• Step 1: Say something snarky on Twitter.

  
   

• Step 2: Have the internet shoot up in flames around you and get a mention at Fox News.
• Step 3: Panic.

From linked blog post:

What I should’ve said

Naw, I shouldn’t have. I’ve regretted walking this back for years, since almost as soon as I posted it. Sure, I was panicked. Sure, I’d been conditioned to apologize for shit I didn’t do or that I wasn’t sorry for to soothe some hurt fee-fees. Sure, I … and and and and and

No, I wasn’t sorry then. I’m not sorry now. The internet is full of very clever and funny people, but it is also full of idiots with reading comprehension problems, deficits in reasoning, and broken sarcometers.

Fuck all y’all. I’m only sorry I back-peddled.

← Part 2

Part 4 →

I watch hoarders programs because they make me feel good about my shoddy housekeeping. (Well, really, I have much better things to do than housework.) But it makes me feel superior because I’m not like them.

More often than not, the impetus for a hoarder to clean up is code enforcement agencies. They find out through EMS (who can’t get through the hoard to the patient) or neighbors (who have to look at it and/or smell it and/or deal with the vermin such hoards attract and the attendant lowering of property values) or loved ones (who are concerned and/or pissed off). Sometimes children are involved. Sometimes animals are victims of the hoard. (For the purposes of this article, I will not address DFS or animal control involvement.)

Enter the need for redress and resolution, if not recompense, and following that need, code enforcement.

Like the EPA’s existence, I can see why code enforcement would be a necessary evil to some extent. But the more I watched, I increasingly wondered how Libertopia would deal with the problem of one person imposing his problem on neighbors and/or loved ones.

I asked this on a Saturday-night zoom with some libertarian friends. One of them made the point that if I, a neighbor having to look at/smell/exterminate vermin caused by someone using their property as they see fit, act by calling code enforcement after direct requests to clean up have failed, I am imposing my will upon someone else to do what I want them to do.

FREE WILL

But the neighbor has already imposed his will upon me and I can’t do anything but submit.

Let us put aside a nature-versus-nurture discussion of the concept of free will because that’s a rabbit hole I haven’t been able to dig myself out of yet. However, what I do want to explore is what happens when your will is imposed upon by someone else to your detriment. It happens all the time. A car accident where you’re not at fault. A high-maintenance family member. A health scare that turns real. A family who moves in next door to you and junks up their property, bringing the whole neighborhood’s property values down.

None of these are things predicated on decisions you made, acts you committed. You cannot act. You are forced to react, which is not the power position, and so you feel powerless to change the situation.

Let’s take the case of the new neighbor. It takes a while to junk up the property, but there are signs that it’s going to get worse and it’s not going to get better. You either talk to the neighbor or you call your HOA president, if there is one. The neighbors either don’t answer their door, give you a line, or get nasty, or the HOA sends a notice.

Now here’s the rub: They ignore you. They ignore the HOA. They have nothing to lose because there are no real consequences. When you get right down to it, an HOA has no teeth. You, personally, are powerless to stop this impending hoard that will eventually bring with it stink and filth and vermin that will leach over into your property. Once the wiring gets eaten by rodents all it will take to set it (and possibly you) ablaze is a spark and a piece of paper too close to an outlet and the chance of fire is greater if they smoke. The value of every house in your neighborhood has tanked, especially yours, and even if you wanted to sell to get away from the neighbor, you’d take a bath. Everyone on the block is affected and not one of you can do anything about it.

HI. I’M FROM THE GOVERNMENT AND I’M HERE TO HELP.

Code enforcement can do something, but will they? And how long will it take?

On the TV shows, when code enforcement is involved, they have already been involved for months and years to give the neighbor time to clean up. Maybe they’ve already condemned the house. Maybe they’ve slapped fines on the neighbor (which he hasn’t paid). Maybe the neighbor has done jail time, which doesn’t faze him in the least bit.

Almost no one in this scenario has a TV producer to call and magically Matt Paxton will show up to dish out basic wisdom (“We’re all 5 bad decisions away from shitting in a bucket.”) while he shovels out a hoarder house and grounds and the hoarder is picking through urine- and feces-encrusted hand-knit baby blankets lovingly made for people who are now 43 years old.

In reality, the neighbor is not only unwilling to clean out his hoard, but he is likely unable to.

GALT’S GULCH

Naturally, in Libertopia we would not have this problem because all libertarians participate voluntarily within the confines of a set of rules we have agreed upon and carry out faithfully. We pay for fire service. We pay for police service. We pay for animal control. We pay for muh roadz. Everything is voluntary, so things like code enforcement don’t exist because it’s an agency and we don’t like agencies in Libertopia.

