John C. Wright's Blog, page 151
October 17, 2011
COUNT TO A JULIAN by John C Wilson — Wait. Who?
Someone tell Barnes & Noble that they have the wrong review posted on their site for my book:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/count-to-a-trillion-john-c-wright/1103614708Let’s read:
Decades after the world has descended into anarchy,
Menelaus Montrose dreams of making it better. He jumps at the chance to
escape backward Texas, now an independent country, to participate in a
daring expedition to recover antimatter from an alien relic in a nearby
stellar system. Montrose’s misguided self-experimentation leaves him
comatose for years; when he regains consciousness, he learns his
surviving crewmates have used the antimatter to conquer and reshape
Earth. They have also left the planet obligated to the alien hierarchy
responsible for the antimatter’s creation.
Er… none of that is exactly accurate. It sounds like someone read the
dustjacket rather than the book, and got little details wrong. Let us
read on!
Read more
Wright's Writing Corner: Naming Names
Today’s post is a guest blog on how to name characters by Danielle Ackley-McPhail.
Living your Life the Way You Choose
I was reading this article http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2011/10/the-political-battlefield-of-military-science-fiction/ by Jason Sanford, and was thunderstruck by this paragraph:
Toward the end of World War II, Robert Heinlein wrote a letter to well-known SF fan Forrest Ackerman,
whose brother had recently been killed in battle. In the letter
Heinlein, who had served in the U.S. Navy, explicitly condemned the many
SF fans who considered themselves superior to ordinary people yet
hadn’t lifted a finger to help win the war. In Heinlein’s words, these
fans were “neurotic, selfish, (and) childish” individuals who needed to
tackle “the problems of the real world.”However, if these fans had written their own letter to Ackerman I
have no doubt they would have defended their lives and choices in
equally blunt terms (after all, there are very few SF fans who aren’t
opinionated about life and politics).While Heinlein wrote from a military point of view about his desire
for self-sacrifice and a sense of duty, these fans would probably have
replied that they supported their country by making their own individual
choices.The best way to defend freedom, in this opposing view, was to embrace freedom by living your life the way you choose.
My comment: contemplate that last sentence carefully, if you will.
Mr Sanford does not credit the opposing view to Heinlein’s civic
militarism with any of the views I heard from the lips of the antiwar
crowds of my youth.
Their objection was either procedural (the Vietnam War has not been
declared by Congress as the Constitution provides) or isolationist (the
Vietnam War served no vital American interest) or humanitarian (war in
general is so dreadful and tragic that it can only be waged for clear
and clearly moral purposes, that is, for self-defense only) or
sentimental (the Communists were poor and weak, and America big and
strong, so we should not pick on them) or partisan (by no coincidence,
always in favor of the Communists).
In those days, any argument, sound or un, was promoted to defend the
Reds by their ideological fellow travelers and cellmates here in the US,
including, incredibly and ironically, the anti-war movement. Since
Socialism is based on the promise of violent world revolution, this is
as odd as Hitler preaching Zionism. While Stalin was busy making wars
and proxy wars around the world, and orchestrating famines and genocides
in Russia, the Reds and their useful idiots here at home urged the
rather asymmetrical doctrine that we should surrender and disarm in the
name of peace, while our enemies should be funded and equipped and
applauded, also in the name of peace. A war is only a war if we fight.
If they fight, even if they fight us, it is not war. Logic is not
central to the intellectual scheme of international socialism.
so utterly lacking in sense or in a sense of shame as the argument that
shirking one’s duty to defend one’s national liberty or aid one’s sworn
friends and allies fulfilled that duty, on the ground that letting
brave men die while you stayed at home and shagged their girlfriends,
smoking weed and joining campus riots, was an exercise of liberty.
incomprehensible, yet so smug and self-congratulatory, that expressions
of exasperation simply run out of breath.
Read more
Unbelievable
Christian prohibitions on use of the word ‘Raca’ forbid me from
speaking directly, so I will employ the rhetorical figure of irony, and
say only: Hail Caesar! Greater than Christ!
Our forefathers came to this country, after all, to allow a
republican form of government to ordain the internal workings of the
congregations of the faithful and of their consciences rather than a
monarchic-parliamentary form of government, right? And if Christian
teaching says we are not supposed to sue each other at law without first
speaking to the brethren, then the law, which is the source of our
salvation, must sweep aside the teachings of Christ, who, after all, was
condemned by a legitimate Roman legal process, and Christ had lower
polling numbers than Barabas.
Oh, and then the High Court speculates on the advisability of forcing
Rome to ordain priestesses like the Anglicans do, under
anti-discrimination law. No mention of ordaining gays.
Still, should I complain? Things were worse for my team under Queen Elizabeth, and under Diocletian. Rejoice, brethren.
But keep your powder dry, and go to confession.
Rich Man, Poor Man
Bill Whittle in this video explains, using charts and graphs and a
graphic example, the richness of the poor in America, and the root of
envy.
My favorite speech
in all other respects, despised Thomas More. The author of UTOPIA has a
particular high place in the hearts of all science fiction writers,
being the father of fictional commonwealths from FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
to NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR to THE DISPOSSESSED.
Read more
October 10, 2011
Why so Dark, so Young?
During the last panic over the dark trends in YA fiction,
a few questions cropped up over and over: “Why are our kids are so
attracted to dark literature? Why do they seem to think the older
generation are out to get them? Or is this attitude merely being
projected onto them?” I believe this trend in dark fiction for young
adults happens for a reason, and yes, they do sense hostility from older
generations. They’ve good reason for it. It exists.
