Twitter Rewards & Punishes Incivility

Do you use Twitter? Have you ever wanted to have a post go viral? Being unkind is probably the way to go. The most ‘viral’ thing I’ve ever done on Twitter was to make a non-supportive comment on Bernie Sanders’ tweet. I got so much flak from that I had to change my settings! And I wasn’t even rude or nasty or anything. It’s just that Sanders’ fans don’t appreciate anything other than Sanders-worship.

Tired old ex-celebrities have found their tweets unignored when they venture forth with unhinged comments about how Pres. Trump’s children ought to be murdered. As long as they are progressive ex-celebrities they will probably not have their Twitter account suspended. (If they did, they’d just make a new Twitter account and continue as before.)

Personally, I don’t see why anyone should call Bernie Sanders or Barack Obama or Donald Trump a POS when you can just say ‘bless his heart!’ and mean more or less the same thing. We live in a world full of unhinged people. Civility is a safety measure.

But if you are regularly uncivil in your Twitter life, and if you are some flavor of conservative or Republican, and you are NOT Donald Trump, the Twitter gods are likely to punish you. You may lose your account or be ‘shadowbanned’ or, as I have recently heard, you may find yourself following someone/something you would never follow voluntarily. I have seen this happen to people I know who are kind, decent people— people I would turn to for help if reconstituted Nazis were hunting me. 

Since neither the progressive nor the conservative movements are monolithic entities where everyone thinks the same, I’m sure there are progressives who have been persecuted by Twitter for not saying the right— or Left— things. In fact, I’m sure there are those in the Twitter beast that are madder at the deviant progressives than they would ever be at we mere conservative ‘haters.’ 

So what is a tweeter to do? If we are too polite, our tweets will be ignored and disappear into silence. We will lose our chance to be of influence. But if we are ‘spicy,’ even if in a mostly civil way, we’ll be guilty of hate speech, deplatformed and silenced. Sometimes our words will be grossly misinterpreted in order to make us guilty. 

I have no answers, other than to be flexible. Don’t put all your internet ‘eggs’ into one Twitter or Facebook basket. Have a blog, have a Gab or MeWe account, try something different. Spread your effort out in more than one place. It’s highly unlikely you will be suspended from Twitter, Facebook, Gab and MeWe at the same time, and also have your blog taken down. And if you blog— consider compiling some of your more ‘evergreen’ blog posts into an ebook on Smashwords, or even a printed book. Banning a book is harder than taking down a Twitter account or a blog.

Amazon-dot-com really is out to get us

I’ve been a customer of Amazon-dot-com for some years now, and I tend not to think of them as promoters of book censorship. After all, early on I got my copy of ‘The Turner Diaries,’ a once-talked-about badly written white supremacist, antisemitic book about a future race war, from Amazon.

But in more recent times I’ve heard stories of censorship at Amazon.  There were stories they were going to start banning or shadow-banning books with ‘keto’ in the title, because the keto world is full of cholesterol-deniers  who believe scientific research rather than ‘fats are bad’ bleating.

I also have heard a report that the works by the founder of ‘conversion therapy’ had been pulled from Amazon because the LGBT leadership feel these books conflicted with their dogmas.

The Aquila Report: Amazon Bans Books on "Conversion Therapy"

But now, Amazon has pulled some e-books by Christian authors I happen to know personally, Declan Finn and Jon Del Arroz. I have read their previous books and named kittens after both men. OK, one kitten is named Declanna and the other is Jon-with-Rice, but still.

Both books were in the pre-ordering stage and both authors have lost the pre-orders they had for the ebook edition. In both cases, the more expensive paper-based versions of the books were still available. 

Evidently Amazon is claiming that the authors took the books down for revision (a lie) or that the publisher did something (also a lie.) I wonder if their plan is mainly to persuade certain non-progressive authors that Amazon is not their friend and they should boycott and make it harder for themselves to get their books out with alternatives to Amazon. 

The thing about Amazon is that they are out to make money. They probably believe they will make more money by giving in to complaints by the Progressive special-snowflake types, than standing strong against all censorship. But the more they cater to the special-snowflake, safe-space, pro-censorship crowd, the further they will have to go. Someday they may need to start taking down books and movies that earn them good money to prevent an expensive boycott from the Left.

