John C. Wright's Blog, page 111
November 16, 2012
Bad Catholic on Nothing
Without doubt the clearest meditation on this theme I have ever read.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/badcatholic/2012/11/better-than-nothing.html
… the modern world sees destruction as something bold, brave and ballsy. We see sin — always destructive — as a solid in an otherwise watery universe. The vandals, arsonists, gangsters, home wreckers, and serial killers; the self-destructive, self-righteous, and self-serving; the womanizers, tyrants, and abusers – we are most of these things, and we think at least one or two of them badass.
But if we come from Nothing and are going to Nothing, what boldness can there be in destruction? The law of entropy will kill our families, reduce our houses to dust, and slowly, steadily, bring about all the super-hardcore-ness we can imagine. There is no rebellion in hastening the inevitable. A killing spree may shock society, but it is a boredom to the universe, who ultimately kills everyone. To objectify a woman into a sex object might give men a thrill, but it is a pathetic to the universe, who is busy rendering her into a corpse.
Sin is weak. Sin is a white flag of surrender waved to the oncoming Nothingness.
[...]
Sin is always the easiest action to perform in any given situation. All it requires is Nothing.
To commit the sin of wrath or anger, a man doesn’t have to do anything, he merely has to lose something — his temper. He breaks, he snaps, he “gives in”, all of which merely points out the obvious, that he stops doing something. There is no boldness in wrath, any more than there is in rot, though they amount to the same thing, an acquiescence into Nothingness.
To commit the sin of pride, a man need not do anything. He does not know — nor can he — if his family and friends are having the same experience of life, or the same depth of thought and feeling that he is. He does not know them as selves — that is, as he knows himself — but as others. … All Pride requires is not doing anything.
Lust is merely the absence of love in the erotic. Sloth is the simply the absence of diligence and love for life. (It requires nothing, as a man standing straight requires nothing to slouch. He only needs to stop doing something, to stop standing straight. Sloth is a spiritual slouch.) Envy is the absence of kindness. Greed is the absence of charity. Gluttony is the absence of temperance.
So to summarize: Man comes from Nothing and goes to Nothing. In the brief interval of time in which he exists, he has the free choice to give in to the Nothingness that surrounds his existence — to sin — or to fight it with joy — to practice virtue. Sin is surrender and virtue is resistance.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
I cannot believe we are still having this discussion
Note: I had thought this topic long dead, as the title indicates. Since someone brought it up again, I reprint my previous thought on the subject, editing only the opening remark.
A reader who, on other topics, I deem worthy of respect, has ventured the following comment in regards the Iraqi war:
“Pre-invasion, Iraq was a deplorable place run by an unrepentant dictator that is better off dead. However, at the time, it was a secular and not a Jihadist hell-hole. (to the point that Al-Qaeda disliked Saddam nearly as much as us). Of course, Saddam kept it secular by terror and repression.
By toppling Saddam, and having an incompetent in charge of the war not understand how to conduct the aftermath (see the work of Tom Ricks for details) , we MADE it a hell-hole of religious conflict that we subsequently poured trillions of dollars into trying to fix.
I can’t grok why President Bush attacked Iraq.”
The original rationale for the war is the same now as it has always been.
Since someone else has done the work for me, I will simply post his line of argument in full, saving my comment for the end.
http://qando.net/archives/002062.htm
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Message from Morlockland
Gentle readers, I got this message in my spam filter, and I could not tell if it had been written by a robot or a man, if it were directed at me, or was part of an anonymous mass-mailing. I wrote a note to the address, to find out if it were robotic or human, and as of this writing received no reply, so I yet wonder.
Savor the voice of those who sit in the seats of the scornful:
Oh wait… I thought “the issue” was abortion for you… The issue that defined all others. Guess that was yesterday.