Her theme is that there is indeed darkness in modern juveniles, but
that the darkness is merited, because the hostility of the older
generation to the younger does indeed exist, and growing up can indeed
be a dark and scary prospect. She points to the tripod trilogy of John
Christopher (a trilogy I loved in my youth, I must admit) as being an
apt symbol of the fear of aging. Her point is trenchant. In that book,
upon reaching the age of majority the alien overlords of Earth ‘cap’ the
youth with a mesh of wires, altering his brain to make him docile. Any
youth reading the book is surely reminded of the conformity of opinion
of the adults who rule his life, and wondering if he also will become
merely a worker or a housewife without that divine spark of heroism or
sainthood that leads to revolution as well as evolution in life.
She lists that the younger population is harder hit by the current
depression than the older as an evidence of the hostility between the
generations. The reasoning is obscure to me, since the ability of
persons longer in the workforce to save and weather a depression is and
must be greater than the young. I could see it as a source of envy from
the youth toward the old, but not of hostility from the old toward the
youth.
So rather than actually addressing the issue, the writer here
dismisses it as a “panic”, something not unique to this generation.
I would have speculated that the hostility of the old toward the
young had some unique aspects in this generation, unrelated to the
depression.
Get a Job
Herman Cain, a tea-party favorite, and the CEO & Founder of
Godfather’s Pizza, was asked about the Occupy Wallstreet street
theater/protests. He said, in part:
“Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if
you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself. It is not
someone’s fault if they succeeded, it is someone’s fault if they
failed,”
Taken from: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2011/10/05/2011-10-05_herman_cain_to_occupy_wall_street_protesters_if_youre_not_rich_blame_yourself.html#ixzz1a7Vp3Cdm
Normally, I would not find the comment noteworthy. It is hardly
controversial. Americans do not regard failure as a passkey to the moral
high-ground from which the losers self righteously condemn the
successful for the sin of success.
But more than one Catholic commentator whose brilliance I admire have
excoriated the statement, and Cain, and conservatives for admiring it.
One of them said conservatives were handing the election to Obama; the
other likened Capitalism to allowing the rich to shoot the poor in the
head.
Aux Armes, Citoyens!
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/05/us-cia-killlist-idUSTRE79475C20111005
(Reuters) – American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.
There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.
My comment: I am the most ardent warhawk I know, and have many times prayed that the public and our leaders would take the threat of militant Islamic fascism, which is a theocratic hence political party, and not a religion, seriously.
The prayer has been denied. This is not taking the enemy seriously. This is serious tyranny over a once-free people, which makes us the enemy.
“No public record of the operations or decisions…no law establishing its existence…”
No law. The legacy of 900 years of Anglo-American common law is gone.
Come, all of you who demanded Gitmo be closed, and that secret CIA prison camps disbanded. You called Bush the second Hitler. Here are the same policies, or worse. Where is your outrage?
Back when I was a Libertarian, we would roll our eyes at the latest statist outrage — and there were enough outrages that Reason Magazine could fill a column with them and never want for material — and while rolling our eyes, we would rhetorically ask, “We’ve tried reasoning. When it is going to be time to shoot the bastards?”
Well, classical enlightenment theory identifies the time with the following test:
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
I addressed my comment to all armed gentlemen among my readership. When has that point been reached that the design of despotism is clear? When a death panel has the power to slay American citizens in a war that has not been declared by Congress, without warrant, without oversight, without fear of reprisal should they abuse this power, without any law establishing their duties, and no rules to check such abuse, or even to define it?
We are discussing men of the intellectual stature and moral conviction of George Stephanopolis or Barney Frank.
Do you honestly think, seeing the rhetoric delivered against, for example, Sarah Palin, that the Left would raise stern and righteous objections if she were killed as an enemy of the state? Do you think it would even make a front page headline?
No doubt you say, “but such a thing could not happen here! This is America!”
Did you say that when the state, without any enabling legislation or compensation, took private property for public use in the form of the nationalization of the automobile industry?
October 6, 2011
Guest Book Review
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0396.htm
Aping Mankind: A review
MARK ANTHONY SIGNORELLI
A devastating critique of biologism and its misrepresentation of human life.
I can recall very clearly the moment at which the spread of Darwinian ideology became a matter of concern for me. Previously, I had been acquainted with such ideology, and recognized it as but one more strain of fashionable cant, promoted by a set of persons quite obviously unfamiliar with elementary philosophical reasoning. Having attended college in the late twentieth century, I, like many of my generation, simply became accustomed to dwelling in an intellectual atmosphere poisoned by noxious dogmas, whether deconstructionist, multi-cultural, or what have you; Darwinism was evidently just such another doctrine, and so I took no great alarm at its prevalence. That changed one evening when, surfing idly across the internet, I came across the late Denis Dutton's article on "Aesthetics and Evolutionary Psychology" in the Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, an article which proposed the advantages of applying evolutionary theory to our inquiries regarding the arts and literature. This was the first time I had encountered Darwinism in such a context, and when I looked into the matter subsequently, I found that Dutton was by no means alone in his project; quite a body of literature had amassed by that point, purporting to offer evolutionary accounts of poetry, dance, and painting, among other things. Now I became alarmed, and greatly so. Literature (understood in the broad sense of learning, or letters) has been everything to me, the source of all my consolation, and all my self-understanding. To see it threatened by this dirty little creed, with its invariable tendency to degrade whatever comes under its purview, was deeply worrying to me. So I began writing against it, with that same defensive urgency that motivates a man to fight for kin and country.
This is why I felt such an immediate appreciation for Raymond Tallis' new book Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity, because Tallis narrates a similar history in his introduction.
Read more
John C. Wright's Blog
- John C. Wright's profile
- 449 followers
