John C. Wright's Blog, page 139

Quote of Tomorrow

As far as real science is concerned, we are as likely to create C3PO, or any other self-aware, talking, thinking and acting computer, as we are to create the Tin Woodman of Oz by the process of chopping off one body part at a time until all are replaced by the tinsmith (as described by L Frank Baum, the Royal Historian of Oz, in a grisliness odd for a children's book.)

Despite the eagerness with which modern materialists confuse the objects on which symbols are inscribed, or to which symbolic meaning is attributed, with the material object itself, in their eagerness to pretend we are all Tin Woodmen, in reality even the most advanced of computers neither reflects nor cogitates nor acts of its own volition, no, not even so much as an amoeba acts.

One of my correspondents in a debate on this point solemnly proclaimed that the computers of the future would be self aware.

He was as confident as Robert Heinlein predicting the discovery of life on Mars. He seemed to forget that, as a science fiction writer, I am one of the unscrupulous ilk of story tellers who both made up the idea of talking computers and used our arts of deception to make them seem realistic. We did the same thing for flying cars, which are possible, and for time machines and faster than light drives, which are not possible.

As a lawyer, I admit it would be nice to call to the stand witnesses not yet born or introduce evidence not yet in existence. I could then describe to the gullible jury anything I wished the witness to have said. He would describe World War Three in great detail, or the invasions of the tripodal Martian War machines crewed by Sorns and Tharks.

The logic here seems a little elliptical. Since the computers of the future, which neither I nor any living being has ever had seen, will one day be capable of self-aware thought, therefore I should believe that computers now must be self aware merely at a more primitive level, and therefore should believe my brain was nothing more than a computer, and my soul and mind nothing more than my brain, an organic mechanism without intentionality or free will or imagination — or without anything else I distinctly and immediately perceive and suffer and do.

Determinists believe, in effect, that we do not make decisions, so I am aways puzzled why determinists so patiently spend their efforts in trying to persuade me to decide to be a determinist. None seems to accept my explanation that I am programmed in inescapably to believe in free will, and have no choice in the matter.

I did not answer my correspondent, being, for once, at a loss for words. I did, however, stumble by accident across this quote by GK Chesterton, which seems apposite to the point:

THE truth is that all feeble spirits naturally live in the future, because it is featureless; it is a soft job; you can make it what you like. The next age is blank, and I can paint it freshly with my favourite colour. It requires real courage to face the past, because the past is full of facts which cannot be got over; of men certainly wiser than we, and of things done which we could not do. I know I cannot write a poem as good as 'Lycidas.' But it is always easy to say that the particular sort of poetry I can write will be the poetry of the future.

And if, for poetry, you substitute technology, you will have a keen insight into the philosophy of both materialists and transhumanists, who are so confident that tomorrow will reduce to practice things currently thought impossible.

 

 

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Santorum and Ashes

Happy Ash Wednesday, if that is the proper greeting for the advent of the season of repentance in ashes and mourning for our sins.

On the radio this morning, I heard what I thought was a Twilight Zone episode about a parallel universe in which the human race had never heard any Bible stories, fairytales, pagan epics, nor seen the movie TIME BANDITS nor read even a single history book of the long and sad and terrible history of the human race, and so had no idea that evil was real.

In this deliriously naive parallel world, the radio was chattering nervously about some politician who made a speech a few years ago, and made reference to the Supreme Being, and also to His adversary.

One liberal commentator, Lanny Davis, apologist for the Clintons, condemned the language as moralistic and judgmental; one conservative commentator, Anne Coulter, supporter of Romney, dismissed the talk as inappropriate and distracting, saying the Republicans should concentrate on debating economic issues and leave divine issues aside.

Everyone seemed as embarrassed for the politician as they might for a bride's maid who farts during the ceremony.

The speech they were discussing was, of course, was this one:

In this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer:

Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.

They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.

Oh, sorry, my mistake. That is from the D-Day prayer given by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Here, I found the speech they are talking about:

The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Boy, what a sourpuss and a Godbotherer. Someone being so judgmental, and actually accusing this great country of falling under the  Divine Wrath and judgment of God, is such a negative view of this nation — it will not play well with the voters. In fact, this kind of moralizing is exclusionary, and unacceptable in our modern and enlightened …. uh …. Oops. Wrong again. That is from Lincoln's Second Inaugural.

No, the speech they were discussing was given by Rick Santorum at Ave Maria University in Florida. Here are some excepts.

The Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies, Satan, would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country — the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age? There is no one else to go after other than the United States, and that's been the case for now almost 200 years, once America's preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.

[...]

Satan has done so by attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of these strong plants that have so deeply rooted in American tradition. He was successful. The place where he was, in my mind, the most successful and first successful was in academia. He understood pride of "smart" people. He attacked them at their weakest, that they were in fact smarter than everybody else and could come up with something new and different, pursue new truths, deny the existence of truth, play with it, "because we're smart;" and so academia a long time ago fell.

[...]

The next was the church. Now, you say, "Well, wait. The Catholic Church?" No. We all know that this country was founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic, but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant Judeo-Christian ethic. Sure, the Catholics had some influence, but this was a Protestant country, and the Protestant ethic. Mainstream, mainline Protestantism. And of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country, and it is a shambles.

So, in this weird parallel Twilight Zone in which I found myself, both liberal and conservative commentators thought it worthy of comment that a practicing Catholic when addressing a Catholic audience would rebuke the sins of pride, vanity and sensuality, particularly the pride of intellectuals as seen in the La trahison des Clercs — and then rebukes the Church for falling into disarray.