So if you hate debt so much how about the next time a republican manufactures a war you bring up that wars cost money, and recommend that this president pay for his multi trillion dollar hissy fit in Iraq? The way wars are paid for (besides blood, and I would go into that waste of life but this is on the debt… So allow me to stay on track) with “taxes and bonds, and bonds and taxes” not by “tax cuts for the rich and hey why don’t y’all go shopping”?
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
November 14, 2012
Tea with the Mrs!
John C. Wright
December 8th, 2012, from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Virginia fantasy and science fiction authors Lamplighter and Wright will drop by December 8th at Constellation Bookstore to chat about their work.
Coffee, Tea, Cocoa and treats will be available.
Constellation Books! Where every book is a star!
303 Main St
Reisterstown, Maryland
21136-1903
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Ellis Wyatt, Phone your Office
In news naturally ignored by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and virtually everyone else in the establishment media, The Hill reported late last week that the Interior Department “issued a final plan to close 1.6 million acres of federal land in the West (i.e., 2,500 square miles) originally slated for oil shale development.”
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and the Environmental Protection Agency plan to spend the next four years using largely phony environmental concerns to prevent the country from seeing affordable energy costs and from achieving long-term net energy independence. The U.S. could accomplish the latter within a decade if the government would, with appropriate oversight, let the oil and gas industry do in the West what it has successfully been doing in North Dakota and Pennsylvania.
from http://pjmedia.com/blog/3-windows-into-obamas-dangerous-second-term/
My comment: We had a chance to have an energy Renaissance in this country. It would have ended the Depression and undermined the petrodollar-funded Terror Masters in the Middle East.
But no. America voted her future away.
In related news, Israel is under missile attack, foodstamp enrollment has reached an all-time record breaking high, layoff and reductions in workforce from permanent to temporary jobs is underway (anyone under 30 hours a week is not covered by his employer according to Obamacare), the Stock Market is declining.
And the man whom the Administration decided to scapegoat as the cause of the Benghazi attacks — by now, by all admitted to have been planned terrorist attacks, not a spontaneous mob enraged by some unwatched YouTube video — is still in jail.
Oh, and the Nation is entirely broke. See the Debt Clock to the right.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
On Ecumenical Partisanship
A reader with the magical name of Robertjwizard asks:
“So I ask – what, outside of banning abortion (which many Catholics practice) does a Catholic stand for politically?”
Not to be impudent, but our kingdom is not of this world.
Politically, we want to save man from death and damnation.
The Church has existed under the Imperial government of Byzantium, under warlords in the Dark Ages and kings in the Middle Age, monarchies both constitutional and absolute, under more than one Holy Roman Emperor, under republics, democracies, sultanates, and under modern dictatorships.
We believe the free market can be corrupted and used for evil, and so to the capitalist we sound socialist. We believe the state can be corrupted and used for evil, and so to the socialist we sound capitalist.
We believe in the ‘just war’ theory. To the doves, we seem like warhawks, because we are not pacifists. We do not believe in pre-emptive surrender. To the warhawks, we seem like doves, because we do not believe in pre-emptive attacks, nor war as anything but a last resort.
We are reactionary in that we hold that the laws of morality do not change or vary any more than the laws of nature. We are radical revolutionaries in that we hold that the world is broken and corrupt to its roots and needs Herculean and immediate effort to lift mankind out of the mire.
Politically, Catholics stand for sanity, for balance, and for every man under every form of government. We are catholic, that is to say, universal.
We are the only party that stands for the truth rather than for an ideology. We are not a party at all, but a family, or, to be precise, the body of Christ incarnate on Earth, whose every member is of Him and in Him.
Let me put impudence aside and give a clearer and longer answer, quoting a man both wiser and better spoken than myself.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
November 13, 2012
On the National Debt
Several of the responses that I have seen from the Left in recent days, and, alas, from the Right, compels me to believe that not only does the public and the elite not grasp the true depth of the fiscal Armageddon facing the Republic, their ability to avoid grasping it is the single greatest feat of mental malfeasance, of willful blindness, in history.