What can YOU do? Buying Declan Finn and Jon Del Arroz’s books are a good start. It is also good, when you hear of a case of this type, to transmit it throughout your social media— tweet, Facebook, MeWe, Gab, whatever you’ve got. Blog about it. Because this kind of progressive sh-t only works when they can keep us in the dark.

PajamasMedia: Amazon Bans Christian Novels Glorified and Deus Vult

John C. Wright: Declan Finn Encounters Rough Waters on Amazon....

Bounding Into Comics: Amazon Removes Two Christian Fiction Books

Rawle Nyanzi: Why #BrandZero Matters

Jim McCoy: Stop With The Discrimination

Congresscritters shalt not commit adultery

Among the many things that Congresscritters, male and female, ought not to do, adultery is high on the list. Even if you call it ‘open marriage’ or ‘polyfidelity’ or violate the terms and conditions of the English language by using the non-word ‘thruple.’ 

Why? Congressing is a job in which you are expected to swear an oath of office. Swearing a solemn oath is a big hairy deal! Throughout much of history folks worried if they swore a solemn oath and failed to keep it, they could expect some hellfire in their long-term future. They didn’t feel entitled to shrug their oathbreaking off with the insincere words ‘well, I tried.’ 

And marriage? It’s not a government benefits program for sex partners no matter how much some people want it to be. It is a covenant— another solemn oath you are expected to keep. The institution of marriage is also a major building block of any society. Marriage traditionally creates a home with a man and a woman at the center of it. Scientific studies have shown that these marriage-based homes provide a beneficial environment for the raising of children. Just look at children who have been raised in orphanages and the foster care system, and you will see there is no substitute. 

Now, when you are selecting a candidate to vote into Congress, you want someone who is going to take his oath of office seriously. And one hint is to see how well he has kept the other solemn oaths in his life. A person who is on record as having committed adultery, just like a person who has been convicted of perjury, is usually not a good choice.

Former congresswoman Katie Hill has been mislead by our sick society into thinking that the word ‘polyfidelity’ somehow makes adultery OK and gets her permission not to keep her marriage oath. She also thinks accusations of ‘abuse’ make her misdeeds all right. She is wrong, and that makes her resignation the right thing to do, but I’m afraid she will never know it and will think of herself as an innocent victim. 

Now, there have been even presidents of our country who are believed to have committed adultery while in office— the business with JFK and Marilyn Monroe being one example. Does that mean we should have rejected JFK from being our president (had we known?) No, we are allowed to forgive presidential (and congressional) sins. But it is far better when our nation’s leaders have the morals and the dignity to avoid adultery and other major violations of moral law. 

Marriage is the heart of our society— it’s where are most competent members of society are raised. Adultery, in the German language, is called ‘Ehebruch’ or marriage-breaking. Perhaps that’s where we get our concept of the ‘broken home—‘ a home which is destroyed by an annulment or divorce, which is in turn often triggered by adultery or suspicions of adultery. When a marriage is broken by adultery, a light goes out in our society. When enough lights go out, we have violence in the street and filled prisons because of all of the young people who come from ‘broken homes’ and don’t have the moral foundation or mental health to become contributing members of our society. 

Some people look down their noses at the ‘prudes’ who don’t want known adulterers elected or appointed into positions of power. ‘We should pick the best guys regardless of their private life,’ they say. But are they the best guys if they are adulterers? Or perjurers, thieves, bank robbers or serial killers? Would you vote a Jeffrey Dahmer into congress if he had good skills, or would you hold out for someone who had the moral values to at least not kill people?

Katie Hill says 'this isn't over' despite resigning over sex scandal

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They're Out to Get the Children!

They are out to get the children. No, not the zombies. The progressives. It’s a simple matter of math. As long as the progressives have not yet managed to replace our ‘two-party system’ with a one-party tyranny, they have to manage to get 51% in some election to even have their guy in Congress. 

But progressives have one major obstacle in gaining future votes: they have much more fully embraced ‘birth control mentality’ and abortion culture than the conservatives. As a result, conservatives have larger families. Progressives may not have children at all. Global warming, you know? Children are a form of pollution, like carbon. Progressives may pride themselves on being more environmentally friendly, but by giving up children they are giving up the chance at having a captive audience in their home to recruit to the cause. 