The queen of the Twilight Zone is Maureen Dowd, whose reaction was to quip: "Rick Santorum has been called a latter-day Savonarola. That's far too grand. He's more like a small-town mullah." and then to say "When, in heaven's name, did sensuality become a vice? Next he'll be banning Barry White."

This is what passes for wit in the Twilight Zone: to express disbelieving yet smug disdain that Christians do not celebrate and laud the sins of the flesh.

In this weird parallel Twilight Zone, no one had been to Sunday School, or listened to a sermon, or else they would have heard this same theme at least once in their lives.

Neither had they ever cracked a history book, or else they would have known Western Civilization was Christian.

So Santorum said that proud academics think they are smarter than everybody and deny the existence of truth. I seem to recall the same point being made by Ayn Rand fifty years ago, and GK Chesterton a hundred years ago: and I cannot think of two writers more starkly opposite than the jovial theist anti-capitalist Chesterton and the choleric atheist pro-capitalist Rand. If they agree on something, it must be as common as table salt and as obvious as sunlight.

I cannot even see anything controversial in the comments. It is about as outrageous as upbraiding the rich for their greed or the fashionable for their vanity to upbraid the intellectual for his arrogance. Upbraiding the Church for her disarray is not outrageous at all, it is the duty of all God-fearing men. The comments would be platitudes, except that the wording is new.

Is this it? Is this what has the Mainstream media going through its ritualized foaming at the mouth and rolling on the ground in pretended epileptic paroxysms of excessive emotion? This? Seriously?

Does the media actually think this is a winning political issue for their man? To mock and deride the Christian faith, and to dismiss the majority as uncouth lunatics? To dismiss the last millennium or two of Western civilization as unsightly crackpottery?

Well, it might work in the Twilight Zone, or the weird echo chamber where the Pauline Kaels of the world live, carefully insulated from meeting any real people who know about real life — which includes, by the way, a very real Devil, who has made very real progress in America in a shorter time that I would have believed possible.

Has the Prince of Darkness already won so many hearts and souls that the slightest mention of reality, and of the real war between darkness and light that rages every day in every life, as well as in the life of a great nation, is to greeted with shock and disbelief? Is all truth, and everything interesting, or exciting, or dangerous, to be scrupulously and fastidiously expunged from the public forum?

At least one liberal commentator says yes. Truth is too judgmental, too moralistic. At least one conservative commentator says yes. Truth is not a pocketbook issue: voters are more worried about their keeping their jobs and making their mortgage payment than they are about the nosedive of this once-great nation into the outer darkness of pride, vanity and sensuality, the cold and colorless treason of the intellectuals, the shambles of the scattered flock of Christ.

Meanwhile, back in reality, in the bright sunlight far from the Twilight Zone, today is a day to initiate the season of fasting and repentance. Perhaps the first thing for which we the people should repent was letting ourselves be led so far astray, to have forgotten both the light of heaven so completely and the darkness of hell, that any mention of such high things or profound strikes the ear not merely as odd, but ugly.

Have we forgotten Christ so completely that the mere mention of His name sounds like a faux pas to us, a breach of etiquette, a curse? Or the mere mention of the name of His adversary?

Let us by all means repent in ashes that we have allowed our nation to descend into such a swamp of worldliness that even to speak as all Christians always and everywhere have spoken is thought not merely impolite, but extraordinary.

If Christ indeed is forgotten so completely, ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?

 

 

 

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Reviewer Praise for COUNT TO A TRILLION

Mr Vogt over at Examiner.Com has a kind word to say about COUNT TO A TRILLION.

http://www.examiner.com/speculative-fiction-in-national/review-count-to-a-trillion-by-john-c-wright-review

What would you do to make yourself smarter? Study harder? Get a private tutor? Invest in a Ph.D.?

Stab yourself in the brain with an untested cocktail of intelligence enhancers based on formulae inscribed on an alien artifact?

Maybe not the wisest approach–but hey, if you were smart enough to realize that, perhaps that brain booster wouldn't have been necessary anyways.

[...]

Count to a Trillion is an epic science fiction novel that travels more through the uncharted vastness of human intellect than it does through space itself. It asks questions such as, "How much does intelligence define the human nature?" and "Can humanity even be trusted to chart its own evolution?" Some readers may find themselves skimming the more esoteric portions, where Menelaus grapples with his heightened thinking, but these sections do give a good sense that he's gone beyond anything compared to normal levels of human intellect. This book won't hand you any easy answers, but will leave you pondering long after the final page–and any story that encourages deeper thinking is worth tackling in my estimation.

No one ever told me that the hard part of being a writer would be fending off a natural modesty that urges one to deprecate or contradict the flattery of pleased readers. Another danger is the opposite one, the desire to vaunt and prance like  Cassius Clay for every slight compliment. Even modest fame is not good for the soul.

I think the way to avoid both Scylla and Charybdis is simply to be grateful to the muses and to the readers for their favors, which they bestow by grace, not which the writer by his own accomplishment earns.

But in this case, the reviewer is right about the book. I hope.

Go out immediately and buy a copy or nine in hardback for Fat Tuesday! Reading my books can be your penance over Lent!

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Exhibit A That SF is F

A science fiction fan, and, later, writer, I have always maintained that the only really insightful social and political commentary being written is written in the genre of Science Fiction.

My reason for this admittedly outrageous statement is that, first, the art of story telling is the art of exaggeration. Telling an un-exaggerated and balanced and even handed story is the task of newspaperman, if they seek to the serve the truth rather than serve up the party line, that is.  To examine a exaggerate a social or political trend, you mus exaggerate it, so as to make the latent characteristics plain.

