John C. Wright's Blog, page 11

Not to Us, O Lord, the Glory

A musical interlude to brighten a dark day of remembrance.

Latin

Non nobis, Domine, non nobis,

sed nomini tuo da gloriam.

English

Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us,

but to thy name give the glory.

It is a crusader’s hymn. Let us recall against whom the Crusades were fought, and in what good cause (for they were, perhaps, the only truly just wars in all history) yet recollect with sorrow that the disunion of the Christian princes and powers at home allowed the Holy Land to slip back into Mohammedan hands, and soon all of the Eastern Empire as well. Everything that now weeps under the merciless crescent of the pitiless God of Submission once was governed by the cross of merciful Christ, and instead of the wail of the prayer-call, even the Libyan and Egyptian air rejoiced with church-bells.

Remember 9/11.

Remember who the enemy is, and who supports, defends, and cheers that enemy, while heaping scorn and scathing hate on those who name him what he is.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Ruth Johnson on Sci Fi and the Culture Wars

There is a new post up at the Superversive blog you might find interesting. It touches on the psychology of the Culture Wars, using the Hugo Kerfuffle surrounding the Sad Puppies as an example. http://www.ljagilamplighter.com/2015/09/10/superversive-blog-wherefore-art-thou-culture-war/

 

Part One:  What Forces Drive the SciFi Culture Wars?

Q: In the Afterword to your new book, you suggest that ideas about personality might help us understand “culture wars” by showing how the sides just see the world differently.  What do you mean by “personality-based worldviews”? 

A: The thesis of Re-Modeling the Mind is that our brains can’t process all of the information that comes at us constantly, so each brain organizes itself around more limited options, depending on the neural strengths it already has. When we talk about “personality” we mean these limitations and abilities, which are usually clearly visible when we watch each other. We know ourselves this way, too. We know there are things we simply can’t take in, or if we can take in the facts, we can’t manage them to make decisions. There are things we pay close attention to, and other things we just can’t be bothered with. Personality is this very real neural patterning that filters the world so that it’s manageable.

But this means that our personalities also limit and even blind us to things other people can perceive and manage. We’re all in the same physical world, in the sense that we agree on where the objects are, so that we can avoid running into them. But at a more complex level, we really don’t all live in the same world. Our personalities can have such root-level different views of the world that we can barely have conversations. This is what I’d call a personality-based worldview.

I’m not a science-fiction reader, and I’d never heard of the Hugos until this year. But watching the ferocity of the battles made me feel convinced that at least some of this culture war is provoked by a clash of personality-based worldviews. In other words, probably the leaders and many supporters of each faction share some personality traits so that they all “live” in a similar world. In each faction’s “world,” its values are not only sensible but the only possible ones. Or if not the only possible ones, the only morally right or safe ones. This is why it’s so hard to have a conversation. It’s self-evident to each faction that its values are right, and the arguments offered by the other faction hold no water in their worldview. A lot of people on both sides feel that if So and So wins a prize, moral right or wrong will be rewarded

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Less Does Not Mean Nothing

The Sasquan committee is refusing to release data that would obviate or confirm accusations of ballot fraud at the last Hugo elections.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/09/sasquan-tries-to-hide-scandal.html

Vox Day quotes Glenn Glazer:

Unbelievable. I wonder what it is they are trying to hide? Tor buying supporting memberships for its employees?

Back at Sasquan, the BM passed a non-binding resolution to request that Sasquan provide anonymized nomination data from the 2015 Hugo Awards. I stood before the BM and said, as its official representative, that we would comply with such requests. However, new information has come in which has caused us to reverse that decision. Specifically, upon review, the administration team believes it may not be possible to anonymize the nominating data sufficiently to allow for a public release. We are investigating alternatives.

Thank you for your patience in this matter. While we truly wish to comply with the resolution and fundamentally believe in transparent processes, we must hold the privacy of our members paramount and I hope that you understand this set of priorities.

Best,

Glenn Glazer

Vice-Chair, Business and Finance

Sasquan, the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention

This is not acceptable. This is not even REMOTELY acceptable. If you voted in the 2015 Hugo Awards, I encourage you to contact Sasquan and demand that they released the anonymized nomination data.

