John C. Wright's Blog, page 107
January 16, 2013
Guest Post by William M Briggs: Firearm Homicides Dropping
Firearm Homicides Dropping. Assault Weapons Ban Not Correlated With Decrease In Homicides. No Need For New Restrictions.
Posted on 16 January 2013 by Briggs
I rarely ask this, but please link, forward, email, and favorite this post as widely as possible. See below for copying permission.
Murder in the United States1 is illegal, and has been for over two hundred years. Strong penalties, up to and including the penalty of death, are incurred by those who commit this heinous crime.
Yet, strangely, despite murder’s high illegality, there were in 2011 over 12,000 of them committed! The largest number of murders were in 1991, with nearly 25,000 of these frowned-upon unlawful incidents.
It is difficult to imagine a penalty more severe than death, so it remains a curiosity that so many murderers are found when such strong laws are in place. Perhaps this scourge can be eliminated by even tougher laws?, say death by torture? Or maybe by creating Executive Orders bypassing the hindrance of Congress and Constitutional safeguards? We must protect the children!
But never mind. Let’s instead look at the number of murders and what devices were used in their commission.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Restarting Wright’s Writing Corner
My lovely and talented wife is restarting her weekly post about writing and the writing world.
Today, she is posted her “best of” her previous posts on Writing Tips for anyone who has not seen them.
http://arhyalon.livejournal.com/274031.html
Two Strings: Two separate issues need to be going in each scene.
The Trick: Raising expectations in one direction but having the story go in the opposite direction. It sounds simple, but it may be the most useful writing technique of all…the book Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier is just the trick over and over again.
The Foil: The trick applied to people. Use other characters to showcase the strengths of your main characters and to make them seem extraordinary.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
January 14, 2013
Beauty Queen Called Beautiful — the Science Fiction Scale
This is a weekend addendum to my weekly Friday post, which concerned the ugly insanity of the political Left and the beauty of the beauty queen Katherine Webb.
More than one reader wrote in to say that she was not so very attractive. Now, the young lady in question did indeed win a title in a beauty pageant, so no matter what your taste or mine have to say about her degree of good looks, she clearly falls within the general category of healthy and attractive femininity.
At no point did I give my personal opinion about her good looks, but, being opinionated about everything, of course I have an opinion. Sports fans rate women according to a cuteness scale unknown to me, but which, I am sure, include sportscasters from Phyllis George to Ines Sainz and sporting figures from synchronized swimming twins Bia Feres to Branca Feres.
Being a science fiction fan and not a sports fan, I would say that, if dressed as a space princess, Miss Webbs is cuter than Space Princess Leia but not as cute as Space Princess Amidala, and, if painted green and forced to dance for my pleasure at a barbarian space-feast, she is cuter than Orion slavegirl Vina but not as cute as Orion slavegirl Marta.
Let us compare:
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
January 11, 2013
Beauty Queen Called Beautiful — PCists Panic
My mission as a science fiction writer is foredoomed if the creatures in real life continue to behave in a fashion more alien than any Martian, more crazy than the ‘Crazy Years’ Heinlein’s future history predicted, more absurd than even the darkest of dystopian satires could possibly satirize.
I am referring, not to the sinister and meaningless ‘Kabuki Theater’ of the current hysteria over Victim Disarmament (formerly known as Gun Control) nor over the equally sinister absence of hysteria over the fact that a bankrupt nation ruled by a lawless criminal elite continues to go deeper into debts so astronomical that they can only be expressed in scientific notation, but a matter of far more wide-ranging significance and longer lasting impact.
Someone said a Beauty Pageant Queen was beautiful.
And our self-anointed Politically Correct conformists had a psychotic episode.
Obviously this is not the most important topic of the day, but it is the one which gives me the most plausible excuse to post pictures of beautiful women.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
January 8, 2013
Friday Only
My Jesuit Confessor, Father Elliptical de Casuistry of Our Lady of Endless Hairsplitting, tells me that the increased burdens of work and looming deadlines means I will have to cut back on posting articles here. I still hope to write an article once a week and post it on Friday, but aside from that, until the current heap of work is past, I cannot be as voluble.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
January 6, 2013
The Feast of the Magicians
Today is the Twelfth Day of Christmas, when it is traditional to wear masquerade. (The various antics of disguise and mistaken identity in Shakespeare’s TWELFTH NIGHT reflect this the theme of the day, hence the name of the play). And it is also the Feast of the Epiphany, which commemorates, among other things, the adoration of the Magi of the Christ child.