The only way to exaggerate a latent political trend is to ask the question "what will happen if this goes on?" and then write up an extrapolation.

The only way to engage the soul of the reader instead of merely his cool and remote intellect, is to cast the extrapolation as a fiction. "If this goes on" must take place in the future, and therefore must be science fiction.

I will hold up WE by Zamyatin, NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR by George Orwell, FAHRENHEIT 451 by Bradbury, ANTHEM by Ayn Rand, BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley as examples, and perhaps even NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL by Chesterton. In film, the oldest and seminal film of SF was written to make a political and social point: METROPOLIS by Fritz Lang.

But one thing I never expected to see was those whose fame rests on social and political commentary get involved in the geekfest fanboy debate over trivia in a sciffy film of our little beloved ghetto of a genre.

Here is Bill Whittle, who has written essays and make speeches as fine as anything I have ever read or heard, talking about whether Han shot first.

Independent of whether you agree with his point (and if you do not, why are you reading anything I am likely to write?) independent of that, what fascinates me about the time in which we live, is that the fanboys have won. We are all geeks now. The ghetto wall is broken, and science fiction has captured the popular culture.

Which is as it should be.

Science fiction is mainstream fiction. SF is F.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

What does this Horde of Slaves, Traitors, and Conjured Kings Crave? For Whom These Ignoble Chains an

Note this article from the Carolina Journal Online.

http://www.carolinajournal.com/exclusives/homemade-lunch-replaced-with-cafeteria-nuggets.html

RAEFORD – A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because a state employee told her the lunch her mother packed was not nutritious.

The girl's turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the agent who was inspecting all lunch boxes in her More at Four classroom that day.

The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs – including in-home day care centers – to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home.

When home-packed lunches do not include all of the required items, child care providers must supplement them with the missing ones.

The girl's mother – who said she wishes to remain anonymous to protect her daughter from retaliation – said she received a note from the school stating that students who did not bring a "healthy lunch" would be offered the missing portions, which could result in a fee from the cafeteria, in her case $1.25.

"I don't feel that I should pay for a cafeteria lunch when I provide lunch for her from home," the mother wrote

Aux armes, citoyens,

Formez vos bataillons,

Marchons, marchons !

Qu'un sang impur

Abreuve nos sillons !

Que veut cette horde d'esclaves,

De traîtres, de rois conjurés ?

Pour qui ces ignobles entraves,

Ces fers dès longtemps préparés ?

Federalists in particular please note that this is a USDA mandate, that is, federal and not state or municipal government enacting this regulation of the lunchpail.

Health, since it seems to be an objective and scientifically defined entity, is the favorite excuse for Progressives in their eagerness to overreach the limits of the law, or, indeed, in this case, common sense.

I fear, alas, the time for armed rebellion is dangerously near. How much indignity must free men stand? The dollar and twenty five cents exacted from this mother who fears to speak for fear of retaliation offers as much Casus Belli as the War of Jenkins' Ear.

For the love of Christ, hold your outraged hands, gentlemen who love this land, and allow the blessings of peace continue while they may. But for love of liberty prepare for the coming storm, sharpen your fathers' swords, keep your powder dry.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Wright flees Ignominiously

One small advantage of being a Christian is that I no longer need to be as scrupulous about my honor and pride.  Indeed, part of my task is to beat down my pride, which, as a candid reader can see in the words that follow, I have not yet done.

I young (I presume) man (I presume) named Brad, who in his spare time serves as the the Mouth of Sauron and an apologist for the heresiarch Karl Marx has addressed me with the following offer, which I admit is a noble one:

He writes:

John, then let neither of us muddy the waters. This argument was not started specifically with the intention of making this into 'capitalism vs communism'. I may have less experience than you, but I have still argued it enough to be tired of it. For the same reasons as you, just in reverse.

Let us go even unto the electronic mail, where no hecklers, rhetoricians and other people in general cannot interfere. Let us set out our arguments in a logical fashion, without ad hominem and other logical fallacies, which you rely on, but claim that you do not and I do. Let us be emotive when emotion is called for, and analytical when it is not, not this strange fusion which we are experiencing here. Let us state our sources, and also quibble over them.

How shall we discuss it? Shall we select elements, such as economic and humanitarian, and then beat them to exhaustion in turn?

What we shall not do is make unsupported assertions. Or insist that, to quote point 13: Start referring to Marxism as being some kind of religious faith, Messianic, or whatever other spiritualist bullshit you can come up with. When people point out that you can draw similarities between virtually any political ideology and other religions, ignore them. Or use smilies. -_-

Until such a time as we have finished or, to prevent either side (well, given my record, mainly me) simply not replying in order to gain time, you shall not do an overtly anti-communist post. Continuing your posts against the current action regarding insurance is fine. Criticising the Democrats is fine. Doing an angry 20,000 word rant on communist infiltration, communist indoctrination and the international communist conspiracy sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids is not fine.

In return, I shall be a lot more restrained, and not get into arguments, on any topic, with anyone. This is, of course, a perfect moment to engage me in argument. I will remain actively commenting, though.

I set out the terms here, as opposed to privately, so that if you and I agree to them, then we have witnesses to our promises. A bit like a marriage ceremony, really.

I decline. I am not willing to debate a man who does not know how to debate on a topic with which he is unfamiliar. My offer was for a future time after you had corrected these shortcomings.

If the offer had been made in the language a mature man would make,  not the same old sneering smugness and accusatory tones, I might be willing to put some faith in your ability to conduct yourself honorably.