And so they turn to the public schools, and, through laws and lawsuits, they exercise some controls over private Catholic, Lutheran and other Christian schools as well. Overwhelmingly, people who want to become public school teachers are required to join a liberal teachers union that uses union dues from members to support progressive political candidates. In the states where teachers do have a legal alternative to joining the union, they are certainly not told about that fact routinely and it is not made easy. In some cases, they have to pay union dues anyway. 

Teachers’ unions provide access to the teachers for indoctrination purposes, if they haven’t already been indoctrinated enough by their schools and colleges. The result? In stories throughout the nation, for decades now, we hear that children who express support for Republicans are viciously bullied— by the teachers as well as other students. While children who express progressive views, even contradictory stupid ones, are praised.

Biased rules of ‘diversity’ support help promote the progressive atmosphere. Kids who come out as LGBT-whatever are rewarded by having ‘Gay-Straight Alliance Clubs.’ Christian kids don’t get to form ‘hateful’ Man-Woman Marriage Support Clubs, they are lucky if they are not forbidden to wear crucifixes or crosses to school. Because they are haters, see?

Many years ago, I was a teacher in a Lutheran school. Because the parents had to pay tuition, every single parent thought he was in charge. One parent would want zero homework for the younger kids, another wanted more homework for these same kids. Some parents wanted Lutheran religious instruction, others wanted generic Protestants. We as teachers had to try to make everyone happy.

Progressive public school teachers don’t think like that. I’ve heard of a case where the teacher inspected a child’s lunch from home, deemed it nutritionally inferior, and forced the child to pay for an (institutionalized processed food) school lunch. Because teachers have more rights than parents in that area, in progressive teachers minds. Parents are the problem. 

More recently there are cases where teachers have ‘diagnosed’ a child as ‘transgender’ and demanded that the parents take the child to a pro-gender-transition ‘therapist’ or be prosecuted for child abuse. 

In California there was several years ago a requirement that all schools teach ‘LGBT history,’ which I suppose means that to California kids Abraham Lincoln and Emily Dickenson are Gay now. Whether Abraham and Emily like it or not. Children need LGBT history whether it’s true or not!

Once children get fully indoctrinated by progressive schools, we know what party they are going to be casting their first ballots for. Some of these young voters will, in time and with exposure to the real world, become mentally free to consider both sides of some issues. But in the meantime they will be voting the way progressive teachers have programmed them to.

I think that we conservatives should not just lie down and take it. A few families homeschooling is not enough. Why are there not funds in every single American city and town, so that every family who wants to send a child to a conservative Christian school can get a scholarship to do so? We can’t wait for school voucher programs to magically appear and magically be fair even to ‘hateful’ conservative schools. As long as Big Government holds the purse strings to schools and school vouchers, education of children will be a political football. And I hate football. We need to opt out— not just for our own kids if we are lucky enough to be in two-parent families, but for other kids as well. Government schooling is becoming an increasing threat to the democratic process. Let’s seek alternatives.

Why College Education Can't Be 'Free'

College students who are too dim to make it in college are demanding that college educations should be ‘free.’ What they really mean is that THEY don’t want to pay for it. They just want the benefits if they actually manage to get themselves educated, or get a degree in spite of their cluelessness.

Colleges and universities have a staff— professors and others— and buildings in which to hold classes. Both these things cost money that someone will have to pay for. Yes, we COULD enslave all college professors and make them teach for free, but we’d still have to feed them, because their deaths by starvation would inhibit their teaching ability. Feeding our nation’s college professor slaves would cost us money. We’d also need to house them in some manner nice enough they won’t all run away from the educational plantation and leave the college students untaught. 

Because of the costs, what ‘free education’ usually means is that those few students who pass the entrance exams with flying colors will get the educations. The students who today can enter classrooms based on student loans (which have to be paid back) would have no shot at higher education. This would actually be good for the dim bulbs who could never have graduated anyway, since they would have no loans to pay back.  But the others— the ones who are not epic test-takers but who could have managed to learn and graduate anyway— would have no opportunities.