I find it very difficult to believe they are refusing to release it because it might make the Rabid Puppies look bad; we already know that the SJW message that the Puppies voted in lockstep is completely false. So, the question is: what voting patterns tend to embarrass whom?

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Two Quotes

This is from the pen of Thomas Olde Heuvelt, letter to me, 2015

Let me state this: people who write different stories than what you know or like, not necessarily have “sad and narrow lives”. You glorify what you know. I glorify what I know. Stephen King glorifies what he knows. Whether it’s God, or a gay tentacle, or an evil clown – as long as they are good stories, who cares?

This is from THE PHOENIX EXULTANT, published in 2003:

The image of the Cacophile flopped its tendrils first one way, then the other. “What has that to do with us? Phaethon wants to fly to the stars. He wants to make worlds. I want to find a new wire-point to jolt my pleasure centers, maybe with an over-load pornographic pseudomnesia to give it background. Are his dreams any better than mine?”

While science fiction is not meant to predict the future, sometimes it does.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

The Moral Decay of Star Trek

https://www.claremont.org/article/the-politics-of-star-trek/#.VezEhPlVhBf

This excellent essay from the Claremont Institute tracks the moral decay from the JFK era Leftism of Roddenberry’s Star Trek to the utter desolate nihilism of Abram’s Star Trek: from Cold Warriors to the Wasteland in one generation. Into Darkness is an apt metaphor indeed.

Roddenberry and his colleagues were World War II veterans, whose country was now fighting the Cold War against a Communist aggressor they regarded with horror. They considered the Western democracies the only force holding back worldwide totalitarian dictatorship. The best expression of their spirit was John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, with its proud promise to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

***

Star Trek VI opens with a shocking betrayal: without informing his captain, Spock has volunteered the crew for a peace mission to the Klingons. Kirk rightly calls this “arrogant presumption,” yet the Vulcan is never expected to apologize. On the contrary, the film summarily silences Kirk’s objections. At a banquet aboard the Enterprise, he is asked whether he would be willing to surrender his career in exchange for an end to hostilities, and Spock swiftly intervenes. “I believe the captain feels that Starfleet’s mission has always been one of peace,” he says. Kirk tries to disagree, but is again interrupted. Later, he decides that “Spock was right.” His original skepticism toward the peace mission was only prejudice: “I was used to hating Klingons.”

This represented an almost complete inversion ofStar Trek’s original liberalism, and indeed of any rational scale of moral principles at all. At no point in the show’s history had Kirk or his colleagues treated the Klingons unjustly, whereas audiences for decades have watched the Klingons torment and subjugate the galaxy’s peaceful races. In “Errand of Mercy,” they attempt genocide to enslave the Organians. In “The Trouble with Tribbles,” they try to poison a planet’s entire food supply. The dungeon in which Kirk is imprisoned in this film is on a par with Stalin’s jails. Yet never does the Klingon leader, Gorkon, or any of his people, acknowledge—let alone apologize for—such injustices. Quite the contrary; his daughter tells a galactic conference, “We are a proud race. We are here because we want to go on being proud.” Within the context of the original Star Trek, such pride is morally insane.

***

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Less of the Same

From a reader with the elevated name of Tall Dave:

I suppose I understand the need to read and respond to such things, and I’m sure I could not resist the call to do the same, and I don’t offer this as advice, but I have to say that reading books like Somewhither I cannot escape an overwhelming certainty that Mr. Wright’s critics — and I include GRRM — and their criticisms are not worth the author’s writing time we readers lose in their consideration, nor worthy of said consideration, and I feel deep remorse for our fallen state that allows such debased thievery.

Alas, but one of my patrons and employers has caught me dithering during work hours. I accept the correction without complaint.

Expect fewer or no references to Sad Puppies in the days and weeks to come. I managed to crank out over a third of my next novel in the last two weeks while I was unemployed, and, thanks to providence, I also have found a new day job I begin this Tuesday.

So my columns here for a while may be sparse. My books will last long after this controversy is forgotten.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

More of the Same

I note that Mr George RR Martin calls for a return to civility in the Sad Puppies debate (http://grrm.livejournal.com/440444.html). I welcome the idea and would not be displeased if the Puppykickers were men of such character as to be able to carry through with it. But I applaud the gesture.