As it is, I will let the gauntlet lay as is, and accept the dishonor of refusing to meet you in the lists. I think my escutcheon can withstand the stain.

I was not doing overtly anticommunists posts because, frankly, I thought with the fall of the Soviet Union your heresy had lost so much prestige that it was no longer an issue.

Just one more idol that fought the Church and failed.

I met two people, a brother and a sister, who escaped from one of your Worker's paradises. They were Korean. In broken English, and with a look of disgust on his features, the brother explained how at the factory those who stood outside lounging got paid as much as those who worked hard all day, and so no one worked hard, or, if they could help it, at all. He could express, even in broken English, the concept so simple and so obvious that only an intellectual could fail to see it.

If you do not pay people for work, people will not work; and in order to make them work not for pay, you must taskmasters over them to drive them. They are slaves. Nothing could be more clear.

The sister mentioned that they had lost everything, their family and their home, when they fled.

That is what you are defending.

Those people were friends of mine. I knew them and worked with them. They were people whose lives were ruined because of an idea so stupid, and so obviously stupid, that no honest man can take it seriously for an instant.

Your idea.

You say that these events, the the astronomical number of innocent dead, and far more lives ruined, were killed not by your idea, by a transitional stage of communism which is not true communism: a perversion of your idea, which is wonderfulness incarnate.

To which I reply, in all courtesy and gentleness, that I do not give a tinker's damn for your distinction between 'true' (i.e. make-believe) implementation of your idea of communism and 'bad' ( i.e. real) implementation of your idea of communism.

My idea of limited government by free men does not require nor ask that tens of millions be sacrificed during the transition from an imperfect form to a perfect form. My idea does not expect nor promise perfection this side of heaven. All my idea says is that you are not a slave, which means, you own yourself, and you own the fruit of your own labor. All my idea says is that you should tell the truth, think logically, and not covet your neighbors' possessions, provided you are secure in yours.

If your happy-talk make-believe Alice-in-Wonderland idea of the Marxist dictatorship of the proletarian is supposed to usher in a worker's paradise, but if in fact all this Wonderland idea has done so far is pile up ruined lives and pyramids of skulls, what in the name of the Hell you serve makes you think that somehow, tomorrow, next year, or next century whatever the mysterious mistake is that keeps derailing the promised pie in the sky will not rear its head again?

Every Communism so far has turned into a slave labor camp and a death camp. No one on the Western side of the Berlin Wall was machine gunned down trying to climb away from the racist exploitation of the democracies into the glorious five-year planned prosperity and luxury behind the Iron Curtain.

No one from Florida risks his life on a raft with a child, and dies in the attempt to sneak the child into the Worker's Paradise of Cuba, there to get free health care.

No one. Not one. Nobody.

If all the Communism we have seen so far in history has been nothing but an empire of darkness and a vast wasteland of unconvincing lies, Newspeak, double-talk and doublethink, bloodshed, torture, lies, bloodshed, orchestrated famines, falsehoods, one-child policies, propaganda, bloodshed, secret police, political correctness, bloodshed, political polices, bloodshed, show trials, and blood, what in the Hell you serve makes you think that everything will be different once your version of the Big Brother is in charge?

For that matter, What in the Hell you serve makes you think anything at all will be different? Will human nature change? Will people work without pay and without taskmasters?

Why should you and yours be in charge of anything? I do not even trust you to hold  conversation honestly. Why should I and mines place life and labor and fortune and future in your hands?

You won't even admit that blood that is on them.

Read HUMAN ACTION von Mises. There is no argument I can make which he does not make with considerable more clarity and patience. Here is the link: http://mises.org/document/3250

If that is too technical for you, I can recommend a fairy story addressing the issue. http://orwell.ru/library/novels/Anima...

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Borrow Some Small Wonder: The Secret World of Arrietty

I do not have time to write a proper review of this wonderful movie, so let me just gush. Think of some of the better Disney movies you saw a a child, or some of the better Hayao Miyazaki films.  This is on par with that. I think every man should, upon reading these words, go get married, father a fourteen year old daughter, and take her to see this film. That is what I did. Okay, well I did not get married JUST for this film, but it made me glad I was a Dad. It is one of the few where the relationship between a stern and loving father and a willful yet obedient daughter is done right.

It is based on the book THE BORROWERS by Mary Norton (which I read as a child, but, alas, do not remember). The conceit is that some houses have little people living under the floor or in the walls who 'borrow' small items humans think we only misplaced. The charm of the original illustrations in the book are here given magic and glamor by exquisite execution: I watched in fascination scenes where the tiny Borrowers poured tea (made from a single leaf) from a toy teapot into doll house cups, and the artist remembered to scale up the water tension so that the water drops were as big as softballs to the little people, and flowed like magical pearls.

The typical Miyazaki care and detail lavished on every frame is here most evident. Miyazaki and company love drawing insects, crows and cats, particularly on a giant scale.

One scene showing the young Borrow girl Arrietty, climbing a vine. The art showed every vein on every leaf and the water droplets from a late rain sliding as the wind across the housetop blew. She turns and looks out upon the back yard, but instead of a back yard, it was as fabulous, seeing it through her eyes, as elfland.

It takes true magic to made stealing a lump of sugar and a single tissue into an adventure across the grand canyon like spaces of an enchanted giant's castle.

The plot is simple. A young man, resting up before an operation he fears he may not survive, spends his days while his uncaring parents are away in his mother's old house, under the care of a servant. His grandfather believed in the little people, and so does the young man. Meanwhile, Arrietty and her parents fear they may be the last Borrowers alive in the world, and the father strictly enjoins the daughter not to take foolish risks, neither to show herself to any humans — for if they are seen, even once, the Borrowers must abandoned their beloved home and flee.