Another approach to ‘free education’ is what happens in our public high schools, especially in poor neighborhoods. The standards are lowered, classes dumbed down, and before long you see high school diplomas handed out even to kids who can’t even read the words on the diploma. That’s a major reason that college is so important for people who want a job— high school diplomas now mean nothing. College diplomas are going the same way. 

I’ve heard someone express admiration for some foreign country in which ‘anyone’ can get government funding to live on while they go to university. But they never ask how many applicants can get into the colleges, how many places there are available compared to the number of high school leavers who don’t have jobs yet and might look at government funded studying as an alternative to getting a job. I doubt any country with ‘free education’ can afford to give it out to all comers. Someone has to get jobs to pay the bills.

As college degrees become worth less and less, it’s interesting that some are pointing out the shortage of young persons willing to train to become plumbers, carpenters, electricians, and other skilled non-college jobs. I guess the work is just too hard, compared with going to a college for years, majoring in binge drinking, and hope Bernie Sanders will magically pay off everyone’s student loans without collapsing the economy too badly. 

Why Bloggers should Compose Posts on Scrivener

Scrivener? You may be saying. Isn’t that just for novelists and book writers? Why should I use that— pay money for that— when I am just a blogger?

OK, that’s another problem. If you blog, and your blog has more than just pictures or videos— if there are words— You Are a Writer. You may be an unpaid writer, and you may be so insecure that you haven’t adopted the identity of ‘writer’ yet— or you just add ‘not a REAL writer’ — but you are a writer. Deal with it.

Scrivener is a tool that writers use to write their work. You start a Scrivener ‘project’ and you can make any number of folders for chapters and divisions of your work, and under the chapters you have pages called ‘text’ which are often used for the scenes of a fiction chapter.

I use it for my blog. I no longer compose my blog posts while online, using the ‘new post’ thing on my blog. I have a Scrivener project for blogging. I have folders for my individual blogs— there are a few active blogs— and sub-folders for the date range.

Why do I do that? Several reasons. The main one is that blogging is insecure. My very first blog, before I started my Blogger account, was on a blogging service which no longer exists. I’ve had more than one blog on services that no longer exist. Since I have my back blog posts preserved on Scrivener now, if my whole blog went down I could re-create it somewhere else.

I’ve been having a bit of a time with Blogger since I moved my blogging efforts back to that service. I’m wondering how committed Google is to blogger. I’ve been having troubles commenting on other Blogger blogs. Google could discontinue Blogger or turn it into a paid service at any time. 

Also, I’ve heard, also about Blogger, that people have had their whole blog taken down for no reason, by mistake. It’s never happened to anyone I know of, but it could happen. If it happened to me, I wouldn’t lose my posts.

Finally, bloggers are WRITERS. After you have been blogging for a while, you may have enough posts on a certain topic to gather those posts together, make a new Kindle project for them, add more material, and publish it as an e-book or a printed book. 

The down side of Scrivener is that it does cost a little money. Once you have it and get used to using it, you won’t want to do without it. Now, before I first bought Scrivener I downloaded a free Scrivener alternative called YWRiter. That would work to preserve your blog posts as well.

Is Your KJV Bible Missing Bits?

Writers of all kinds who are culturally literate have most often either read the Bible or at least read books in which phrases from the Bible are quoted. It’s part of being an educated person. 

But as you probably aren’t willing to learn Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek to read the Bible in the original, you will need a translation. And the long-time reigning king of English language Bible translations is the King James Version, called the KJV for short. 

The KJV was also the Bible authorized to be read in Anglican churches in England back in the days you couldn’t safely be anything BUT Anglican in England. So another name for it is Authorized Version, also AV. 

There is a dispute between Catholics and most Protestants, and between the ancient Jews who translated the Septuagint, an ancient Greek-language Bible, and medieval and modern Jews, over which books belong in the Bible. The dispute is over some books that are called Deuterocanonicals or Apocrypha, depending on which side of the dispute you are on. 

These books were included when the first Christian Bible, with both a New Testament and an Old Testament, was compiled. At the time of the Reformation when Protestantism was invented, ‘Reformers’ such as Luther and Calvin grumbled about the Deuterocanonical books. 

But Luther translated them into his German Bible translation all the same, and the King James translators did also. They were only removed later, by the British Bible Society, perhaps because not believing those books belonged in the Bible made it cheaper to print Bibles.