Who and what the Magi are is unclear. They may have been devout Jews from Babylon, astrologers, or may have been the Magi of the Zoroastrians, who are the ruling priest class of ancient Persia. Ironically, Zoroastrianism is a faith that utterly rejects the use of magic or divination, but such is the wisdom for which the magi of old where known, that our word ‘magician’ comes from them. So it seems, for several reasons, a good day to discuss magicians in their various disguises.
I frankly admit that I am sick to death of vampires as portrayed as protagonists in stories. They are properly villains and vermin, antagonists to be exterminated, not friends afflicted with angst and waiting to be understood. I am weary of friendly werewolves, and disgusted by friendly dragons, and I wonder about friendly witches, particularly when none of them are old crones. And, in honor of the day, I should admit that while I am not sick yet of friendly magicians, I am suspicious and annoyed by stories where magic is treated like a technology, that is, like an art which is lawful and harmless to practice, a thing without a terrible price.
If I were only slightly shallower obscure midlist writer, or had slightly more time on my hands, I would write a new literary manifesto and start a new literary movement. It would be something like the “Mundane SF” movement in how significant and world-shaking it could be: namely, something halfway between a joke and an unsightly spasm of self-importance. Writers have no business writing manifestoes. Our business is not to improve the world, but to entertain it.
But since I am a speculative fiction writer, allow me to speculate. If I were to write a manifesto in favor of mundane fantasy, the cause I would pick would be the “Retro-fantasy” movement, also called “Yesterday’s yesterdays.” Catchy, huhn?
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
December 31, 2012
Sylvester and Beowulf a Note on the Alignment of Dragons
For those of you who did not get enough Christmas at Christmas Day, let me remind you that today, 31 December, is the Sixth Day of Christmas, when it is tradition to give your true love six geese a-laying. It is also the day called Leave-Taking, and the feast of Saint Sylvester.
Sylvester was the Pope during the days when Constantine converted, and, with him, the Empire, and the Christian faith, which had been illegal throughout the civilized world for a period longer than the lifespan of the American republic, and had been the target of inhuman persecutions, became not only legal, but celebrated. This was before the first Nicene Council, before the schism of the Coptics and Nestorians, and long before the schism of the Eastern Church. At that time, we were all one.
It was also a time of legend. Here is the Medieval account from the Golden Legends or Lives of the Saints, of the tale of St Sylvester and the Dragon.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
December 28, 2012
Feast of the Holy Innocents
This day, December 28th, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, is the day we remember the most guiltless and precious children slaughtered by the evil of this unhappy world.
The Gospel says this in Matthew:
Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men. Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying,
In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
December 27, 2012
Christmastide
Some say that ever ‘gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, no witch has power to charm,
So hallow’d and gracious is the time. –Hamlet
I thought today, Dec 27, the Feast of St John (and my own name day), would be an apt time to reflect on it, and to urge my fellow traditionalists to continue the Christly and Christian work of Keeping the Feast and Partyin’ On! Let us pause for unsolemn reflection on these solemnities.
We all know the Twelve Days of Christmas from a famous nonsense song about a lady whose true love gives her 184 birds of various types, not to mention 12 fruit trees, 40 golden rings, 106 persons of the various professions either musical or milkmaidenly, and 32 members of the aristocracy variously cavorting.
If you have ever wondered how the lady in the song feeds all the leaping lords and dancing ladies, pipers, drummers, and milkmaids now living in her parlor, the answer is that she feeds them the 22 turtledoves, 30 French hens, 36 colly birds, and 42 swans, not to mention the nice supply of eggs from the geese, milk from the cows and pairs from the pair trees.
You may have heard that the lyrics contain a secret meaning, referring to Catholic doctrines or rites forbidden by Oliver Cromwell. This is true. The secret meaning is that the Walrus is St. Paul, and if you listen to a record of the carol backward, it says “Cromwell under his wig is bald.” All this is well known.
What is not as well known is that traditionally, these are twelve days of feasts which start on Christmas Day and run through to Epiphany on January 6th, which is the festival variously of the Adoration of the Magi and the Presentation in the Temple. (Really hard core Christmasteers extend Christmastide 40 days, ending on Candlemas February 2).
