other special character.  Microsoft Word likes to make your documents look better and they do so by changing what you type into something that means the same but looks better.

The more of these characters you remove up front when you write your book, the less tweaking you have to do when you get to future steps.

Yes you can fix things downstream, but consider the problem of typos. You want to fix typos in the Word file, and if you do a ton of manual tweaks downstream from the Word file, all those manual tweats will make you not-want to fix typos--or worse, fix those typos in both your Word file and also in the manually tweaked downstream files.

For this reason, it makes sense to tell Word to not-change what you type automagically.

(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)

I Don't Find Shut-Up Persuasive

Recently, an induhvidual took exception to something I wrote.

It is my opinion that we all belong to different partisan groups, yet share an underlying humanity. And this underlying humanity does not change across the centuries.

Do you care what a scalawag Bobby Baker was? Unless you're older than dirt, you'll have to google the name first. Yet we shall appreciate the wisdom of "pride goeth before a fall" ten centuries from now. Though schadenfreude isn't a particularly nice thing, our ancestors did, and our descendants will, appreciate it as well as we do.

Thus when I speak of axe-grinding vs storytelling, I'm referencing the transient and the invariant aspect. And if I say something you disagree with because I'm a Whig, it's OK. In ten centuries nobody will care about it.

Ah, but if I say something you disagree with and it's NOT because I'm a Whig, but that I've engaged reality, and you are in denial of reality at that point? Then it's not OK.

Horace said you can drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but she keeps on coming back. The Soviets worked in vain for decades to change human nature. Instead of creating the New Soviet Man, they created a continent-spanning Gulag. I'm not picking on Commies, because before they tried to change human nature the Spartans did the same by a program of child-rearing that we would characterize as ritual child abuse.

There are some laws you can break, and there are other laws you can only break yourself against. One of my favorite lines is "How's that working out for you?" When you engage reality, things work out, and when you deny reality, things don't.

If you think you can break the law of gravity, just give me a moment to get anything I care about out from underneath you.

If you disagree with me, feel free to engage in rational argument. I rather enjoyed the dialogs of Plato. Particularly useful was the civility of the various participants therein. Good behavior to model. I learn more from people I disagree with than from those who hold my opinions as gospel. (I don't even hold my opinions as gospel!)

However, if what you think of as rational argument consists of "shut up," go find someone else to troll. I'd rather talk to humans.

The Hollywood Stupid Tax

In the year 1966 a television show premiered that I absolutely loved. It was called Star Trek and it followed the adventures of humanity going off into unexplored regions. Though the starship Enterprise was the focus of action, they'd show up from time to time at a mining camp or a human colony. And you'd see hearty pioneer stock, like the people I imagined my ancestors were.

When Gene Roddenberry had to do some axe grinding it involved a Kirk and Uhuru interracial smooch. Or the fella with white on one half of his face and black on the other half of his face couldn't play nice with the other fella whose coloration was the opposite. Happily, the ratio of axe grinding to story telling was kept low enough that the show was watchable.

Fast forward three decades and someone in Hollywood gets the idea for a new Star Trek series called "Enterprise" wherein they follow the exploits of an earlier band of explorers. The show was unwatchable because it way too politically correct.

When Star Trek Next Generation came out, interracial smooching was passe and they went on to whatever social issues were current hot buttons. And the axe-grinding to story-telling ratio got cranked way up, too. For crying out loud, they replaced Kirk with a Frenchman! And what'd he do in the first episode, he surrendered.

Political correctness assimilated the Star Trek franchise far more thoroughly than any Borg collective possibly could. Thus, when Enterprise came out, and it depicted a future that was less technically advanced than any of the other Star Trek shows. Nevertheless, it proved to be the more politically correct than any of its predecessors. How could that be? Did Kirk vote for Reagan or something to make the original show less politically correct than Enterprise? It made no sense and I quit watching in disgust.

When I reflected on the death of the Star Trek franchise I came to the conclusion that it was bankrupted by what I call the Hollywood Stupid Tax. Let's suppose you work in the entertainment industry. You vote for Santa Claus in every election. You think gun violence is caused by scary-looking weapons. You think society needs to move "Forward" to embrace the economic theories of the 1930s that worked oh, so well for FDR, Stalin, et al.

News flash: there are bitter clingers who don't think like you do. There are people who recognize that when seconds count, the cops are just minutes away and seek to arm themselves. There are people who go to church and worship as they choose. And they watch television and movies. If you hew just a little more to the center, you can get some of their money.