Myself, I would be more pleased by a return to basic honesty.

For one, Mr Martin would have seemed more sincere had he not parenthetically added “And too many people empowered VD and his slate… either by voting for the work he slated (often unread)…” Which says, in other words, that those who voted for my works in record numbers, giving me a record number of nominations, did not read those works.

The claim is not correct, but it is politically correct, that is, this is the narrative convenient for SocJus, and the mere fact no one could possibly know this is a matter of sublime indifference.

Often unread, indeed, Mr. Martin? And how, praytell, would you or any mortal man know such a thing? The Hugo committee does not quiz the voters on their reading comprehension.

I suspect they were read. I have heard from hundreds of fans who voted and who expressed regret that my stories did not win. It seems to me odd that anyone would send a personal note of condolence to a writer whose stories one did not read: but even if Mr. Martin were privy to my private letters, he would have no basis for a firm conclusion as to how many, or even if a single, vote were cast for my stories by someone who did not read my stories.

So why add these two dishonest words to the sentence? It would seem an oddly undiplomatic gesture to make in the middle of a sincere proffer of a truce: that is, if this were a sincere proffer of truce, and not merely more of the same.

Morlocks live in darkness and consume human flesh for their holiday feasts. I can indeed be civil to them if they return the courtesy, but I cannot change their nature.

The basic nature of SocJus is dishonesty.

They addicts of Social Justice seek forever to be outraged at some nonexistent injustice, so that they can paint themselves as martyrs and crusaders in a righteous cause, but without the inconvenience of suffering martyrdom or the travail of crusade which would accompany any fight against a real injustice.

One sign of Morlockery is to pen a missive asking one’s foes to abandon their arms and surrender in the name of compromise or civility or somesuch hogwash, while offering nothing, nothing whatsoever, in return, not even basic honesty.

Nor is Mr. Martin in a position to offer anything. Like the Sad Puppies, his side is a loose coalition of likeminded but independent members.

If he refrains from incivility, but his allies do not, I gain nothing by forswearing the use of such colorful terms as ‘Morlocks’ or accurate terms as ‘Christ-haters.’ If I wanted to be bland and inaccurate, I would adopt the flaccid language of political correctness.

And, by an entirely expected coincidence, during the same fortnight as Mr. Martin’s call for civility, we find other members of the SocJus movement busily not being civil or honest:

The surrealistic sensation of finding oneself subject to the two-minute hate for things one did not say by  eager Witch-hunters (leveling silly, false and negligent accusations apparently in hopes of gaining a reputation for zealotry) is not one I would wish on any unstoical soul. In this week’s episode, we find that I call men bad names not because they betray my trust, ruin my favorite show, and seek to worm their sick doctrines into the minds of impressionable children, but because I do not like women befriending women. Who knew?

https://quoteside.wordpress.com/2015/09/05/the-weekly-round-up-592015/

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

The Parochialism of Anachronism

Part of an ongoing conversation:

A reader has been asked somewhat peevish questions in recent days about the academic freedoms allowed to scholars in the medieval university system in and after the Thirteenth Century. The purpose of the questions is unclear: he seems merely to be unable to fathom that anyone should object to modern speech codes, modern political correctness, and modern thought police.

Being a modern thinker, he has no way to put his arguments into a dialectical or logical order, since modern thinkers have no argument whatsoever aside from ad hominem tu quoque or making accusations. So he seeks to accuse Christendom during the first dark ages of having less academic freedom as we who  suffer in the current dark ages enjoy.

The questions have been about the legality of arguing in favor of atheism, but the reader cites no sources, quotes no laws, and seems to be unaware that as an ordinary part of the regimen of scholars in those days (see Thomas  Aquinas) arguments for and against atheism were routinely debated and discussed.

 

Another reader, Stephen J., with perhaps a bit more knowledge of history, offers gallantly to take up the thread of the argument, and with more success. He asks a penetrating question:

Purely for devil’s advocate purposes, wasn’t refusal to acknowledge the supremacy of the Emperor cult a crime in the Roman Empire? I seem to recall that was part of why the Empire had such trouble with the Jewish lands.

