John C. Wright's Blog, page 110
December 1, 2012
City of Heroes is Dead
Trivial as it might sound, this was the only online game I played. This moment 3.00 AM Eastern time, Midnight Pacific, all servers forcibly disconnected. Despite that the game was making money, and despite the rumors that someone might buy the property from NC Soft, the company decided to abolish the game.
I was playing my final character, the Merriest Widow, and was one ‘bubble’ or unit of experience points away from reaching level 50, the final level. Had I had another ten minutes of playtime, or even five, I might have reached the goal. But it was not to be.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
November 30, 2012
Too Wealthy for the Public Weal
A reader with (considering the question) the very appropriate name of Moore writes in to ask:
Economically and socially speaking, is there any amount of wealth that is ‘too much’?
Here’s the analogy: we have a right to bear arms. Nonetheless, I can’t own a fully-functioning tank, or an MX missile, or a nuclear bomb. And most of us (I presume – please correct me if I’m wrong) are OK with that. There’s a limit – someplace – to what it means to ‘bear arms’, and hunting rifles are within it and F-16s are beyond it.
Similarly, we have a right to property. Now we don’t often see someone who controls $10B as being as dangerous as someone with a squad of M-1 tanks, but my question is: why not? As someone who has spent years in the finance industry, that rich man, and what he is capable of, is every bit as scary and dangerous as somebody with a hundred fully automatic assault rifles, probably more. For if the guy with the assault rifles decides to, he (and 99 of his buddies) could take over a city kill some people, until the police, the national guard and the other armed citizens take them out. The guy with a few billion dollars, with a few of his buddies, can, say, bring down the economy in order to profit by having bought ‘insurance’ that only pays off if the economy collapses – and then get his people in the government to fund the payoff of his insurance. Millions of innocent people lose jobs, pensions and billions of dollars in the value of their holdings and we all inherit trillions in debt as a result of these moves. More or less – this is the ‘atomic bomb’ level. Something like this did just happen.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
November 29, 2012
Spies and Superspies and SKYFALL
The latest entry into the longest running film series is history was superb. I strongly recommend SKYFALL to anyone who shares my tastes in Bond films.
Being a penurious writer, and having four kids and zero babysitters, and being able to entertain myself much more cheaply with books, role-playing games, or any number of public domain books or films on the Internet, or stream content on Netflicks, it takes an extraordinary film to crowbar me out of my house and into the local gigamegahyperplex for the big screen experience, and to call the experience worth it.
SKYFALL was worth it.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
The Knife and the Pony
I was puzzling and pondering about the alliance between the Left and the Jihad. Having exhausting any historical cause or psychological cause, I conclude the cause is spiritual.
The inspiration of the imps in Hell, consumed with their wretched hatred of mankind, are the only thing sufficient to explain how Leftists can (for example) at once claim to support the rights of women, and bring the terror and majesty o the law to bear against writers (including, namely, Mark Steyn) for talking about honor-killings and female genital mutilation.
Tom Simon, one of the most intelligent writers it has ever been by pleasure to read, recently wrote in the comments here on the topic of this alliance:
I’m sure the match was made in Hell, but there is, unfortunately, a pseudo-rational basis for the unholy alliance. It is an outgrowth of Marxist thinking, though most of the people who subscribe to it don’t know that and have no idea they are practising Marxists, because of the stupid modern habit of jumping into an argument in the middle without any attempt to find out what axioms it is based upon.
Put as shortly as possible: All property is theft; therefore those who have no property are the victims of theft. Muslim countries are poor, therefore they are victims of those who are rich.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
November 26, 2012
The Darkening of the Intellect, Deadening of the Moral Sense
I found this today:
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/022015.html
Anthony De Rosa is a reporter for Reuters. He asks:
If Iron Dome is so successful, what is the purpose of killing so many in retaliation, especially human shield causalities?
If this were a serious question, asked in earnest by a creature with a human soul, the sober answer would be that Israeli air strikes are meant to destroy enemy launch sites.
But it is not a serious question. The best answer is this, tweeted by one Robbie Guy:
If you had an AMAZING jock strap, reducing pain by 90%, can I still keep kicking you in the balls without you retaliating?
Yet even this contemplated castration via blunt boot damage is too kind a reaction to this comment by a Rueters writer. Jew-hatred should not be tolerated in any civilized nation in the West. It is beyond the pale.