And, of course, when the young human sees Arrietty on her first mission out into the vastness of the human house …

I don't think it ruins any surprise to reveal that both the young Borrower and the young human are curious about the other, and want to befriend each other, but their two worlds want to separate them. This is not a film about action and plot twists. The scenes unfold slowly and deliberately.

I will mention Spiller, who is an 'outside' Borrower, who lives not in a human house, but in the wild, as even though he has less than half a dozen lines, comes across as noble and romantic a figure as Ashitaka from Princess Mononoke (who, come to think of it, he dressed somewhat like.)

The English dub was done with Disney's characteristic attention to detail as their other Miyazaki dubs, with professional voice actors whose performances blend smoothly into the animated expressions and lip movements. There were certain places I suspect Disney put in dialog where I thought a more Japanese moment of silence would have been better.

See this movie in the theater. Bring your family. Buy popcorn. Let us by all means reward Hollywood with our entertainment dollars when they do something right.

My only complaint is an absurdly small one. I like the title THE BORROWERS. The title in Japanese is 'The Borrower Arrietty'. The decision to change this to 'The Secret World of Arrietty' strikes me as being a little tin-eared.

I will not provide a link to the trailer, which I think spoils all the surprises in the film in a ham-handed way. But I will insert some stills.

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Jennifer Fulwiler: HOW I BECAME PROLIFE

I can no longer find a copy of this fine essay by Jennifer Fulwiler available on the web. At the risk of offending the author, I repost the entirety here, unedited, in order that the testimony be preserved. I will remove it upon her request.

Please note the paragraphs where Mrs Fulwiler explains that in her entire upbringing, the relationship between sex (coitus) and sex (reproduction) was never mentioned, not once. Readers of mine will recall that my encounter with a friend of mine, a Christian, who described sexual relations as nothing other than a pleasant sport or pasttime suffered from the same stupid deception, and it was this that first convinced me contraception was wrong. Absent contraception, the false-to-facts myth claiming sex was not sex could not be maintained.

Here is the essay:

How I became pro-life
Who is human?

Back in college I remember reading about how in certain societies throughout history (I believe in this case it was the Greeks) it was common for parents to abandon unwanted newborns, leaving them somewhere to die. It was so deeply troubling to me, and I could never figure out what was going on there: how on earth could this have happened?! I mean, I knew lots of people, and nobody I knew would do that! In fact, in our society you only hear about it in rare cases of people who are obviously mentally disturbed. How could something so obviously evil, so unthinkably horrific be common among entire societies?

Because of my deep distress at hearing of things like this, I found it really irritating when pro-lifers would refer to abortion as "killing babies." Obviously, nobody around here is in favor of killing babies – and to imply that those of us who were pro-choice would advocate for that was an insult to the babies throughout history who actually were killed by their insane societies. We weren't in favor of killing anything. We simply felt like women had the right to stop the growth process of a fetus if she faced an unwanted pregnancy. It was unfortunate, yes, because fetuses had potential to be babies one day. But that was a sacrifice that had to be made in the name of not making women slaves to the trauma of unwanted pregnancies.

I continued to be vehemently pro-choice after college, and though my views became more moderate once I had a child of my own, I was still pro-choice. But as my husband and I were in the process of exploring Christianity, we couldn't help but be exposed to pro-life thought more often than we used to be, and we were put on the defensive about our views. I remember one day when my husband was in the middle of reconsidering his own pro-choice ideas, he made a passing remark that stuck with me ever since:

"It just occurred to me that being pro-life is being pro-other people's-life," he quipped. "Everyone is pro-their own-life."

It made me realize that my pro-choice viewpoints were putting me in the position of deciding who was and was not human, and whose lives were worth living. I (along with doctors, the government, or other abortion advocates) decided where to draw this very important line. When I would come across Catholic blogs or books where they said something like "life begins at conception," I would scoff at the silliness of that notion as was my habit…yet I found myself increasingly uncomfortable with my defense:

"A few cells is obviously not a baby or even a human life!" I would say to myself. "Fetuses eventually become full-fledged humans, but not until, umm, like six months gestation or something. Or maybe five months? When is it that they can kick their legs and stuff?…Eight weeks? No, they're not human then, those must be involuntary spasms…"

I was putting the burden of proof on the fetuses to demonstrate to me that they were human. And I was a tough judge. I found myself looking the other way when I heard that 3D ultrasounds showed "fetuses" touching their faces, smiling and opening their eyes at ages at which I still considered abortion OK. I didn't have any interest in reading the headlines at Lifesite. Babies — I mean, fetuses — seen yawning at 12 weeks gestation? Involuntary spasm. As modern technology helped fetuses offer me more and more evidence that they were humans too, I would simply move the bar of what I considered human.

I realized that my definition of how and when a fetus became a "baby" or a "person," when he or she began to have rights, also depended on his or her level of health: the length of time in which I considered it OK to terminate a pregnancy lengthened as the severity of disability increased. Under the premise of wanting to spare the potential child from suffering, I was basically saying that disabled fetuses were less human, had fewer rights, than able-bodied ones. It didn't sit well.

The whole thing started to get under my skin. At some point I started to feel like I was more determined to be pro-choice than I was to honestly analyze who was and was not human. I started to see it in others in the pro-choice community as well. On more than one occasion I was stunned to the point of feeling physically ill upon reading of what otherwise nice, reasonable people in the pro-abortion camp would advocate for.