But those parts of the KJV were known for a long time in England, and a lot of the writers we are taught to think of as ‘great’ grew up having these ‘extra’ Bible books read to them at church and at chapel in their schools. 

The missing KJV books are available in a separate volume called ‘The Apocrypha KJV,’ which I used for years until I got a really nice leather-bound complete KJV. There are also paperback KJV Bibles with Apocrypha.

The thing that writers, particularly, need to know about Bible translations is that all the newer, trendier Bible translations are copyrighted works, and you need permission to quote from them. 

For indie writers and bloggers, though, it may be too hard to get permission, especially if all you want to do is quote one little thing. The KJV Bible, being old, may be freely quoted. 

I personally prefer the KJV because I grew up Protestant reading the KJV, and did not become Catholic until much later in my life. Most of my Bible knowledge came from the KJV, and I prefer it. I couldn’t imagine using a modern version for memorizing a Bible verse, for example.

For the English-speaking writer who does not have a religious preference, the KJV has been the version with the most literary influence. The old-fashioned language of the KJV strengthens your command of the English language, and prepares you to read Shakespearian English. 

To learn more about the history of the ‘missing’ books of the KJV Bible, read ‘Why Catholic Bibles are Bigger’ by Gary G. Michuta.

Why Folks don't Neuter their Barn Cats

Some people think that you should treat barn cats like they are the elderly, overweight indoor cats we are supposed to have, and neuter them in kittenhood. If you are an Animal Rights advocate who believes that all domestic animals should go extinct, you are probably angry— if only those darn people would have neutered all their cats long ago, they’d be extinct already.

People who have barn cats don’t think like that. A barn cat colony usually has a lot of unaltered cats. In the case of the female cats, motherhood makes them more interested in hunting. Even after the kittens have grown up, even if the mama cat is later spayed, they still think they are hunting for a family of 4 or more. Girl kitties who get spayed before motherhood are more likely to get fat and do like my cat Mariska does— imitate a furry, fat rug 23 hours a day.

With male cats there is a different situation. Intact males serve a leadership and protective function in many breeds of animals. Some people who keep free-ranging laying hens also have a rooster to warn of danger and to lead the hens back to the henhouse at night.

With cats, the most dominant tomcat rules the roost. Or at least, he bosses the other male cats, neutered and not-neutered. I have had a problem with my current Head Tomcat, Derek, chasing off male kittens once they start getting all masculine. As a result, I’ve neutered some of the male kittens that are affectionate and that I would miss if they get chased off the property. The two kittens, George M. and Sonny, did get big weight-wise, but not actually obese. They retained their sweet nature and Derek gets along with them, since they are not rivals.

The previous Head Tomcat in Charge was called Little Stranger. He got the name since I found him as a newborn in the long grass, and since I couldn’t find the guilty mama I added him to the litter of a cat who’d just had 5 girl kittens. She was too tired to notice the addition.

Little Stranger killed a favorite kitten in the middle of the night one night. This is an instinctual act some tomcats perpetrate to get the lady cats to come back in heat quicker. I ‘punished’ Little Stranger by making the appointment to neuter him the next morning. After he got neutered, I kept him in the house for a while so he wouldn’t smell like a tomcat to Derek and get chased off. Little Stranger stayed lean after his decommissioning as a tomcat. He’s adjusted to his lower status in the cat herd, but he keeps telling me he could have been a contender.

Some people say that an unspayed queen cat will have about a thousand descendants in a year or so. In real life, that is not so. My barn cat colony mostly produces enough kittens to make up for the old cats who have died and the occasional cat that wanders off or gets eaten by coyotes or foxes. I used to allow my barn cat queens to have their babies in the barn, with the result that some kittens grew up without human contact and were feral. 

I didn’t like that. I used to give away some kittens regularly, and they need to be tame for that. My barn cats have a cat door so they can come in to the back porch and go to the basement. I encourage them to have their kittens on the porch, and some obviously pregnant mama cats get to come into the house to raise their babies. (It’s a farmhouse, there are plenty of mice for mama cats to hunt without going outdoors.)