To those who say this is not Jew-Hatred, I ask only that you provide me with three examples of a nation condemned for defending herself from unprovoked attacks without declaration of war by enemies not in uniform upon her innocent civilians, aside from a Jewish nation being attacked by Jew-haters? Well? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
November 23, 2012
Giving Thanks for Cats, and other small guardians of civilization
A reader with the eldritch and unspeakable name of Nostreculsus writes:
Although cats are disgusting vermin that must be put down, I must warn against any plan to consume their meat in a stew. It is just too dangerous. Science tells us that cats are infested with symbiotic parasites that lodge in the brains of those unfortunates exposed to cats. These parasites then control the minds of the human victim, convincing him to shelter cats, to feed cats and to serve all cat purposes. There are even sad cases where the infested human’s perceptions are so disordered, so that he finds the cats “cute”, and “fluffy”, rather than as the diseased and repulsive beasts they truly are. Any such infested humans should be reported for medical decontamination at once.
At least, that is what the parasites from my faithful golden retriever, Scout, are telling my brain. He is truly man’s best friend.
This is almost as amusing as the scene in Tanith Lee where the great demon prince Azhrarn, upon discovering the mankind does not like snakes because of the slitted eyes and sinister pride and sleek cruelty of snakes, takes a snake and pets it, giving it fur and feet, and releases upon man the race of cats, who men love, because of the slitted eyes and sinister pride and sleek cruelty of cats.
I am totally kidding about the cat cooking. Without cats, out first ancestors who settled down from a nomadic life and grew grain and raised city walls would have been eaten out of their grain supplies by rats, and civilization would have never begun. All writers owe our livelihood to cats, since the first writing systems were apparently to tally grain or write down the names of the kings of walled towns. So, a few thousand years of catlike lazying around and doing no work is small price to pay for all the efforts of all farm cats for countless years keeping the rat population down.
Now, of course, after the last election, we realize that the rat population has returned, and the voters voted themselves all the seedcorn in the grainhouse, and all the rats feasted and feasted again with so called stimulus packages that magically reversed cause and effect (as if consuming goods could somehow produce goods) and various inflationary quantitative easing schemes. Oh, where is some Egyptian devil-goddess with the head of a cat to call down vengeance upon this nation with a swarm of slitted eyes cats, sleek and cruel, to eat all the hordes and hordes of rats rising like an endless tide to consume our civilization? Where, O God, is the archangel in charge of cats? Send us, Lord, St. Gertrude of Nivelles!
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
November 21, 2012
Quote of the Day
“Poetic license” is the freedom allowed to writers for achieving literary effects by deviating from facts, conventional logic, or standard grammar and spelling.
“Political license” is the freedom allowed to politicians to make statements deviating from facts, logic, principle, or consistency to achieve electoral effects. Although sanctioned for politicians by long practice, this freedom is denied to ordinary mortals. When they say something silly, they expose themselves to immediate contradiction, derision or rude guffaws.
This gem comes not from Mark Twain nor H.L. Mencken, albeit worthy of their pen. It from a man named John Frary in the comment box here: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/11/20/the-surrealistic-states-of-america/
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
November 20, 2012
Harriet Klausner Review!
I assume this seems funny only to me, since, at this date, I am the only one who has read my book so far. Some of the sentences have that odd, mechanical sound of a sentence translated by Google translate from a foreign language.
So that those who have not read the book will see the humor, I will add corrections and comments in parenthesis.
The Hermetic Millennia
John C. Wright
Tor, Dec 24 2012, $25.99
ISBN: 9780765329288
Crew members of the starship Hermetic discover the alien warehouse [sic: a Monument the size of a small moon], which contained [contains-agreement of tense] advanced knowledge and an energy source [the Monument does not contain an energy source, but circles a star made of antimatter, which is an energy source] way beyond what humanity knew [knows]. Menelaus Montrose and Zimen [Ximen] “Blackie” Del Azarchel had two diverse [divergent] visions of a future earth. Whereas Montrose wants his home planet to thrive with the shared discovery and prepares to challenge the alien menace, Blackie feels the need to reengineer the species to make them worthy of the warehouse [Monument] owners [,] the Domination of Hyades when they return [invade] in eight millennia to determine whether enslaving mankind is worthy of them [Other way around: whether mankind is worth enslaving][and a run on sentence]. Blackie wins the first round as he persuades other crew members this is the only way their species survives the return [invasion] [which happened in the first volume, in the opening chapters].