In reading through the Supreme Court case of Stenberg v. Carhart, I read that Dr. Leroy Carhart, an abortion advocate who actually performs the procedures, described some second-trimester abortions by saying, "[W]hen you pull out a piece of the fetus, let's say, an arm or a leg and remove that, at the time just prior to removal of the portion of the fetus…the fetus [is] alive." He said that he has observed fetal heartbeat via ultrasound with "extensive parts of the fetus removed." The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which presumably consists of well-educated, reasonable, intelligent men and women, opposed this procedure. Not for the reasons I thought — because it was plainly obvious that this was infanticide in its most grisly form — but because dismembered babies inconvenienced their mothers, and it was better to kill them outside the womb in a procedure they refer to as "D&X". In the College's words in its amici brief:

D&X presents a variety of potential safety advantages over other abortion procedures used during the same gestational period. Compared to D&E's involving dismemberment, D&X involves less risk of uterine perforation or cervical laceration because it requires the physician to make fewer passes into the uterus with sharp instruments and reduces the presence of sharp fetal bone fragments that can injure the uterus and cervix.

There is also considerable evidence that D&X reduces the risk of retained fetal tissue, a serious abortion complication that can cause maternal death, and that D&X reduces the incidence of a 'free floating' fetal head that can be difficult for a physician to grasp and remove and can thus cause maternal injury.

I read the Court documents from Stenberg v. Carhart in a state of shock. A few years ago a friend of mine had her baby very prematurely, and I had visited him in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. He was so beautiful, just like the full-term newborns I'd seen, only a little smaller. Seeing him and the other babies lying there so peacefully in their incubators (some of them with cute little notes written on their incubator tags like "Aiden — mommy's big boy!"), I was overwhelmed with feelings of wanting to protect these precious, innocent little babies. I was thrilled to hear the my friend's son and all the other preemies who were in the NICU at that time did survive and go home with their parents. So I found myself in a state of cold shock and disbelief that I was reading of people — not just fringe crazies, but the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and some Supreme Court Justices — casually speak about the inconvenience of the skulls and bone fragments of dismembered babies ("fetuses") the same age as those babies in the NICU. The horrors continued when I read Gonzales v. Carhart [some excerpts here...warning: no photos, but the descriptions are extremely disturbing].

It took my breath away to witness the level of evil that normal people can fall into supporting. They were talking about infanticide, but completely refused to label it as such. It was when I considered that these were educated, reasonable professionals who were probably not bad people that I realized that evil always works through lies. I also took a mental step back from the entire pro-choice movement. If this is what it meant to be "pro-choice," I was not pro-choice.

Yet I still couldn't quite bring myself to label myself pro-life.

I started to recognize that I was no better than Dr. Carhart or the concurring Justices or the author of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists' brief, that I too had probably told myself lies in order to maintain my support for abortion. Yet there was something deep down inside, some tremendous pressure that kept me from truly, objectively looking at what was going on here. There was something within me that screamed that to not allow women to have abortions at least in the first trimester would be unfair in the most dire sense of the word. Even as I became more religious, I mentally pushed aside thoughts that all humans might have God-given eternal souls worthy of dignity and respect, because it got too tricky to figure out when we receive those souls, the most obvious answer being "at conception" as opposed to at some arbitrary point during gestation.

It wasn't until I re-evaluated the societal views of sex that had permeated the consciousness of my peer group, took a new look at the modern assumptions about the act that creates those fetuses in the first place, that I was able to let go of that internal pressure I felt, and to take an unflinching look at my views on abortion.

The contraceptive mentality

Here are four key memories that give a glimpse into how my understanding of sex was formed:

When I was a kid, I didn't have any friends who had baby brothers or sisters in their households. One friend's mom was pregnant when we were twelve, but I moved before the baby was born. To the extent that I ever heard any of our parents talk about pregnancy and babies, it was to say that they were happy that they were "done," the impression being that they could finally start living now that that pregnancy/baby unpleasantness was over.
In sex ed class we learned not that sex creates babies, but that unprotected sex creates babies. After we were done putting condoms on bananas, our teacher counseled us that we should carefully decide when we might be ready to have sex based on important concerns like whether or not we were in committed relationships, whether or not we had access to contraception, how our girlfriends or boyfriends treated us, whether we wanted to wait until marriage, etc. I do not recall hearing readiness to have a baby being part of a single discussion about deciding when to have sex, whether it was from teachers or parents or society in general. Not once.
On multiple occasions when I was a young teen I recall hearing girls make the comment that they would readily risk dangerous back-alley abortions or even consider suicide if they were to face unplanned pregnancies and abortion wasn't legal. Though I was not sexually active, it sounded perfectly reasonable to me — that is how much we desired not to have babies before we were ready. Yet the concept of just not having sex if we weren't ready to have babies was never discussed. It's not that we had considered the idea and rejected it; it simply never occurred to us.
Even recently, before our marriage was validated in the Catholic Church my husband and I had to take a course about building good marriages. It was a video series by a nondenominational Christian group, and in the segment called "Good Sex" they did not mention children or babies once. In all the talk about bonding and back rubs and intimacy and staying in shape, the closest they came to connecting sex to the creation of life was to briefly say that couples should discuss the topic of contraception.

Sex could not have been more disconnected from the concept of creating life.

The message I'd heard loud and clear was that the purpose of sex was for pleasure and bonding, that its potential for creating life was purely tangential, almost to the point of being forgotten about altogether. This mindset laid the foundation of my views on abortion. Because I saw sex as being closed to the possibility to life by default, I thought of pregnancies that weren't planned as akin to being struck by lightning while walking down the street — something totally unpredictable, undeserved, that happened to people living normal lives.