My mama cats have varying amounts of kittens. A couple regularly have one-kitten litters. One, Connie, likes to have 2 litters of 5 or 6 kittens every year, but hers tend to be small and not thrive. Some people think I should give all my cats away to the Humane Society (which charges for abandoning a pet) so that they can all be put to sleep, since some of my kittens die, but that is absurd. Some of every kind of animal die young. My goats, when I had them, never had a 100% survival rate of their kids. The same with my sheep. Chicks and ducklings I raise don’t ALL grow up to be big chickens or ducks. 

The purpose of having barn cats is to kill the vermin. Barns attract vermin, especially rats and mice. Just being in a rural area attracts mice— I have tons moving in the house every fall. Last year I even had a mouse living in my mailbox. The trick with barn cats is this: never scold one for killing things, or bringing dead stuff to you, or eating a baby bunny rabbit right in front of you. Don’t even kvetch when they kill a baby chick! It’s YOUR job to protect the critters you don’t want eaten from your barn cats.

Is Secular Man-Woman Marriage an Instinct?

What is the true nature of Man-Woman marriage/pair-bonding, found throughout history and across cultures? Unlike same-sex-marriage which is a modern cultural development. 

It IS possible that from the earliest human history the cultural custom of M-W marriage has spread from culture to culture because it was a good invention and people liked it, since it solved some social problems. What social problems? 

1. Keeping men from fighting too savagely over the women.
2. Keeping women and their children fed, since they would have a specific man to provide for them.
3. Allowing men to have what women had by nature: the ability to be a parent of a specific child.

But is this just a cultural custom? If it were, wouldn’t we see cultures that hadn’t adopted that custom, or rejected it years ago? Especially in long-isolated human groups? But we don’t see that. There just haven’t been cultures in which men could have any women they wanted. Or where human men acted like mating baboons, sharing any female who was in heat, while ignoring the others.

I believe that M-W marriage or pair-bonding might well be more that just a custom that could be different from culture to culture. It may be instinct— the way that wolves have the instinct to form wolf-packs, and Mandarin ducks have the instinct to mate for life. 

Some people might say that the facts that some cultures allowed polygamy and harems while others didn’t proves it isn’t instinct, but I don’t think that’s so. Humans, as thinking beings, can shape the cultural results of a pair-bonding instinct. One group allows a man to make multiple marriage-bonds— perhaps because there is or was a shortage of men in the culture, or perhaps because some men were enslaved and made eunuchs. Others allowed only one pair-bond per customer. Or only one at a time.

Our experience of human beings is that they tend to group up in male-female pairs, and attempts to change that don’t work well. Some groups, like the Shakers, wanted everyone to be celibate— no sex. They aren’t around any more. The early Marxists who believed that the ‘means of production’ should be held in common included women as a means of production, and experimented with the travesty of ‘free love.’ That also did not last. The Soviet Union and other Socialist regimes had M-W marriages. 

So when they scream at you that M-W marriage is ‘just a piece of paper’ and that same-sex couples or triples deserve paper too, don’t believe it. Humans may have a long history of M-W marriage, but S-S marriage is an innovation we can’t find in the past.

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Sometimes you have to take sides

I don’t like the muck of politics. People argue with one another, imply the other side doesn’t care and/or eats babies for breakfast, and condemn folks without taking a minute to look for facts.

But some times you have to take sides. There was a writer in Germany long ago, Hedwig Courths-Mahler. She wrote a lot of little novels she called ‘fairy tales for adults.’ She was so popular that some of her novels were reprinted to send to soldiers during World War One.

But then as her writing career was winding up, National Socialism came along. Someone came to her and said she should re-write all her novels to make all her heroes ‘Aryan’ and all the villains Jewish. She didn’t do it. She gave the excuse that she was ‘too old’ for all the work. She didn’t risk her own life and those of her daughters by REALLY taking a stand, but at least she didn’t go along with the suggestion to turn her life’s work into National Socialist party propaganda. 

Today’s Socialists are making similar demands of writers. Include this, condemn that in your writing work: or else! They want ‘diversity,’ and when you write about Appalachian teens bullied for being ‘hillbillies’ you are told that doesn’t count. And they when you write about a ‘diverse’ person that does count, you are told you are the wrong race/gender/sexual orientation to write about that kind of ‘diverse’ person.