I have added the National Debt Clock to my site, so you can see the numbers in all their glory of what you owe our leaders. Mark the numbers marching like the mindless broomsticks in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, whose endless advance no ax can stop.
I have found a brief and clear explanation of this depth.
Federal debt began the 20th century at less than 10 percent of GDP. It jerked above 30 percent as a result of World War I and then declined in the 1920s to 16.3 percent by 1929. Federal debt started to increase after the Crash of 1929, and rose above 40 percent in the depths of the Great Depression.Federal debt exploded during World War II to over 120 percent of GDP, and then began a decline that bottomed out at 32 percent of GDP in 1974. Federal debt almost doubled in the 1980s, reaching 60 percent of GDP in 1990 and peaking at 66 percent of GDP in 1996, before declining to 56 percent in 2001. Federal debt started increasing again in the 2000s, reaching 70 percent of GDP in 2008. Then it exploded in the aftermath of the Crash of 2008, reaching 102 percent of GDP in 2011.
(Source: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_debt which is explained in more detail here and ultimately comes from http://www.scifiwright.com/www.gpo.gov.)
Keep in mind what we are discussing. GDP is the gross domestic product, an economic shorthand for the total value of all goods and services produced by the entire American economy. Now, over one hundred percent, or, in other words, all of the economic activity of the National economy for this year is insufficient to pay our bills.
It is insufficient even if the entire economy, all of it, every penny earned by every man, woman, child and talking dog went immediately to service the debt, and not to any other use whatever.
This figure does not include state and local deficit spending, nor unfunded mandates like Medicaid. Nor does it include personal debt.
The money is gone. All of it is spent, and all the nation will ever make.
Raising taxes on the rich will not do anything. Even if all the wealth of everyone worth more than a quarter million a year were confiscated outright, all of it taken, one hundred percent, it would not do anything. For that matter, pulling the plug on PBS, Big Bird and all, will not do anything. These are purely ceremonial gestures, meant as political theater.
We are so far in debt that our children working their whole lives cannot pay back what has already been spent.
And our grandchildren, working all their lives.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Jordan 179 on Political Culture
Today’s must-read article on the nature and pacing of political changehttp://www.scifiwright.com/: httphttp://www.scifiwright.com/://jordan179.livejournal.com/255430.html
…. the State is now doing something which, decades ago, would have led to protest and possibly violent rebellion, which is now just accepted as “the way things are,” which is to say the change has become part of the political culture. These changes may be good, or bad from our POV. (Personally, while I’m not happy that the States are no longer semi-independent, I’m very happy that Lincoln liberated the slaves). This is irrelevant. The important point is that the changes are no longer controversial.
This is what Obama wants to do, in his lifetime. He wants to secure the regulatory expansion of the 1970′s and go a bit beyond it, and have these changes be ratified by his successors so that, by 2030 or so (when he’ll have long since retired from politics) Americans just accept this growth in Federal purview as normal, and only a few extremists still regard them as controversial.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
November 12, 2012
In Whose Mighty Company We Shall Not Be Ashamed to Stand
Happy Veteran’s Day.
And now this concerning the long war:
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
November 9, 2012
On the Enormities of Kindly Men
A reader with the ever-present name of The Ubiquitous utters this cri de coeur:
During election night, I cheered in irony because if I did not laugh I would not know what to do. The greatness in this sarcastic folly struck me only the following day in conversation with a friend, a God-fearing man who means well — and voted for Mr. Obama.
“But what about abortion? How is that not terrible?”
“It’s just one issue … ”
True to form, I cut him off bitterly, and the weight on my shoulders increased with every word: “It is not an issue. It’s everything. How can it be an issue when the scale boggles the mind? What is it, 45 million in the United States alone, since the ’70s?”
Any man who openly advocates for abortion may seem a nice man, a decent man, who loves his daughters and means well. But these otherwise noble qualities do not redeem a man, but condemn him. It is kinder, in a sense, to Mr. Obama if we demonize him. For the other option is that he is a dupe, willing or unwilling.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
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