John C. Wright's Blog, page 14
July 30, 2015
Reviewer Praise for TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN
A rather nice review:
http://carlos-carrasco.livejournal.com/1348.html
If you have never understood the attraction that science fiction has for so many of us, Mr. Wright’s essays might just explain it to you. If you are already a fan, you will love his analysis of the genre, its voices and various visions for various tomorrows. While it was pretty heady in places, the writing was never dense and certainly never dull.
Quite the contrary, it was laugh-out-loud funny in many places. My favorite case in point would be the essay, “The Desolation of Tolkien.” It is Mr. Wright’s eviscerating critique of the second Hobbit movie and in reading it I finally found the peace which that cinematic act of vandalism robbed from me. I laughed so hard reading his review of the film that every shadow that movie had darkened my soul with was exorcised from me forever.
[…]
Mr. Wright gives us an Eagles of Manwe-eye view of the battlefield and the forces arrayed on it, his descriptions delivered through the delightfully adroit juggling of Snow White and Aristotle, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Gender Theory, transhumanism, the Gnosticism of Arthur C Clarke, the hedonism and patriotism of Robert Heinlein, the historicism of Isaac Asimov, Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, this-ism and that-ism and the glorious Catholicism which answers them all.
Mr. Wright’s love of the genre is evident on every page of the book and you might just find it to be contagious.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Conspiracy or Code of Conduct?
One of the arguments against the Anthropogenic Global Falsehood Theory is that so many scientists cannot be cooperating in maintaining a falsehood because such a conspiracy could not be maintained secretly.
I propose a simple rebuttal: the thing is not a conspiracy. It is a code of conduct that springs out of the worldview called Political Correctness.
When a large group of people take it as a maxim of their code of conduct that believing what is politically useful rather than what is true, it is not a secret that they do not believe nor say the truth. This is not a conspiracy except in the sense that Taoism or Monarchism is a conspiracy.
It is a shared worldview. Political Correctness differs from other shared worldviews in that it is, at its core, at its root, utterly dishonest. Political Correctness is the attempt to think whatever is approved thought, and not to think the truth. Whether it counts as lying when you yourself pretend you believe the lie with all your might is an interesting question for a psychopathologist. From a practical point of view, it is a lie.
So if everyone in the worldview lies, and lies in the same way about the same topics, this is not a conspiracy. It is not secret. Everyone outside the cult (who cares to look) knows political correctness is a lie.
It is a lie about … everything.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
July 29, 2015
My Experience with Global Warming
I received this letter from a reader. It contains the clearest reasons for skepticism about the Global Warming Hoax as anyone could wish. He asked me not to print his name.
Please note that his request for anonymity is perfectly reasonable, given the climate of the time in which we live. I add this as one more evidence that my skepticism is reasonable. When one has the truth on one’s side, mob tactics are not needed.
Mr. Wright,
Years ago in college I would say I was not a leftist, but I did buy into the global warming nonsense because of an appeal to authority. I took a class in Oceanography and the professor was adamant about it. I knew I was ignorant and unstudied in the subject so I gave him the benefit of my trust.
Months later I got in an argument with a roommate, drinking beer and doing homework, where I took the positive and he the negative; he accused the UN climate panel and the entire mainstream scientific establishment of being corrupt. Politicians using it to gain power, and unscrupulous scientists using it to get a paycheck. My mind rejected it as being such an absurd collaboration worthy of the title conspiracy, and I rebutted with the maxim about the only way to keep a secret between two people.
That very month the University of East Anglia emails broke. I was utterly wrong, he right.
The BBC did a pretty good expose of it I watched as it came out. I had since gone to great efforts to find copies of it posted online but they were all removed due to “copyright” reasons and the BBC scrubbed all references, even the title and author of the documentary from their site. I don’t have access to research databases but it wouldn’t have surprised me if they scrubbed it from there too. Down the memory hole.
I have a close friend who is a historian, and he has hard copies of pro-communist issues of major American newspapers which when you go to them in a digital format those dates (from the 1940s to 1960s) are mysteriously missing.
The book Nineteen Eighty Four was influential for me and it amazed me later I wasn’t able to find aforementioned documentary. As I get older more of Nineteen Eighty Four is coming true. The city is installing cameras at every intersection and you can’t get away from telescreens even at gas stations now. The world wide web has turned into an all seeing eye. Even this email will be read and archived for government purposes.
In any case here is just another bit of data compiled this month I saw on a forum I lurk showing explicitly where NOAA “adjusted” their data to show the hottest month on record. http://www.survivalistboards.com/showthread.php?t=400800
Thanks for your website. I find it very good. Your post brought up this memory and I would like to thank you and share my experience.
Sincerely, [Name withheld by request]
P.S. I later found out it was common knowledge at the university that specific professor had a habit of plagiarizing and stealing research from other professors and many would not work with him, and much of his research was funded by NOAA who had been implicated in fabricating data for political ends.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
July 28, 2015
A Question about the Global Warming Hoax
Read it and weep:
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/07/27/mind-blowing-temperature-fraud-at-noaa/
The measured US temperature data from USHCN shows that the US is on a long-term cooling trend. But the reported temperatures from NOAA show a strong warming trend.
