John C. Wright's Blog, page 158

My Plan for a Better Polity

I think all Christian conservative mothers should seriously think about taking a hit for the team, and agitating for the repeal of the 19th Amendment.

True, you ladies would be given up a sacred suffrage which is granted to you by God Almighty and which no man rightfully can take away. This is the downside.

On the other hand, your sisters who are feminists and suffragettes would be shut out of the voting booth as well, and they are worshipers and votaries  of Asmodeus and Moloch, who are princes of the Ninth and Eleventh Circle of Hell, commanding six thousand legions of demons.  Meanwhile, ladies, you can bend your attention to the task of raising your boy-children to vote the US Constitution back into effect, and train them in the use and care of firearms, so that we can both outbreed the servants of darkness, outvote them in the ballot box, and then shoot them when they riot.

I realize this is a radical view. But it seems like plain common sense compared to my other view, which is to abolish the American system of government altogether, and beg on our knees for Queen Elizabeth II to take us back, say we’re sorry about that whole messy Revolution business, it was a failure.

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An Amusing Little Quiz for Jack Vance Fans

I stumbled by mistake across the following:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-597375.html

A poster with the energetic name of Rocketeer proposes the following quiz:
An amusing little quiz for Jack Vance fans

1. Name the five Demon Princes.

2. Name the four alien races (not counting humans) on Tschai.

3. Who sent Cugel the Clever far away across the Dying Earth?

4. Who was Zap210?

5. In what novel did a travelling showman, owner of a tattered tabard, become involved in a dynastic struggle?

6. In what novel did stranded Earthmen ride the monoline?

7. Name the Galactic Effectuator.

8. Extra credit: name three of Kirth Gersen’s romantic interests.

I would hold my fansmanship of Jack Vance to be merely nuncupatory were I unwilling to answer. I neither used internet nor turned toward my extensive bookshelf of Vanceania for reminders. This is based on raw memory alone.

Fellow Vance fans! I invite you to join me without looking below the cut, where I place both my answers and then the real answers.

Warning: I assume I have spelled each and every name wrong. This is just my memory without looking at anything or using any reminders.

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Mozart's Answer to the Manwhore Question

Susan Wash once more brings the calm and careful voice of reason to bear on modern sexual madness. She says, in part:

In my recent post What a Slut Is, there were several commenters who stated that there is no such thing as a male slut. I offer the popular terms manwhore and manslut as evidence to the contrary. Unquestionably, some women are rejecting previously highly promiscuous men for relationships. I’ve called this the Boomerang Effect of Social Proof. According to one study, 70% of women lose respect for men who hook up frequently. This may have little effect on short-term mating strategies, but is likely to have a profound effect on long-term mating strategies.

Hmm. I am pretty sure that before the great Antichristian movement of the 1968 generation, there were in deed some sort of terms or words used to describe men who were of less than sterling morals, sexually speaking.

Let me think.
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The Strange Case of the One Armed Murderer of Antarctica

Part of an ongoing conversation

A reader with the saintly name of Anna writes in and asks.

Perhaps I should make my question clearer. I am not a materialist. I’m far closer to Idealism, although I have too much appreciation for Incarnational theology to refer to matter or the body as an illusion.

My understanding of free will is that it means a choice is not determined by anything other than the act of choosing. When I say determined, I mean something like “forced”, something like the way that if you draw two sides of a triangle, you have determined the third side – there is one and only one way it can be.

To say that we have free will means that we are not compelled to act according to our motivations, we do not have to do what we want to do. It means that no amount of foreknowledge will give you the ability to accurately predict a choice 100% of the time; God himself cannot know what we will choose except that he sees us choosing it.

Materialism challenges the idea of free will by saying that, in essence, everything that ever happens was determined in the first moment(s) after the Big Bang; that after that initial moment, there was one and only one way that everything could play out (for all of time) according to the laws of physics, just as certainly as there is only one way to connect three points into a triangle once you have drawn those three points.

Now, I have no problem saying that materialism is just plain wrong. But I’ve always figured that this means that there is somehow a loophole in what appear to be immutable laws of physics, or something going on at a level that we don’t understand. That doesn’t bother me – if God can turn one loaf of bread into many, after all, allowing us to make choices and affect what physically happens seems like a relatively minor issue.

But it seems to me that you are saying that the laws of physics *are* immutable, that there *is* only one way things can work out according to those laws, but that somehow there is still free will. This is what I keep trying to understand, because I don’t see *how* both these things could be.

I understand, in an abstract sort of way, your cylinder analogy; I don’t see its application to this question. Yes, we generally talk about either the physical dimension of something or else the moral dimension, without confusing them for each other. Most of our questions about life will be answered by one or the other aspect, without any mingling of the two dimensions. I just don’t see how we answer this one particular dilemma without discussing the relationship between the two; a man cannot choose to verbally insult his neighbor without moving his lips.

This distinction that you try to draw between “determine (push)” and “determine (draw)” is not completely clear to me. By “determine (push)” you might mean something like what I have in mind – that it sets something so that only one option is left? But why would you use “draw” as a modifier/synonym for “determine”? We are drawn in by our motivations?