And then a hoarder who is not particularly interested in participating in voluntarism moves in next door to you. After all, we aren’t keeping people out. Before you know it, you’ve got roaches in your house. Sure, they signed the rules, but they simply don’t care. You can get the courts involved, but again, they ignore the judgment. Maybe you send collections after them. They dodge the dunning.

Now you’re in a blinding rage because your will is being encroached upon by someone else and you are powerless.

My contention, that lovely night on the zooms, is that the logical conclusion of these two competing free wills, sans some governing/intervening body, sans some reasonable recourse and redress, is that somebody’s gonna get shot.

What do you think it retails for? $5,000? $7,000? That’s what Donald Trump pays for his designer suits. [beat] [audience boos]

$10,000? No. It retails for $12,495.00. [beat] [audience boos]

But I paid $12.50 for it. Why? Because it’s ugly. I went to Goodwill and I had so much to choose from, an abundance of jackets, but I chose this one. Why? Because it was the most attractive one there. [beat] [audience laughs]

Would you wear this jacket outside the house? No. Nobody with good taste would. It’s warm, I’ll give you that. And roomy. Look how roomy it is. It’s well made. It is an Armani, after all. But it’s ugly. Not only wouldn’t you wear this outside the house, you wouldn’t wear it to a job interview.

Yet that’s what most of you, our working women today, have to choose from: ugly, uglier, and ugliest. [beat] [audience laughs]

You work hard to feed your families, to keep a roof over your heads. You sacrifice your needs for your children the best you can. You might go without eating because you gave the last of it to your children, without sleeping because you’re working two jobs to make what a man would make with one job, without love because you’re too tired to invest yourself in a relationship with a person who loves you. But no matter what you sacrifice, it’s never enough, is it? [beat] [audience shouts NO]

The light bill has to be paid. You’re living paycheck-to-paycheck because you aren’t being paid the same as the men and you look for a future where you fight to be paid what you deserve. You’re more qualified. You’re being overlooked and overworked. You decide—because you are a powerful woman who can set her own path [beat] [audience cheers]

—to find a new job. A better job. A job you deserve where you will be valued and paid what a man would be paid for the same job. You have an interview and now you have a dilemma: You don’t have appropriate interview clothes. You spent the last you had to feed your children and your next paycheck isn’t until next Friday.

So you borrow a few dollars and head to the thrift store to find an interview outfit. You look and look and look and you realize that your best option is … this.

This well-made designer jacket that retails for $12,500 but was given to Goodwill because it’s ugly and does not project the image of the powerful women you really are. It doesn’t say, “I deserve this job because I’m the best qualified.” It says, “I’m a schlub.” It doesn’t say, “I deserve this job because I’m calm, cool, and collected and can manage crises extraordinarily well.” It says, “I’m useless.”

You know the value of a dollar. You have to because you aren’t making as much as men do for the same job, and minimum wage just isn’t enough to feed your family anymore. I have dedicated my life to ensuring that all hardworking Americans have the chance to succeed, no matter their circumstances.

I have led the charge for equal pay for equal work. [beat]

I have expanded access to early childhood education and healthcare. [beat]

I have worked tirelessly to raise the minimum wage and advocate for out-of-work Americans because I believe that every American should have the right to achieve economic security and income opportunity. [beat]

You’ve been in this ugly jacket for too long. You deserve better than this jacket. You deserve to be paid what men are paid for the same job and you deserve better than minimum wage!

But the truth is that I am just really tired. Perhaps the vacuum in affect attested to by the accumulation of emoticons and emojis has little to do with the flattening effect of digital communication. Maybe feelings are simply exhausted.

Granny Clampett moved to NYC.

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

As the subpoena turns.

And now, I bring to you the obligatory pot-and-prostitutes report (pot not included with purchase, sorry): Kaytlin Bailey is a former sex worker, now a stand up comic, with a story to tell.

I have some things on my mind I’ve wanted to discuss, but my attention span these days is pretty rotten. I’ve been tweeting (and then Facebooking) way too long to be able to put a small essay together in a coherent fashion.