Measured : ushcn.tavg.latest.raw.tar.gz
Reported : ushcn.tavg.latest.FLs.52j.tar.gz
They accomplish this through a spectacular hockey stick of data tampering, which corrupts the US temperature trend by almost two degrees.
The biggest component of this fraud is making up data. Almost half of all reported US temperature data is now fake. They fill in missing rural data with urban data to create the appearance of non-existent US warming.
Voila: Global Warming is make-believe science based on make-believe data.
The hoax was clear from the beginning for those with eyes to see when the same parties, in one case the same man, called for curtailing fossil fuels and modern industrial technology, bigger government and global government, in order to stop Global Cooling in the 1970s. “Opposite problem, same solution” is not the slogan of sanity.
The hoax was clear from the beginning for those with eyes to see because no one spoke in public about technical solutions to the problem. To raise the albedo of the Earth, for example, and ensure more solar radiation was reflected into space hence lowering Earth’s average temperature, cutting down the Amazon jungle would be the optimal solution. Anyone actually interested in lower the global heat would be actually discussion how actually to do it. They were not.
The hoax was clear from the beginning for those with eyes to see because of the hysteria surrounding it. It was a scare, a panic, and there was no more evidence for it than the DDT scare, the ALAR scare, the radon scare, the mercury in the fish scare, the acid rain scare, the hole in the ozone layer scare, the power cables causing cancer scare, mobile phone towers causing cancer scare, the chloroflourocarbines scare, the overpopulation scare, the salmonella scare, the Mad Cow disease scare, and so on. Have you ever heard even one retraction or apology for any of these false alarms, even long after the fraud was exposed? Is DDT available even thought Rachel Carson’s mass-murdering fraud is well known to have been scientifically absurd?
The hoax was exposed (even to those without eyes to see) when Phil Jones, of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, to reveal the raw data the CRU had used for its forecast models with these words: “Why should I share this data with you, when your goal is to find something wrong with it?”
And he destroyed the data when it was subpoenaed, rather than turn it over.
That is not the way scientists talk. That is not the way scientists act. That is the way propagandists talk and act. Activists. Advocates. Ad-men. Hoaxsters. Scam Artists. Liars.
The hoax was exposed when the ‘hide the decline’ emails from East Anglia University went public in 2009.
How is it possible any sane man is still taking global warming seriously in 2015, years later?
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
July 23, 2015
Theist v Atheist
I have been exploring some argument for and against theism and atheism in my biweekly columns at EveryJoe. Unfortunately, the constraints of time and patience do not allow me to state each argument at length, and so, as a gift to my readers, I here publish some of the discussion that did not see print. Make of it what you will.
The strongest argument in favor of one model over another is how much it explained, how clearly, without recourse to special pleading, lapses in logic, or ad hoc. I propose that while the Christian religion contains mysteries certain to daze even the most patient of theologians, it is nonetheless the more robust, on the grounds that it requires fewer assumptions and leaves far less unexplained. For the atheist, nearly everything his worldview seeks to explain is left unexplained, marked off with a mere somehow.
While it is possible (in that it is not a logical self contradiction) that we live in a universe where irrational and non-deliberate chemical and evolutionary processes gave rise to creatures like ourselves capable of reason and deliberation, and that our reason somehow is able to deduce and predict correctly some of the processes of that material universe as well as the imponderable truths of logic, aesthetics, law and ethics, which just so happen somehow to apply to and work inside the material universe as well, it requires a leap of faith to believe that this is the case here in the real universe in which we actually live.
Where is the proof that the real universe behaves in this way?
Where is even a single example?
We have never seen any irrational process lead to a rational result, nor any non deliberate process give rise to a deliberate conclusion, and so our assumption that this somehow happened in the past rests on no evidence, and involves a seeming paradox of something arising from nothing, the paradox of beauty coming from randomness, of ethics springing from remorseless Darwinian struggles to survive, of logic and science arising from unintentional by products of brain chemistry.
And somehow, nearly every human being who has ever lived has had a joy for music and a fear of ghosts, two things which Darwinian selection could not possibly select into existence.
What natural process made it so that natural processes derive order out of chaos without any intention of creating order is also an unanswered somehow.
You see, even if it were true that Darwinian evolution creates order out of disorder (it is not), the question of how Darwinian evolution came to have this property, who or what makes evolution be something that creates order out of disorder, is not answered by the atheist worldview. The atheist must either dismiss the question as unanswerable because it is beyond human knowledge, or must dismiss the question as unanswerable because it is incoherent conceptually, that is, not a real question (like asking how far up is ‘up’?). That dismissal is yet another somehow, a thing the model does not explain.
It would not be an act of faith for any atheist who had seen an irrational primate evolve into a man to believe that order can arise from disorder. Indeed, even seeing a designed system like a computer be engineered into having self awareness and a moral sense would affirm that the hypothesis of order from chaos were reasonable because he would have some reason to believe it were possible. None have ever seen such a thing. As it is, the atheist walks by faith, not by sight.