*

“My understanding of free will is that it means a choice is not determined by anything other than the act of choosing.”

Well, first, what is the support or evidence for this view? I am not disagreeing with it, but it does not seem intuitively obvious to me either.

My understanding of the free will is that it is the thing that man have which allowed them to make decisions, take oaths, make contracts, and be held accountable for their actions; madmen are defective in their will, and it is not free by reason of their madness; children have their will not free yet, and is undeveloped by reason of their age; and beasts do not have free will by their nature, and cannot develop it, and yet this in them is not a defect nor an illness but natural to them. They react by instinct and training, sometimes with wisdom, but never due to thought, reflection, deliberation, or the contemplation of an abstraction or remote good.
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Fifth Wave Feminism

I had recently come to realize that the feminist movement is not feminist at all. It is masculinist.

By this I mean, the purpose of Fourth Wave feminism (if you wish to judge not by what they say, but by what they do, and to know the fruits, so to speak, by their fruits) is not to make women legally and culturally equal to men, but to make them be men: that is, to abolish the female from life and thought altogether.

No clearer homage could be paid to the concept that males are superior to females than the tacit acknowledgement that the only path to equality was imitation. What the feminists are doing is about as insulting and degrading to women as if the Civil Rights movement of Martin Luther King, rather than abolishing Jim Crow laws, kept those laws in place, and instead urged all Negros to have their skin dyed white.

I cannot think of a deadlier insult, or a more outrageous.

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Barbicane and Lucretius

A reader with the diminutive name of Michael the Lesser writes and asks:

Now the assumption that I hold is that atoms move in orderly and predictable ways. My body is made of such atoms and thus all of the organs involved in making the noise I use to speak should then act in orderly and predictable ways.

Now there is a certain noise that I use to refer to the idea of dog and that is the sound “dog.” So, if I were to be speaking with you and made the sound “dog”, you would understand that the pressure waves were referring to the idea of dog.

Now, how is it that when I will to communicate the word dog in my mind through speech, that the pressure waves that come out of my mouth are the noise that we have agreed upon in language is referring to the idea of dog?

What I’m after is what is the connection between the will in the soul and the movement of the body? If I had sufficient knowledge of all the atoms in my body, given that they are orderly and predictable, could someone predict the movement of my arm before I willed it to move?

Or let me put it into classical terms as best I can, how does my will give the atoms in my arm the final cause to go up?

My comment: I can speak to some of this, but not to the underlying assumption, which I am not sure I understand, much less share.

“Now the assumption that I hold is that atoms move in orderly and predictable ways.”

I am not clear on what you mean here. If you mean that the carbon atom in your liver, let us say, reacts chemically to a hydrogen atom in the fashion carbon atoms are wont to do, fine. This is orderly and predictable.

If you mean that getting an unexpected ulcer due the stress of coming home one day and finding your house has been hit by a meteor and your wife ran off with the mailman, I am not sure that this is predictable in the ordinary sense of the term. There is a psychological component to stress which physics is incompetent to address.

If you mean that when you sit down to a piano and play an improvised jazz riff, so that even you do not know exactly which keys you will strike in which order as the spirit moves you, then, no, in no sense of the word is your hand moving a way any mortal man can predict.

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The Unreality Principle

Do they want to live?

This is from Frontpage Mag, an interview with one Rima Greene. She is one of the (alas, far too few) Jews of the Left who recognize the growing anti-Semitism of the Left.

She had been a member in the 1970’s of a rural all-women community of socialist feminists, but was shocked upon her return from a trip to Israel to discover that her feminist and lesbian friends favored the Arabs over the Israelis, even though Israel is the only nation in that part of the world where women can be free, and homosexuality is legal.

She found herself reduced to the status of an unperson, because the god of the Progressives is a jealous god, and no man can be Jewish, and have loyalties or love for his home, and also serve the Cause.

Please read the whole thing. It is fascinating and heartbreaking all at once.

http://frontpagemag.com/2011/04/01/a-leftist-feminist%E2%80%99s-journey-out-of-the-political-faith/

When I was part of the Left, I thought “evil” and “enemy” were outdated concepts brought on by indoctrinated mental patterns. When I was at a peace camp in Portugal – a German peace community – I met the people who’d paraded through Israel with the banner: WE REFUSE TO BE ENEMIES. This is new age thinking, that you can refuse reality and just keep going on your merry way.  We as Jews are targeted. We as infidel Americans are targeted. We are the ultimate prize as the Big Satan — although Jewish blood is the best for the West’s contemporary adversaries.

We do not grasp the mental universe of our enemies. Their obsession with our blood, their obsession with butchering us. They are like an army of vampires. They actually want to suck our blood. Especially Jewish blood. We in the West have not a clue. They do not just want to kill us any old way. Poison gas will not do. They want to spill our blood.  I could never make this stuff up. That is what I was trying to sort out with the Daniel Pearl incident, but my friend tried to put a stop to my thinking by calling me a racist.