Presumably a Roman atheist philosopher so committed to his atheism that he would deny the divinity of the Emperor, along with all other claimed divinities, would then be guilty of a crime. (Whether a pre-Enlightenment atheist would be likely to consider that level of behavioural consistency enough of a moral imperative to endure state punishment over is another question.) While technically it’s the defiance being outlawed, not the atheism per se, the effect might be argued to be much the same.

Your argument has the advantage of being aware that other men of other times thought as they did, not as we do, on these topics. Yes, denying the divinity of the Emperor in a theoretical conversation between philosophers in Athens may or may not have been against the written law, refusing to throw a pinch of incense on the altar for the Emperor was treason, and treason is always a capital crime.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Hugo Controversy Quiz Questions

I received a letter from a stranger who said he was a preparing a scholarly paper on the Sad Puppies phenomenon. I agreed to answer a few basic questions, whose answers I give below, for the edification and entertainment of my readers.  

1. Any general thoughts on the Hugo controversy this year?

At one time, the Hugo Awards reflected the honest opinion of the consensus as to what was the most popular science fiction of that year. It was an award given to science fiction works based on their science fiction appeal.

The process was corrupted over the last fifteen to twenty years by a small but vocal group whose first love was political correctness, not science fiction.

By their own admission, they sought successfully to deliver the award, particularly in the short form categories, to authors based on victim-group status, to works based on politically correct themes, rather than on merit, on the theory that science fiction serves a social role whose primary duty is to propagandize the reader, and condition the reader to accept the political and social maxims currently fashionable among advocates of Orwellian politically correctness.

Seeing the award given to stories which had little merit as stories and no elements even arguably related to science fiction or fantasy, Larry Correia, Sarah Hoyt, and yours truly formed a literary movement dedicated to opposing this degeneration and degradation.

In jest, we called our movement the Sad Puppies (the term was coined by Larry Correia) on the tongue in cheek theory that science fiction awards going to poorly-written works based on political correctness was the leading cause of sadness in puppies, and asking readers to vote for meritorious science fiction works out of compassion for the tiny canines, and restore the dignity and meaning to the award.

Theodore Beale, who writes under the pen name Vox Day, joined us as an ally, but disagreed with the goals. He thought the award could not be salvaged and restored to its former glory; indeed, the only thing that could be done would be to force the politically-correctness faction (which he calls by the mocking title Social Justice Warriors, at one time their own name for themselves) to reveal their true purposes. His plan was to make it clear to any honest onlooker that the awards were being given out not based on merit, but due to politics. For this reason, he promoted his own slate of suggested works for his fans to read and vote upon, called the Rabid Puppies.

The Social Justice Warriors did in fact react precisely as Mr Beale predicted, and after the Sad Puppies unexpectedly swept several categories in the nominations, the SJWs used their superior numbers to vote NO AWARD into that category rather than give the award to whichever work was most worthy among the candidates.

This was done purely and openly for political reasons. The mask is torn. No honest onlooker can doubt the motive of the Social Justice Warriors at this point, or ponder whether the claims made by the Sad Puppies were true or false.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Dantooine is Too Remote

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”

I have already spit on my hands.

I would like, as a matter of form, for the Morlocks to be told we are prepared to Death Star the planet — Dantooine is too remote to make an effective demonstration — so that later, when THEY LIE and say they were not warned of the coming storm, they can have the punishments divine justice pours down on falsifiers in the Eight Circle of Hell in addition to the punishments they have earned as Flatterers, Hypocrites, Evil Counselors and Sowers of Discord.

(for the record, the penalties include being buried in excrement, forced marching in lead robes, burning with tongue of fire, and being severed eternally by a demonic swordblade. Falsifier are plagued with scabs or turn on each other as beasts.)

If our side does not make this gracious gesture, the punishments they bring on themselves will be less.

And we cannot have that.

Look — I hate to get emotional. It is bad for my Vulcan digestion. But the Hugos used to mean something, and now they don’t. A little bit of light and glory have departed the world.

Those who snuffed that light, hating a brightness they could not ignite themselves, must pay.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.