The assumption that human reason comes from a rational creature, a rational divine creature with a mind, who designed us deliberately to be rational like himself is a less paradoxical assumption, and does not contain the dubious somehows mentioned above. God himself is dubious, the king of somehow, but the explanation of how and why these other things arose becomes coherent granting this doubtful assumption.
And, indeed, the incomprehensible axiom in the theist model concerns a being alleged to be incomprehensible, which is an assumption less vulnerable to skeptical question than the atheist model.
The atheist model requires the assumption that fundamental things we know about human and animal nature, such as that we have free will where animals do not, are merely gross illusions, bewilderingly universe. It is the greater coherency of the theorem which makes it the more reasonable of the two.
Let us turn to specific arguments to show this greater coherency.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
July 22, 2015
Murder Incorporated Denies Wrongdoing
On the radio, one of the top-of-the-hour news blurbs was that Planned Parenthood dismissed all allegations from an unnamed video as being fraudulent, an attempt to scare women and hinder their reproductive rights.
Nothing more was said. That was given as straight news, as if it were a newsworthy item. There was no context, no explanation, and the other side of the story was simply “pretended”out of existence.
The unnamed video, of course was the one where a top officer for Planned Parenthood (as Murder Incorporated is called on the cubicular bizzaro world, where all things are backward) was dickering for money over how much for each organ harvested from late term abortions. She described how the forceps would grasp the dismembered baby body in the proper spot, so as to not damage the expensive kidneys, lungs, or other juicy bits that bring a fine price on the medical meat market.
It is on tape, the person is speaking, you can watch it for yourself. That is what the news reported Planned Parenthood airily dismissed and denied, without bothering even to say what was being denied.
I used to work in the newspaper business. This was not how news is reported. Newsmen do not simply read the press releases of their advertisers. Even the slimiest Madison Avenue ad-man does not try to deceive the viewer into thinking he is not seeing an ad. Even the slimiest would not package their propaganda as news.
I was more revolted than I can put into words, especially when I think of the effort honesty newsmen expend finding the real story and printing the truth, or at least telling both sides. This is antinews, the thing that destroys news.
Exasperated by the sheer juvenile dishonesty of this, as a public service, I here reprint a list of the 41 companies that have directly funded Planned Parenthood.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
It is Done! Hugo Voted!
I sat down and cast my Hugo ballots tonight, just an hour ago, online. Naturally, I voted for myself wherever possible.
Sorry, Col Kratman, but I thought you were not interested in the award anyway.
And I voted for my editor Vox Day, who as far as I am concerned, is the best editor I have ever worked with. Although my several other editors, including George RR Martin (who has forgotten he and I worked together to our mutual satisfaction) were kind enough, and professional and thorough, and I am grateful to them, none of the others made specific suggestions that specifically improved my work, or discussed my works with me, other than the very minimum.
With Larry Correia off the list, I voted for Jim Butcher’s SKIN GAME in the number one spot for best novel.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
July 20, 2015
From the Pen of Larry Correia
A public service announcement (http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/07/20/sad-puppies-update-dont-forget-to-vote/)
For once I agree with GRRM. Everybody should vote. The deadline is coming up fast.
Since we wrote a novella worth of giant blog posts back and forth, GRRM knows damned good and well the Sad Puppies campaign wasn’t motivated by racism or sexism, but that doesn’t stop him from casually tossing the “neo-nazi” accusation out there… but you should believe him when he says there was like totally never any political bias in the system.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
July 17, 2015
Great Books and Genre Books
Below is a reprint of several columns first printed in this space in 2007, with minor changed.
As much as it pains me to say it, my reluctant conclusion is that there is no great Science Fiction literature.
Now, before you get out your crying bags, fanboys, keep in mind that the standard for being a Great Book is extremely, absurdly high. It is the best of the best of the best. There is no Western that makes the cut for being a Great Book; no mystery novel; no horror novel (unless we stretch a point to include HAMLET, because it has a ghost scene). One might even argue that no romance novel that makes the cut, not even GONE WITH THE WIND, and that is a damn fine novel. Genre writing does not reach the stratospheric heights of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe.
Still, it does not sit well. Let us look further, to see if this unpleasant conclusion can be defended, or if there is some exception or escape from it. For this let us break the question into parts.
First, what makes a Great Book great?
Second, what makes a Great Idea?
Third, what makes Great Literature Great?
Finally, what makes Good Science Fiction Good?
This final question is of most interest to me (as one might expect, being a science fiction writer) so it also needs to be broken down further:
What is Science Fiction?
How does Science Fiction differ from Great Literature?
Does Science Fiction have a universal, timeless, eternal appeal?
Is the Best SF good enough to be Great?
Let us examine each of these questions in order.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
July 14, 2015
Wright on Brainstorm
Announcement:
Please register for Brainstorm with John C. Wright on Jul 16, 2015 from 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM EDT at:
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5586859741601403906
This is an Open Brainstorm session with 5x Hugo nominee John C. Wright
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.
The event can host to 500 people; there are already 60 people registered.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
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