[…]

When I started really understanding that Israel is in continual danger because of a theological commitment to destroy us, and that includes me, as a target, my body got it, my creatural body that fights for its survival with everything it has. That is a missing piece on the Left. My old buddy from high school, a famous Jewish anti-Zionist academic, would rather die in a plane terror incident than have “racial profiling.” I said, “It could save your life.” He said, “I don’t care. It’s racist. I don’t care.” It was a kind of petulant: “I don’t care.” It’s like a three-year-old’s outlook.

[...]

On the Left, with the “universal” values supposedly which transcend the need of the Jewish people to survive, there’s an ideology that Jews are selfish for wanting to survive together, as a collective. It is raw naked anti-Semitism.

My comment: The central tenant of the cultic and hysterical called Leftism is what I call ‘the unreality principle.’ This is the principle, baldly stated, that reality is bad and unreality is good, therefore unreality is real.

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Yet another Question about Materialism

A reader with the coniferous name of Firtree asks:

Mr. Wright, I would like to ask you this:

A man speaks. This means his lips move. His lips are made of cells which are made of molecules which are made of atoms and so on. The movement and positioning of atoms is determined by the laws of physics. So either…

(a) The man’s experience that he chooses what to say is an illusion, because the motion of his lips is ultimately determined by the laws of physics, and only the laws of physics;
or
(b) something which has no physical existence at all (the man’s mind or will) has somehow interacted with the physical atoms to change what their motion and position would otherwise be according to the laws of physics;
or
(c) physics itself has, at some level that is yet to be discovered, a mechanism for the non-physical to affect the physical, for a man’s will to affect the motion of his lips;
or
(d) God set all of physics up so that the laws of physics determine that the atoms in a man’s lips will move according to the way that God omnisciently knows that the man chooses to speak;
or
(e) other?

Which do you believe?

Thank you. I’d be delighted to answer.

(e) The man’s choice determines the final cause, that is to say, the purpose or the meaning of the words qua word communicated by his speech. The mechanics of the motion of lips and vocal apparatus, lungs, air pressure making soundwaves, et cetera, can be accurately and completely described by the mechanics, that is, by the laws of physics.

Your other options are not even close.

The laws of physics have nothing whatsoever to do with the meaning of the word or of the man’s intention. Meanings are described by a separate study entirely, called logic or rhetoric, and intentions by a science called morality or philosophy or (in the case of defective thinking) by psychology.

None of your other answers approaches my answer because they are based on the unspoken assumption that one description of one dimension of a two dimensional thing can accurately describe it. You encounter a paradox as you attempt to describe intentional and behavioral realities in terms of mechanical categories rather than in terms of intentional categories. Hence your choice: (a) assumes that there is only a mechanical explanation, therefore the intentional explanation is illusion (b) assumes the intentional explanation is actually a non-physical yet mechanical form of the mechanical explanation, as if thoughts and logic were a type of nonphysical molecule that push the molecules of brain and body around (c) assumes the intentional explanation is the mechanical explanation (d) assumes the intentional explanation is mechanical in nature and therefore must be coordinated with the mechanical one by divine pre-established harmony.

All these assumptions are different aspects of one assumption: that everyone has one explanation. I deny this. Human beings have no choice but to treat human actions as if it has a moral character, that is, by their intention. Likewise, we have no choice but to treat mechanical reactions as if they have no moral character, that is, no intention.

Clear?

Gallo and Cover Art

A reader wryly commented on the cover art of my forthcoming book:

“…this must be the first time in the history of publishing that they actually gave the cover artist an accurate description of the contents to be illustrated.”

I reply:

Untrue. The art department at Tor books is under the hand of one Irene Gallo. A study of the covers of my books shows in each case that the artist had read or had been told the crucial elements from the story to add, including such details as Phaethon’s flower, Galen Waylock’s steed, Amelia Windrose’s headgear and Colin’s guitar, and the conflict of powers over the chessboard of the universe between Gilbert Gosseyn and Enro the Red.

You can find images of all these images here: https://www.sff.net/people/john-c-wright/index.html

Gallo! I staunchly defend her work! Other publishing houses, let them defend their honor as best they may, but for me, both the accuracy and the beauty and the technical craftsmanship of the covers coming out of Tor books is above reproach, and I say, above comparison.

Here is her webpage: http://igallo.blogspot.com/

Amusing, but not Surprising

Some of you, dear readers, may already be aware of this tidbit of non-news, but it did not receive much airplay.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/269590/taken-gay-girl-jonah-goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/269969/title-tk-mark-steyn

Amina Arraf, the young vivacious Syrian lesbian activist whose inspiring blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus” had captured hearts around the world, was revealed to be, in humdrum reality, one Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old college student from Georgia. The following day, Paula Brooks, the lesbian activist and founder of the website LezGetReal, was revealed to be one Bill Graber, a 58-year-old construction worker from Ohio.

Mr. McMaster was also “Rania” the cousin of Amina, who reported on her arrest by Baathists. The Syrian dictator, hearing a public outcry against her arrest, ordered her release, only to discover she did not exist.

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