Being pro-choice for me (and I'd imagine with many others) was actually motivated out of love and caring: I just didn't want women to have to suffer, to have to devalue themselves by dealing with unwanted pregnancies. Because it was an inherent part of my worldview that everyone except people with "hang-ups" eventually has sex and sex is, under normal circumstances, only about the relationship between the two people involved, I got lured into one of the oldest, biggest, most tempting lies in human history: to dehumanize the enemy. Babies had become the enemy because of their tendencies to pop up and ruin everything; and just as societies are tempted to dehumanize the fellow human beings who are on the other side of the lines in wartime, so had I, and we as a society, dehumanized the enemy of sex.

It was when I was reading up on the Catholic Church's view of sex, marriage and contraception that everything changed.

I'd always thought that those archaic teachings about not using contraception were because the Church wanted to oppress people by telling them to have as many kids as possible, or something like that. What I found, however, was that their views expressed a fundamentally different understanding of what sex is, and once I heard it I never saw the world the same way again. The way I'd always seen it, the standard position was that babies were a horrible burden, except for a couple times in life when everything is perfect enough that a couple might temporarily see new life as a good thing; the Catholic view is that the standard position is that babies are a blessing and a good thing, and while it's fine to attempt to avoid pregnancy for serious reasons, if we go so far as to adopt a "contraceptive mentality," feeling entitled to the pleasure of sex while loathing (and perhaps trying to forget all about) its life-giving properties, we not only disrespect this most sacred of acts, but we begin to see new life as the enemy.

To use a rough analogy, the Catholic Church was saying that loaded guns are not toys, that while they can perhaps be used for certain recreational activities, they are always to be handled with grave respect; my viewpoint, coming from contraceptive culture, was that it's fine to use loaded guns as toys as long as you put blanks in the chamber. Thinking of that analogy, expecting to be able to use something with incredible power nonchalantly, as a toy, I could see how that worldview had set us up for disaster.

I came to see that our culture's widespread use and acceptance of contraception had led to the "contraceptive mentality" toward sex being the default position. As a society, we'd come to take it for granted that we're entitled to the pleasurable and bonding aspects of sex even when we're in a state of being vehemently opposed to the new life it might produce. The option of abstaining from the act that creates babies if we're in a state of seeing babies as a huge burden had been removed from our cultural lexicon: even if it would be a huge crisis to get pregnant, we have a right to go ahead and have sex anyway. If this were true, if it was indeed a fact that it was morally OK for people to have sex even when they believed that a new baby could ruin their lives, in my mind, then, abortion had to be OK.

I realize that ideally I would have taken an objective look at when human life begins and based my views on that alone…but the lie was just too tempting. I didn't want to hear too much about heartbeats or souls or brain activity…terminating pregnancies just had to be OK, because carrying a baby to term and becoming a parent is a huge deal…and society had made it very clear that sex is not a huge deal. As long as I accepted that for people to engage in sex in a contraceptive mentality was morally OK, I could not bring myself to even consider that abortion might not be OK. It just seemed too inhumane to make women deal with life-altering consequences for an act that was not supposed to have life-altering consequences.

So this idea that we are always to treat the sexual act with awe and respect, so much so that we should simply abstain if we're vehemently opposed to its life-giving potential, was a totally new and different message. For me, being able to honestly consider when life begins, opening my heart and my mind to the wonder and dignity of even the tiniest of my fellow human beings, was not fully possible until I understood the nature of the act that creates these little lives in the first place.

The great temptation

All of these thoughts had been percolating in my brain for a while, and I found myself increasingly in agreement with pro-life positions. Then one night I was reading something, and a thought occurred to me, and from that moment on I was officially, unapologetically PRO-LIFE. I was reading yet another account of the Greek societies in which newborn babies were abandoned to die, wondering to myself how normal people could possibly do something like that. I felt a chill rush through my body as I thought:

I know how they did it.

I realized in that moment that perfectly good, well-meaning people — people like me — can support very evil things through the power of lies. From my own experience, I knew how the Greeks, the Romans, and people in every other society could put themselves into a mental state that they could leave a newborn child to die: the very real pressures of life — "we can't afford another baby," "we can't have any more girls," "he wouldn't have had a good life" — left them susceptible to that oldest of temptations: to dehumanize other human beings. Though the circumstances were different, it was the same process that had happened with me, that happened with the concurring Supreme Court Justices in Stenberg v. Carhart, with the abortion doctors, the entire pro-choice movement, and anyone else who's ever been tempted to dehumanize inconvenient people.

I bet that as those Greek parents handed over their infants for someone to take away, they remarked on how very unlike their other children these little creatures were: they can't talk, the can't sit up, and surely those little yawns and smiles are just involuntary reactions. I bet you anything they referred to these babies with different words than they used to refer to the children they kept. Maybe they called them "fetuses."

 

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

A Miracle from the Bishops, and Gibberish from the Machine

From  https://www.stophhs.com/stop_hhs_mandate/breaking-every-single-bishop-has-condemned-the-obamahhs-mandate/

Every single Roman Catholic bishop in the United States has condemned in public the Obamacare HHS mandate — all 180 bishops who lead dioceses in the U.S. have spoken.

My comment: I am astounded. I have never known all the Bishops in America to agree on anything. Nothing other than the most brazen attack on the Church would provoke such a response.

And the Dem political machine has issued its talking points, and decided on their plan of counter-attack, which is the same weapon they always use, because they only have one arrow in their quiver, and one weapon in their arsenal. Argumentum ad Hominem.