• Sunita has me thinking about productivity protocols and stationery.
• An ancient Twitter conversation has me thinking about doorstopper books.
• Victoria and Emilio have me thinking about how / why I eat.
• Mike Cane has me thinking about the citizens of the world v their respective governments.
• A whole bunch of people [@avidmysteryfan, @BookThingo, Julie] have me thinking about what to read when I’m out of writing mode.
• Author friends I made [RJ Keller, Todd Keisling, Will Entrekin] when I first began this self-publishing journey have me thinking about author life post-debut title.
• Various Twitter conversations have me thinking about feminism, racism, privilege, and tolerance.
• Liz Harrison and Missy Bourdius have me thinking about each week’s Conservative Feminist radio show, which should be renamed the Kinkservative Feminists.
• Chris Henrichsen and Lee Stranahan have me thinking about newsletters. (The universe just threw up in its mouth a little, those two names in the same sentence.)
• Minx Malone has me thinking about Google+.
• Emilio (see above) has me thinking about picking up an embroidery needle again.
• Mike Cane also has me thinking about power, from an original article by Leftsetz.
• Dave Grohl has me thinking about following your bliss.
• Various other conversations here and there have me thinking about really good movies I’ve seen.

I used to blog a lot. Building my brand. I got tired. The catchy titles that now read way too cutesy, trying way too hard. I thought I ran out of things to say, but I was saying them on Twitter in 140 characters because why blog asides and snark and memes? Then Tumblr came along and that’s what Tumblr’s for. And porn. People told me to get on Facebook and indeed! That is where the fans are, but I’ve covered that topic. Pinterest lets me post a crap-ton of pretty pictures, but I don’t think people browse other people’s pinboards just to see what they like.

But I decided to blog asides and snark and memes, along with things I’m thinking about because I need to get back into the discipline of essay writing. It’s always been my pet medium and I’ve neglected it terribly.

So to those of you who’ve got me in your RSS feeds and follow my mirror posts on Goodreads, you may have a deluge of posts for a while.

Dude and I went to see this movie for his birthday. I haven’t been interested in reading the books because a) I’m not a thriller/mystery fan and b) haven’t had time to devote to sampling genres I’m not usually interested in. I’m still not interested in reading the books, because I either read the book or see the movie, but not both. (I got burned in the Bonfire of the Vanities.) I am interested in seeing the Swedish version.

mraynes at Exponent II has an excellent post up about the exposition of misogyny in the book/movie.

Ironically, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo phenomenon is a prime example of how our society hides from the culture of violence against women. In the original Swedish version, Stieg Larsson titled the book “Man som hatar kvinnor” or “Men who hate women.” Believing that such a title would turn readers off, American publishers renamed the book The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, changing the emphasis away from violent misogyny to the physical body of the (anti)heroine. This alone speaks volumes about our society. Instead of dealing with the discomfort that in fact, some men do hate women, publishers felt that the only way to sell books was to objectify and sexualize the female protagonist.

Please read the whole post.

This brought to mind a blog post by a Cale McCaskey, ostensibly ripping on romance novels, but really ripping on women, and after I read mraynes’s post, I realized: This is the mindset. Taken by itself, his opinion is irrelevant and he’s a woman-hating man who is single and likely to remain that way.

However, how many WOMEN have I heard over the years say the same thing with regard to romance novels and the women who read them? To hear WOMEN talk about the women who read romance novels, we’re all a bunch of fat Peggy Bundys who, instead of earning advanced degrees, becoming Important People, tending to our hearths with the efficiency of Martha Stewart or a Mormon cupcake baker on Ritalin, or fighting against [patriarchy, white privilege, male privilege, rape culture, insert philosophy of choice].

It is not rapists and abusers alone who silence and hide victims. It is we, society, in our unwillingness to stare evil in the face, name it, and confront it. Until we acknowledge culpability within our culture of violence against women, our daughters, sisters and ourselves will be at risk.

Some men hate women. But so do some very vocal women. Women need to look to themselves concerning their own misogyny.

[Added 2025-07-22 for reference]

What I should’ve said¹ was:

or some variant thereof that was still sarcastic enough to get the point across.

(The “What if she’s next?” part is me displaying my mad Pshop skillz.)

Do I really think conservatism is dead? I don’t know. I struggle with it on a daily basis, and have for several years. However, the many tweeters who sent me nastytweets (save one, who apparently wanted me to sign away my citizenship), who then listened to me, then apologized, retracted/deleted their tweets with my name, and were willing to spread the word made me rethink it.

Despite my tagline, I really don’t often talk politics here on the blog. I leave that to my characters to do for me. But now that you know who I am and where you can find me, maybe you’ll stick around a while.

And I’m pretty sure y’all can find my Twitter name …

Now. Anybody who knows me, has read my books, has read my blog, has read my Tweets, has breathed the same internet air I breathe knows I’m a Reagan-conservative-moving-swiftly-to-libertarian Mormon with a side of objectivism to spice things up.

Thus, it didn’t occur to me that my tweet, made in conversation with someone else, in response to my utter disgust with the immediate blaming of Sarah Palin for Saturday’s shooting of a Congresswoman would be taken as a threat against Palin and/or a wish for her death.

