John C. Wright's Blog, page 153
September 23, 2011
Playpowerment
The thinking behind such a drama is not hard to guess. If you want to
have an excuse to squeeze lots of pretty actresses into lots of skimpy
outfits, you have to come up with an excuse simple enough for a
television executive to understand: so you pitch a show about lifeguards
at a beach, all of whom are in bathing suits.
If someone has made a crime drama where all the undercover
under-twenty she-cops are beauty queens, or cheerleaders, or Hooter’s
waitresses, that show would probably get the green light also. I propose
someone should make a series about the shadowy world of international
espionage and catfight-jello wrestling among lingerie models. The show
could be called VICTORIA’S SECRET AGENT.
What I find uproariously amusing, if pathetic, is the following
statement by the toothsome damsel who is one of the stars in the show.
The young beauty is named Jenna Dewan-Tatum.
She tells PR.com, “Like it or hate it, the Playboy bunny
is iconic. I think it’s a beautiful, sexy, womanly outfit. I also
believe that by today’s standards, we are wearing a lot more clothing
(on the show) than most bathing suits and bikinis out there!“What I love so much about the Playboy bunny costume is that it
creates this hourglass figure when you wear it. For somebody like me who
has to work hard to have my curves, it’s nice to wear something that
helps me out a little bit, gives me that corset and gives me those hips.
As soon as you put it on you feel empowered, you feel sexy and you feel
womanly. There are very few things I’ve worn in my life that I can say
make me feel more like a woman.”
September 21, 2011
Benightenment
Here is an article by Dennis Prager. It is short enough that to reprint the whole thing would take no more words than to describe it:
Why Young Americans Can’t Think Morally
Moral standards have been replaced by feelings.Last week, David Brooks of the New York Times wrote a column on an
academic study concerning the nearly complete lack of a moral
vocabulary among most American young people. Here are excerpts from
Brooks’s summary of the study of Americans aged 18 to 23. It was led by
“the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith”:● “Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing.”
● “When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds
of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described
problems that are not moral at all.”● “Moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering
things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a
partner.”● “The default position, which most of them came back to again and
again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste.”● “As one put it, ‘I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I
feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t
speak on behalf of anyone else as to what’s right and wrong.’”● “Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s
thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.”
(Emphases mine.)
Wright's Writing Corner returns
If only Medea Lived Today
In Canada, a young mother kills her newborn baby by strangling it
with her underwear, and throws it over the fence into a neighbor’s yard.
The judge on appeal overturns a conviction for second degree murder,
reducing the sentence to a three year sentence suspended, and based her
ruling on the fact that since Canada does not outlaw abortion, this
means that Canadians accept that unwanted pregnancy is onerous.
The child’s name was Rodney.
Queen’s Bench Justice Joanne Veit rejected the Crown’s call for a four-year prison term.
The fact that Canada has no abortion laws reflects that “while many
Canadians undoubtedly view abortion as a less than ideal solution to
unprotected sex and unwanted pregnancy, they generally understand,
accept and sympathize with the onerous demands pregnancy and
childrbirth exact from mothers, especially mothers without support,”
she writes.The judge noted that infanticide laws and sentencing guidelines were
not altered when the government made many changes to the Criminal Code
in 2005, which she says shows that Canadians view the law as a “fair
compromise of all the interests involved.”“Naturally, Canadians are grieved by an infant’s death, especially at
the hands of the infant’s mother, but Canadians also grieve for the
mother.”
I am not sure what the ‘without support’ here means. Other news
reports say that teenagers was living with her parents at the time.
http://www.wetaskiwintimes.com/PrintArticle.aspx?e=3292751
Veit said there are many mitigating factors, including
Effert’s youth, her lack of a prior criminal record, her remorse and
her pro-social lifestyle since the killing.Effert had been sentenced to life in prison in 2009 after earlier
being convicted by a jury of second-degree murder for strangling her
newborn son, later named Rodney, with a pair of orange thong underwear
and tossing his body over a fence into a neighbour’s yard in April 2005.However, the Court of Appeal of Alberta quashed the conviction in
May, ruling the jury’s verdict was “unreasonable,” and substituted a
conviction of infanticide.It was the second time Effert was convicted of second-degree murder
by a jury in the newborn’s death. In 2006, a Wetaskiwin jury found her
guilty, but a new trial was ordered because jurors were given flawed
instructions.
September 20, 2011
AAARRRRGGGGGHHHHH!
And there is nothing the publisher can do. It is a decision made by some clerk or officer somewhere in the corporation of the book chain, and it mars my wife’s career at the outset.
I would like every man, woman and child of good will reading these words accepts a husband’s heartfelt and helpless plea.
Call your local Barnes and Noble, and ask for the book. Whether you go in to pick it up or not is up to you, but if you do not, it will end up on their shelves.
September 16, 2011
Plot Scarcity in Post Scarcity Paradise?