They are going to call into question the motives of the Bishops, either by saying that this is motivated by the Catholic Church's love of the Republican Party (I will pause for you to clean the coffee off your monitor left by the Danny Thomas spit-take you no doubt just performed) or by saying this is due to the Catholic Bishops hatred for Obama or for Obamacare. As far as I remember the last election results, Obama was elected by the Catholic swing vote. The Bishops have been in favor of universal health care since roughly 1911.

The Dems have decided to frame this debate in terms of the brave resistance of the bold rebellion of the weak and small Federal government protecting the cringing and scattered womanhood from the ruthless oppression of the jackbooted Catholic Bishops astride a world-trampling Leviathan raiding their homes and bedrooms to rob them of the condoms, pills, and diaphragms on whom their sacred honor, their equality with men, and their very lives depend.

I just heard Lanny Davis, Clinton-era apologist and professional defender of the indefensible, crowing that he welcomes making a campaign issue out of this question, since the alleged compromise with the anti-Church and the anti-Constitution mandate has now altered the terms of the debate. The Administration's attack on the Free Exercise of Religion has been magically transformed by Liberal Fairy Dust and Happy Thoughts into the Bishops' Attack on Womanhood and Everything Good and Nice in the Universe.

If the public can be fooled by such a transparent eructation of jabberwocky nonsense-talk as this, we should all forswear our faith in representative government forever on the grounds that we the people are just too stupid and silly to rule our own affairs, and become a Monarchist or an Imperialist. Long live the Queen! Vive l'Empereur!

I jest, but it is a bitter jest, because if the people do prove too stupid or silly to govern themselves, they will elect a Napoleon, or give bit by bit Napoleonic powers to the office once held by Washington.

History is just, therefore the people get the type of government they deserve. Let us pray that God is merciful, and save us from the justice of history.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Lord, Hear Our Prayer

Regarding the brazen attack on the religious freedom of all Catholics, and, indeed, of all Americans of any faith, including the freedom of atheists to be left alone (for is not the worship of secular idols just as insulting to you, my atheist friends, who despise worship, as it is to us, who despise idols?), and following by the insulting so-called accommodation proffered by an unrepentant administration, Fr. Frank Pavone and Priests for Life have asked us to pray. Here is a link to the page on his website.  Here is the text (copy-and-pasted) from the aforementioned site:

Lord God,

You are the Author of Life and Freedom.

In your Spirit, we have the freedom of the children of God,

And in your Name, we promote the freedom of all

To seek, embrace, and live the truth of your Word.

In that freedom, Lord, we your people stand with Life

And reject whatever destroys life

Or distorts the meaning of human sexuality.

In that freedom, Lord, we your people live our lives

In a way that advances your Kingdom of Life,

And we refuse to cooperate in what is evil.

At this moment, therefore, when our government has decided

To force us to cooperate in evil,

We pray for the grace to be faithful to you

And to oppose the unjust laws and mandates

That have been imposed upon us and our institutions.

We pray for the conversion of those in civil authority

Who fail to appreciate the demands of conscience.

We pray for the complete reversal of all policies

That permit the destruction of life

Or coerce the cooperation of your people

In practices that are wrong.

Bring us to a Culture of Life.

We pray through Christ our Lord. Amen.

My comment: I really should post something about some interesting topic, like why Jack Vance is a finer SF author than Isaac Asimov, but the events of the day continue to draw my attention away from farthest stars and furthest futures to those quotidian matters.

The war against Tash and Sauron the Great and the Dark Eldil, or whatever name he is calling himself these days, in one sense is the central drama of all history: it is the very Ragnarok, the wars fought on the plains of Armageddon.

Here on earth we face his human puppets, who know not whom they serve or why, and it is like debating drunks, because sin darkens the mind and corrodes the soul, so that even matters of plain common sense are closed to them. The victims of vampire bites and lycanthropy are not less worthy of pity, since the soldiery of darkness cannot see the darkness for which they fight, nor see what the result will be.

The elfin lure of Utopia always draws them along and along, visions of sex without babies, food without fatness, willpower without any restraint in morals or logic. It is the Big Rock Candy Mountain, where neither the laws of cause and effect, nor the laws of economics, nor the laws of our forefathers have power any more, but only the omnipotent Leader on Earth, whose benevolence is superhuman.

An idea that stupid, an idol that fails and fails and slays its worshipers like Juggernaut, a mere daydream born of envy and arrogance with no logic to it at all is the lodestone that controls the souls of the modern mind: and yet they dare to call themselves the reality-based community.

It is an idea older than Marx, older than George Bernard Shaw, older than all those quaint and antique progressives of the Victorian Age and their little Darwinian excuses for eugenics and race-hatred. This musty old idea they dare call modern and up to date. Eternal truths the darlings of intellectual fashion dismiss as too 'last season.'

Such be those arrayed against us. Yet God is for us.

In another sense this war is nothing, it is the vanity of evil, the presumption of lingering patch of dawn twilight against the rising of the sun, the vainglory of a void to be filled by an infinite sea.

We know the end of the tale, beloved sons and daughters of God. Python is slain by Apollo; Typhon by Jove; Tiamat by Marduk; Leviathan by Jehovah; and best of all, the slender heel of our mild queen and virgin shall crush the head of the lying snake who deceived all the poor children of Eve.

We shall prevail in this and in all wars, no matter how many battles we lose.

For this battle, comrades, we need not arms, which are weak things and toys, but prayers, which are the weapons of the angels, thrones, powers, and principalities of deepest heaven.

 

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.