It smacked me in the head last night when I was tweeted that I was “scum” who had threatened her, with a link to a YouTube slideshow of a collection of tweets that actually DID wish her dead. Mine and one other tweet were vague enough that they didn’t belong in the collection in the first place. I’ll not defend the others except to say that my first reaction on seeing them was, “They’re blowing off steam like everybody else.” Which is, I think, a reasonable thing to conclude.

Let me tell you what I was doing Saturday when I was watching all the Palin-blaming go down on Twitter: I was at a packed roller rink with my kids, in the middle of loud music and people-chaos, barely listening to their whining, looking at my Twitterstream for news on the Congresswoman’s status … and crying.

For the country. For what it means for political discourse when some nutjob pops his cork for no reason other than he’s a nutjob. For “my” side, which is being blamed for everything from eating their boogers to nuclear winter.

But mostly I was crying for Congresswoman Giffords, who was out doing her job and a guy with a mental illness decided to kill her, for the six innocent people including a 9-year-old girl who died, and the other 18 wounded.

If you are coming here because you saw that video or saw whatever random tweet in which some nutjob on “my” side put me in that list, and you actually are taking the time to find out who I really am, know this: The people who made that video and who are blindly tweeting make “us” look bad.

There is nothing that will kill an ideology or a movement faster than the nutjobs co-opting it: Because the reasonable people who can disagree without being disagreeable, who can let the slings and arrows go by like mature people, who can get “our” things accomplished, who can discern the nutjobs on the “other” side—people like me—will simply walk away quietly because they don’t want to deal with the nutjobs.

And in reference to my tweet in particular, even taken on its face: If you don’t get it, you need to learn nuance, sarcasm, irony, hyperbole. Buy a clue, rent one, steal one, I don’t care. GET ONE.

This is not conservatism. This is its formerly disenfranchised nutjobs peeing and shitting in its swimming pool.

God help us all.

UPDATE (2011-01-12 10:00 a.m. CST): Mike Cane has documented the conversation that led to my tweet. Thanks, Mike.

If you’re passingly familiar with Christian myth,¹ it should be quite clear where I’m going with this.

But let me tell you a little about my main characters.

So I was on the search for a special little gift that Mitch could give Cassie that meant something but was not expensive. After all, what do you give a woman who can buy anything she wants?

Naturally, I turned to books because I have a vested interest in people buying books (product placement!). I decided that Mitch might have a special book that he may have acquired on his mission and is probably in French. Naturally, I googled, and then headed over to Wikipedia where I stumbled upon a list of French novels. I doggedly worked my way through them one by one, read the synopses, then picked one based on a vague similarity of the plot to Cassie’s past.

I wrote it into my book as if I’d read the thing (but hadn’t), then decided I probably should read it. And it freaked me out. Big time.

The book? Angélique, the Marquise of Angels by Anne & Serge Golon, first published in 1958.

Unbeknownst to me, this was a huge hit in Europe and apparently a big hit here. I’d never heard of it, never stumbled across it in the intellectual drunkenness of my youth (that actually amazes me).

The book is heroine-centric, so it’s all about Angélique. The parallel I found between Angélique and Cassie was that they both had arranged marriages. The similarity stopped there.

Angélique didn’t know her contracted husband, feared him at first, then grew to love him.

Cassie knew the man she was to marry, adored him from afar and was eager to marry him, and then quickly realized that her marriage was a sham.

Cassie is familiar with the story via film, so she has no problem making this parallel and had, in fact, written a paper on it during her undergrad years.

What doesn’t show up in the plot summary is a description of the hero’s “unusual way of life.” Joffray (the hero) is described as “scientist, musician, philosopher.” I didn’t think much of it. Mitch is a scientist with his own lab, true, but he’s also a CEO and I’ve always thought of him in those terms. He’s not a musician. He’s not a philosopher. At heart, he’s a blue-collar steel worker who loves steel enough to reinvent himself and the industry; steel is his life’s work.

Turns out that Joffray’s science is metallurgy. That was freaky.

Turns out that Joffray is hung out to dry, religiously speaking, for reasons that have nothing to do with religion and everything to do with power, politics, and money. That was even freakier.

As I got deeper and deeper into the book, I felt like I’d entered the Twilight Zone.

Then I got to the end. Angélique plunges out into the cold night, penniless and powerless, to exact revenge. That is so Cassie. I nearly expired from the freakiness the universe had perpetrated upon my person.

I couldn’t have picked a better novel if I’d written it myself.

Yeah, that’s pretty accurate, although the questions were definitely slanted enough to make you think twice about whether you were thinking or feeling, and tilting you toward feeling.