The fine fellows over at SfSignal asked to me join one of their
‘Mind Melds’ and answer a fascinating question. The had many replies,
and posted the answers in two parts:
http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2011/09/mind-meld-character-stakes-in-post-scarcity-novels-part-one/
and
http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2011/09/mind-meld-character-stakes-in-post-scarcity-novels-part-two/
I answered with an essay when they only wanted a paragraph, and so
they cut it down to size. For any reader interested in the full essay, I
give it here below:
—————————————————-
Post Scarcity and Post Singularity novels have a problem of
giving interesting conflicts to characters. When scarcity is no longer a
concern (or sometimes even death!) what are the stakes for characters?
On one level, the question is easy to answer: think of every story
you’ve ever enjoyed where the danger that the protagonist faced was not
one which threatened him with poverty, penury or death. Any and all plot
conflicts of those tales could be transposed into a post-singularity
background with no loss of drama.
The recent movie THE KING’S SPEECH, for example, concerned a
sovereign just at the dawn of the era of radio and mass media, and at
the dawn of World War, attempting to overcome a speech impediment, and,
by artful coincidence, his personal shortcomings. Had the exact same
tale been set in a background where the Prince of Wales and his speech
therapist and every other denizen of earth been granted the Fountain of
Youth and the purse of Fortunatus, endless life and bottomless wealth,
no events in the foreground would need be changed, because neither
wealth nor deathlessness cure disabilities of speech (just ask Vidur the
Silent, Odin’s son.)
On a deeper level, the question is hard to answer, because the
concern of any science fiction story that is not mere fantasy is that
the unrealistic premise or conceit of the tale be treated realistically.
When Lamont Cranston the Shadow, Sue Storm the Invisible Girl, or
Frodo Baggins the Invisible Halfling decide to vanish, for example,
clothing and gear conveniently vanish also, whereas Griffin the
Invisible Man from the HG Wells novel of the same name must practice
nudism to practice his vanishing act. Wells imagined logical details,
and that makes it science fiction rather than merely a flight of
imagination.
Likewise, the realism of unrealistic SF requires the author to invent
the realistic details of a world where the limitations of the human
condition have been banished by unimaginably sophisticated and powerful
technologies, so that even death itself reduced to a curable medical
condition. If the immortals of the Utopia of Tomorrow want for nothing,
how can trivial things like speech impediments or personal shortcomings
be serious problems to them? To wait a hundred years for a solution, to a
deathless being, would be no more troublesome than to wait a million.
The supermen of futurtopia, if pictured realistically, should be
incomprehensible characters in an unimaginable landscape: how, then,
does an author lure a reader to imagine the unimaginable?
Almost thou persuadest me to be a Leftist
Once I wrote an article called ‘Eugenics and Other Evils’ whose
title I stole from a book of the same name by GK Chesterton. But he,
brilliantly, and I, not brilliantly, pointed out the evident inhumanity
and glaring unreasonableness of a program of ‘scientifically’ managing
human life, breeding men like dogs, and so on.
I received a crackpot letter in my spam filter, so I assume it is was
sent out at random after some sort of automatic spambot found every
article online from any source with the word ‘Eugenics’ in it.
It was addressed to me, but recoil at the thought that one of these
filth knows my name, or feels familiar enough to address me, much less
that he could mistake me or any Christian for one of him.
I am not going to reprint the letter, since I wish no publicity, even
negative, to be given the dreary, predictable, lunatic, hateful and
grotesque philosophy of that branch of modern secular thinking called
National Socialism or Planned Parenthood or Nazism. I am sorry that a
single partisan of that odious philosophy survived World War Two.
My dream is that Jews or Gypsies or Slavs or Blacks should shoot such
vermin down in the street like the dogs they seek to breed us as, to
perish in the gutter without benefit of law or benefit of clergy. Since I
also dream that some day the United Nations building in New York will
be trampled by a giant atomic-powered robot operated by the Israeli
Secret Service, I will admit my dreams are better kept in dreamland. But
I don’t have much sympathy for professional antisemitism.
I must, however reprint certain choice paragraphs of this rank dreck,
to allow for that beneficent exercise of public scorn which may shame
any lunatics in whom some vestige of conscience or humanity remains into
silence.
Legion of Doom
From the Mickey Mouse HOUSE OF MOUSE show, an episode where the Disney Villains combine against the forces of Mouseness.
Mugged by the Mailbag! Describing SOMEWHITHER
A reader with the somewhat angelic name of Manwe, Lord of the Valar, writes in with some questions.
Concerning my current writing projects, COUNT TO A TRILLION (sold) and SOMEWHITHER, he asks:
1) I take it this will be the first saga you have written since becoming Christian, correct?
ANSWER: Usually, I avoid this question, since it gives me a dark and
bitter amusement to overhear critics bemoan as Christian apologetic work
I wrote as an atheist, while work written as a faithful Christian gets
their secular seal of approval.
But the answer is no.
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