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Revenge of the Mediterranean Man
The most insightful essay on North and South — I mean Northern and Southern Europe — I have to date read. The Platonic idea mentioned here, of music being more central to the nation than her laws, is one I touched on glancingly in my latest book THE HERMETIC MILLENNIA.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/333637/revenge-mediterranean-man-michael-knox-beran
An excerpt:
It is not my intention to write a brief for the superiority of the northern system. Were it up to me, I would preserve the economic liberties that have made the northern nations more prosperous than any others that history records. But man does not live by bread alone, and it seems to me that the northern peoples made a mistake when, on the threshold of modernity, they allowed a number of the Mediterranean qualities their culture had adopted to decay.
During the thousand years that elapsed between the deposition of Romulus Augustus, the last emperor of the West, and the posting of Luther’s 95 theses on the church door in Wittenberg, many of the cities and towns of northern Europe emulated non-compulsory, local forms of civic order originally developed by the Mediterranean peoples. Under this town-square arrangement, individuals were free to develop their own talents yet were always in touch with the common life of those around them. (The basic argument is set forth in Thucydides’s version of Pericles’s funeral oration.) The result was the market-square (or agora) culture that the achievements of Athens, Florence, and Venice, of Salamanca and Kraków, of Bruges, Dijon, Prague, and a thousand lesser centers have made familiar to the whole world. Both the material prosperity and the artistic splendors that these cities attained or inspired are still evident to those who visit their historic centers. It is more difficult for visitors to grasp the pastoral and charitable care that once flourished in these cities, a solicitude that led Dante to liken Florence to a “fair sheepfold.”
The great expansion of the modern age overwhelmed these older forms of order: Men came to live, in Wordsworth’s phrase, “irregularly massed.” New kinds of suffering arose amid a general plenty, the misery Dickens and Hugo and Ruskin wrote about in their books. But instead of drawing on the West’s older philosophy of mercy and adapting it to an altered climate, the sages of the north devised a wholly new remedial system.
Unlike the pastoral culture it was intended to replace, the new therapeutic machinery was to be compulsory rather than voluntary, national rather than local, secular rather than spiritual, rigidly bureaucratic rather than idiosyncratically flexible. The old pastoral culture was a product not merely of the religious sensibility of the old Europeans but of their aesthetic finesse: They used art and especially music to create desirable patterns of order in everyday life. (Art and music, the Greeks believed, are more effective than laws in the building of cities — an insight that we in our rage for rule-making have forgotten.) The old pastoral culture of the West appealed to the imagination, for it was saturated with myth and deeply indebted to the poets. The new redemptive machinery, by contrast, was sterile and unimaginative: It said nothing to the soul. Such was the viper the northern sages nourished in their bosoms. They called it socialism.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
November 19, 2012
The Other Side of the Picture
This was written by Flannery O’Conner (who, along with Dean Koontz and Walker Percy, ranks as the most widely famed of Catholic and Southern authors) to a student who had, or thought he had, lost his faith in College.
30 May 1962
To Alfred Corn,
I think that this experience you are having of losing your faith, or as you think, of having lost it, is an experience that in the long run belongs to faith; or at least it can belong to faith if faith is still valuable to you, and it must be or you would not have written me about this.
I don’t know how the kind of faith required of a Christian living in the 20th century can be at all if it is not grounded on this experience that you are having right now of unbelief. This may be the case always and not just in the 20th century. Peter [sic] said, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.” It is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith.
As a freshman in college you are bombarded with new ideas, or rather pieces of ideas, new frames or reference, an activation of the intellectual life which is only beginning, but which is already running ahead of your lived experience. After a year of this, you think you cannot believe. You are just beginning to realize how difficult it is to have faith and the measure of a commitment to it, but you are too young to decide you don’t have faith just because you feel you can’t believe. About the only way we know whether we believe or not is by what we do, and I think from your letter that you will not take the path of least resistance in this matter and simply decide that you have lost your faith and that there is nothing you can do about it.
One result of the stimulation of your intellectual life that takes place in college is usually a shrinking of the imaginative life.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
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