I guess the Socialists are teaching us that some people just don’t count. The lesson Hitler taught the Jews, Gypsies and Jehovah’s Witnesses and that Stalin taught the Ukrainians, Christians and ethnic Germans of Russia. But what about the people that do count? Is it fair to demand that Black people always have to write about Black people and disabled people have to write only about people with their particular disability? Why not let the protected ‘diverse’ people at least write about whatever they want.

Even though I am a former/recovering Marxist, a woman, and a person with Same-Sex Attraction (Gay), my current political perspective makes me a non-person to the publishing industry and the mainstream of writers. But in today’s writing world, thank goodness, one can always become an Indie and write what you want. You won’t be well compensated or anything, but within reason you can write what is in your heart.

I am lucky. My writer friend Declan Finn invited me to join a FB group called Conservative-Libertarian Fiction Alliance, which has since moved to MeWe, a more welcoming social medium. I’ve met a number of fine writers there who are not part of the mainstream or the ‘Establishment’ or the Socialist movement. I’ve read a lot of books and short-story collections that I’ve learned of in the group. 

We need to make the most of our current opportunities. I predict it will be harder for non-Socialists of all kinds to succeed much as Indie writers. In part, because the new Socialists totally do not know when they are calling for censorship. They just want to condemn ‘racists’ and other ‘haters,’ which in their mind can apply to anyone of any race, sex or condition, that does not toe the line to what they believe. 

How Fiction Writers can save 'The Culture'

If you are conservative, have ever been conservative, or are one of the wonderful liberals who listens to conservative friends without ending friendships, you have heard people complaining about ‘The Culture.’ What people often mean by it is that increasingly, ‘The Culture’ favors left-wing points of view and mocks or demonizes other points of view.

An example of this? The eternally-running Law & Order series. I’ve watched them for years, especially Law & Order: SVU. I’ve even named a kitten ‘Mariska’ after actress Mariska Hargitay. (Mariska the kitten is an elderly cat now.) But there are very many episodes of L&O:SVU that show a lot of bias towards Catholics and/or Evangelical Christians. Many issues have pro-abortion, pro-gay-marriage, pro-child-transsexual messages, and people who have honest disagreements are invisible or demonized. (If I had a child with transgender feelings, I would NOT want him to wear dresses to school or in public when even girls mostly don’t wear dresses anymore. Being different gets a child bullied.)

Contrast that to the original Star Trek series. Back in 1966, television shows had to appeal to all viewers. Not just liberals, not just conservatives. Though show creator Gene Roddenberry was very liberal,  Star Trek episodes didn’t push his radical ideas. They were fun to watch. Some episodes even had strong appeal to conservatives. Any liberal or socialist messages you find in the original series were very subtle and so perhaps not intentional. 

It’s very difficult for conservatives and Christians to produce our own TV shows and movies and get them out to the public. But today is the best time ever to be a fiction writer, even an Indie fiction writer (one who self-publishes rather than getting a traditional publishing deal.) 

When I can’t get anything decent on television— no original Star Trek episodes, Bonanza, Wagon Train, Lawman or John Wayne movies— I read. I often read books by authors who are Indie or small press writers who are conservative or Catholic or something else I relate to.

One author I read is Declan Finn. I’ve known him online in various writer-groups for years now. His blog is on the blogroll of this blog. He has a new series out called ‘Saint Tommy, NYPD.’ It is about a cop who is experiencing some of the phenomenon some of the saints experienced during their lives: bilocation, for one. That is, he is given the gift of being in two places at once. Behind the perp he’s chasing, and ahead of him. His gifts give him the ability to deal with the demonic-evil criminal element in NYC. 

Here are the books in the series. I’ve read the first 2 and loved them, and can’t wait to get the third.

Hell Spawn

Death Cult

Infernal Affairs

The benefit of turning to alternate entertainment is that left-wing messages in entertainment can affect us. We watch and watch, and before long we are saying, abortion isn’t so bad, euthanasia isn’t so bad, gay marriage doesn’t affect ME so why fight it, those bakery owners SHOULD have to bake a custom wedding cake for the gay couple….. It’s like brainwashing. When everyone in our entertainment thinks a certain way, somewhere in our heads we start believing everyone in real life thinks that way.