Before Christmas, during the season of Advent, while everyone else is shopping and partying, we who keep the traditions fast, pray, do penance, and make ourselves miserable. It makes the holiday much brighter by contrast.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
December 24, 2012
Nativity
By John C. Wright
“Mr. Went, if you could visit anyone in the world, any time, any place, who would you go see? Oh, not for a long time. Long visits are never permitted. But just for a moment, just for an embrace, a long look, no longer?”
His words were not in English, and I did not speak any modern Romance tongues, but he must have been a priest or a scholar, because he and I could make ourselves understood to each other in Latin and in Greek, two living men with two dead languages in common.
I was not sure where I was. The streets in these ancient cities are narrow and crooked, and they don’t put the names on street signs.
The stranger in the top hat and long coat did not linger to hear an answer. Now he paused to listen to some children singing carols—I remember they sang O Come Emmanuel, but the words were not in English— while waiting for me to climb the alley. I had stopped.
It was not that I was tired, it was just that I was used to the broad and flat streets of the Midwest, so, to me, the sight of a cobblestone street turning into broad stairs for part of its climb was a novelty. It was, no doubt, a street older than my whole nation.
I wanted to make a comment to my wife, but she, of course, was not there. In my pocket was a small Christmas gift for her, wrapped in gold paper. I had put it in the pocket of the dark and formal coat I donned for the funeral. I had intended to leave it at the grave, but the idea of bright, cheery, frivolous colors of wrapping paper beneath the granite headstone, on the darkness of the newly turned earth, seemed unbearably hateful to me. So I had paused, wrestling with the aching emptiness inside me.
I turned my eyes outward. Between the narrow and dark houses looming to either side, the gap of the alley fell like a stone waterfall (as if the stair were the broken rapids) and in that gap I could see the famous city spread below me, adorned for Christmas. I could see the festive lights in the distance.
The stranger came up next to me, offering me a handful of the roast chestnuts he had just bought from a street vendor. The children singing he had shooed away by passing out the brightly colored banknotes which looked like Monopoly money to me.
I gestured to the view below. We were halfway up one of the seven hills. “There are more Christmas trees than there were years ago.”
He said, “You have been to the Eternal City before?”
“My wife is from here. Was. She—excuse me.”
He passed me a handkerchief, and turned as if to look at the city. “The Christmas tree is a Germanic custom. Such things travel south to the more civilized nations somewhat slowly. It the nativity scene where the Italian genius is manifested! You should see the one was displayed at the Church of Saints Cosma and Damiano. It was commissioned by Charles III of Naples. Six master woodcarvers labored on the scene for forty years, adding new figures each year! And in the Santa Maria Maggiore, where the first Christmas Mass was said, is a presepe, or permanent display of the crib. The reliquary below the altar is said to contain pieces of the original manger. History is fascinating, is it not? Are you ready to go?”
I nodded. The stranger walked a short way up the alley, took out with an enormous key and bent over the lock of intricately wrought black iron gates. The iron gates were decorated with images of roses and winged skulls. With a groaning clang they opened. Beyond was a courtyard shaped like an “L”, closed in on each side by windowless brick walls, and in the midst of the court was a dry well filled with leaves and dust rusted midmost under a tiny roof.
Around the corner of the courtyard, up the shorter arm of the “L”, were more stairs guarded by worn winged lions, gaping mouths filled with grit and dust, and the grime of their faces made them seem to weep.
To my surprise, this front door to the old house was not locked. He opened the door and stood in the doorway, fumbling with something on a small table set immediately by the door. There was the click of an electric striker, a flicker of flame, and the stranger lit a candle, which he carefully placed in a black iron candlestick. Inside he went, lighting his way with the candle, beckoning me to follow.
“The power is out?” I said. I could hear the singing of the children in the street below clearly enough, but the door was so heavy and so well fitted to the frame that all noise was cut off.
“There is power here,” said the stranger, smiling crookedly. “More than enough to shatter the cosmos. But the site has never been electrified. It would identify the era too closely, and disturb the anachronic echo effect. Come. The machine is in the attic.”
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
John C. Wright's Blog
- John C. Wright's profile
- 449 followers