You don't have to be a Whig like me to enjoy a good story, but you do have to be a Whig like me to enjoy my political blather about how great a candidate Daniel Webster was or how wonderful the planet would be if we gave the Ring of Power to the Whig Party. If you don't agree with my politics, you won't enjoy my axe-grinding nearly as much as my story-telling.

Thus Star Trek Enterprise killed the franchise because it tipped the balance too much toward political correctness and became unwatchable to anyone to the right of Walter Mondale. If lefty propaganda sold, we'd be awash in Russian Tractor Operas. (Boy meets girl. Collective Farm gets new tractor. Boy gets drunk on cheap Vodka. Girl learns she needs him as much as a fish needs a bicycle and lives happily-ever-after driving the tractor.)

Human nature is neither Red nor Blue. Stories that reflect human nature and engage our humanity at that level aren't Republican or Democrat, Socialist or Fascist, Monarchist or whatever. When you write anything that drifts one iota from that, you're paying some stupid-tax with everyone who disagrees with the party-line. In a thousand years, nobody will care about our partisan interests, but they will engage with our narratives at the level of the humanity we put into them.

Axe-grinding vs Story-telling

Unless you receive a Federal subsidy large enough to blind you to things like sustainability, liberty, and basic mathematics, you might not like the direction the USA has taken in the last decade or so. Or you might think that the government exists to tax your enemies, subsidize your friends and get large enough to make sure nobody can escape its clutches.

The citizens of a representative democracy are responsible to know what its gubmint is doing and replace corrupt rascals with just statesmen. The only problem is that both parties prefer to put no one but weenies on the ballot.

Let's be clear: I think the Republican Party is every bit as corrupt as the Democrat Party.

This poses a problem for the writer who is also a citizen: what do do about this?
 

I've seen Sarah Hoyt, Ric Locke, and Larry Correia tackle this problem in turn. If you like guns, you can get an articulate argument for training responsible citizens in gun handling, and defense so that the crazed murderer can be immediately confronted with a violent response. (When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.) And if you hate Communists, Sarah Hoyt can regale you with tales of Portugal under the left. I have no doubt that if Ric Locke or Robert Heinlein were alive to day they'd be doing likewise.

I have friends whose politics are as contradictory to mine as night is to day. And they've poured their politics into their writing making all the villains like me and all the heroes like them. This makes their stories as readable as a Jack Chick tract. Tolerable if you agree, intolerable if you do not. The ratio of axe-grinding to story-telling is over ten to one.

I've also seen slightly more sophisticated tales wherein the labels are scrubbed from the heroes and villains, but they act out allegories of good and evil while sermonizing about the virtues of their position. Atlas Shrugged comes to mind here. It's a little better than a Chick tract, but I still skipped past the 20 page sermons by John Galt, et al. Here the ratio of axe-grinding to story-telling is improved, but still heavy-handed.

I thing Michael McCloskey gets the balance right in "The Trilisk Ruins" (5 stars). The gubmint is the antagonist and it doesn't matter whether the administration is Republican or Democrat. (Both parties signed onto the USA PATRIOT Act after all.) The heroes are "criminals" who aim to misbehave. They spend a fair amount of time when they're in civilization scrubbing logs of incriminating evidence and bribing bureaucrats to overlook minor infractions. And they find the Feds like to infect everyone's computer with dormant spyware.

None of this gets in the way of a ripping good yarn. The hero and her handsome male companions go rocketing off into space in search of treasure with the gubmint a few steps behind trying to stop them and/or steal the treasure for themselves. I figured the axe-grinding to story-telling ratio was fairly light-handed, but I should get a 2nd opinion from a statist.

Many times you'll read an SF story wherein the aliens are just like us, but with some prosthetic makeup on their nose and funky jewelry (Bajoran), or pointy ears and eyebrows (Vulcan), or spots on their skin (Trill). Why, you might ask Gene Roddenberry? Because more elaborate makeup and alien get-ups cost too much, he'd say.

McCloskey has no such constraints. He devises aliens with tri-lobed brains, or 20-lobed brains, and he gives them really alien forms. Like 40 limbs, no sense of smell or hearing, but a sense of mass. And he gives this a plausible explanation without getting bogged down in technobabble. High marks for making his aliens alien.

Often you'll read Science Fiction with artificial intelligences and lots of networked computers and there's a sense that technology is just magic with wires. Not so in "The Trilisk Ruins." Communications protocols, encryption, and other terms of the geek's art are handled intelligently without any hand-wavy bull.

"The Trilisk Ruins" is the first novel in a series. If you buy this and like it, be prepared to buy a few more follow-up novels. I just did.