Writers and would-be writers: be encouraged. You have a chance to change the world for the better. ‘Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report: if there be any praise, think on these things.’ And write about them!

Twitter: Tweeting Your Own Stuff Too Much

The other night I couldn’t sleep at 2am so I got up and went on Twitter. And there was this guy, a novelist, who’d written a lot of books. And he tweeted promos for them. One after another. With nothing else in between. With only seconds between one tweet and another. I got so sick of it that I almost unfollowed. And then he quit. And another author started. One book promo tweet after another. Until I wanted to unfollow him, too.

Chasing off your own Twitter followers is no way to sell your books or your blog or anything. Tweeting things that feel like an ad with nothing personal about them is just asking people to ignore you. Doing it three to five times a minute will get them to actively hate you. If you want to actually be effective on Twitter, you need to learn some rules.

The 9 to 1 Rule

An older rule in social media is to share 9 things about other people for every one you share about yourself. Because sharing nothing but ‘me, me, me’ makes you look selfish. Now, maybe you are selfish. Maybe that’s your lifestyle choice. But you don’t want other people to know that. 

Retweeting DOES NOT COUNT for all of the 9 items you need to share before you can tweet about you. Because retweeting doesn’t take any effort, and it turns Twitter feeds into echo chambers with everybody retweeting the same stuff. Actively seek out some other-centered material. An author might share a book by some other author, or share a book-blog or writing-blog not their own. A blogger might share posts from all the blogs he reads— you DO read other blogs, don’t you? Other Twitter users can share things from online about their major topics of interest.

What about the 1 out of 10 things you share that can be about you? They shouldn’t ALL be impersonal promos that feel like ads for your books or blogs. Social media is supposed to be SOCIAL! And this can be hard, especially for people like me with Asperger Syndrome/Autism Spectrum Disorder. If you don’t have social skills, it’s harder to be social online.

Some of your me-posts should share things about you. ‘I have a new cat.’ ‘We are on vacation in Antarctica.’ ‘A dragon crushed my car.’ And your promoting-something posts might have a personal touch. ‘I wrote a blog post about restoring monarchy to the United States, what do you think?’ Note: most of the time someone who reads ‘what do you think’ about a shared blog post will NOT read the blog post, and just tell you on Twitter what he thinks of the topic. Interact with these people anyway!

The Twitter Echo Chamber

Once upon a time, I found new people to follow on Twitter by clicking on interesting hashtags and seeing who was tweeting about that. Now when I do that, I find mostly the Tweets using the hashtag made by people I already follow. I’ve seen another person complain about that and speculate it’s a new form of shadowbanning. I’m thinking it may just be a way to keep people in their isolated ghettoes of a few like-minded Twitter users.

What I do is experiment with hashtags. I search new ones all the time. I sometimes find new people. And then there is the oppositional-trick. I don’t care much for politician Nancy Pelosi. So I go on her page, find something of her to politely disagree about, and do so. Other non-fans of Nancy see it and I may make new contacts that way. 

Once I do get those precious new people, I have to cultivate them. I retweet their stuff, or I comment on something of theirs politely. I care about them, if only for a few seconds. Because it means something to me when someone responds to me. OK, it also scares the heck out of me because I have Aspergers and poor social skills, but at least I’m not being ignored.  

Why Hostile-To-Conservatives Twitter Matters

Twitter, like Facebook, is actively hostile to some people. Conservatives, or people they think are conservative. Catholics and other Christians. Religious and/or conservative Jews. They ban or suspend people over something so mild it’s silly, and they ignore your complaints about death threats and virulent hate. And even doxxing, sometimes. (Doxxing is revealing your personal information so non-friends can call your home or workplace or threaten you at home.)

I prefer to use Gab or MeWe, actually, but they are smaller communities and not as active. Plus, it’s very common for people to start an account, follow people, and then just quit using it— for a while or forever. Twitter and Facebook, sadly, are where the eyeballs are.

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Learn More about using Twitter

Twitter in 30 Minutes (updated 2018)  I just bought this book on Kindle. Since I live in a rural area, I have to drive to the local library to use their wi-fi to download the book to my Kindle since I can't download books to my Kindle over USB cable with my newest Kindle. Which replaced an older Kindle that stopped working. But I'm hoping to learn more about using Kindle better with this book.