John C. Wright's Blog, page 38

Amanda Pays and John Wesley Shipp

The TV show THE FLASH from time to time gives little gifts to the fans of the comic, not to mention fans of the shortlived 1990-1991 show from a while back. Has it really been that long?

http://www.comicbookmovie.com/fansites/JoshWildingNewsAndReviews/news/?a=112174

Personally, I always thought Amanda Pays was one of the best things about the show. That said, I the writers of the new version have added many clever and dramatic elements, including the ongoing story line of Barry Allen seeking to free his falsely accused father and find the murderer of his mother, not to mention a clever love triangle between Barry, his unofficial stepfather’s partner (who thinks the Flash is a menace) and Iris West, here playing a curious Lois Lane type tracking down rumors of the Flash. Another shout-out to fans is that the original Flash (John Wesley Shipp) is playing the Flash’s wrongfully imprisoned father.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Take it from a Newspaperman

I just wanted to share with my readers the benefit of my years of experience in the newspaper business.

The press lies. They lie their hindquarters off, and lie, and lie and lie. Sometimes the lie when it costs them money and readership. The lie even when they lose advertisement. They lie like Baghdad Bob saying the American army was defeated while tanks were visible in the background shot closing in. They lie like Walter Duranty.

Walter Duranty. Remember him?

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Anonymous Conservative on Me, Morlocks and Hate

My readers might be interested in this:

http://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/john-c-wright-social-justice-warriors-and-hate/

John C Wright, the amazing Castalia House author who everyone is raving about lately, (and whose new book, The Book of Feasts & Seasons, with an amazing 4.9 Amazon rating,, is available at the Castalia House Store for only $4.99), has given this site some much appreciated linkage recently.

In one post though, he pointed out that he felt the work here was incomplete, because it didn’t deal with the spiritual. He is correct, of course. If you meet pure evil, face to face, you will realize that there is clearly something much deeper than a mere mechanism, which happens to produce evil as a byproduct of some other purpose. As one examines evil up close, the only answer which really makes sense is that the evil are soldiers, with a mission, serving some authority. They will sacrifice their own interests, destroy their own lives, and fall on their own swords, in a genuinely selfless pursuit of their evil purposes. They will even do evil when it doesn’t matter, and when there is no sense to it. Their evil mechanism is so self-sacrificial that it seems the type of thing which nature would eliminate over time. He is right about the spiritual lacking here, and I encourage others to not mistake its absence here for some endorsement of a non-spiritual world model.

One part of his response I take issue with however, is his assertion that the rabbits hate him because he exposes them to truth. A proper explanation of this touches on the spiritual, in part because a full understanding of the rabbit’s hate offers a window into the same hatred Satan holds for the good.

In short, the rabbits do not so much hate John, as they hold him in contempt. Hate is more of a visceral rejection of some moral or emotional aspect of something. Hate can be applied to anything – you can hate a beggar or hate a King. Contempt carries with it a subtle air of rejecting something due to inferiority or weakness. Hate is a raw emotion that you express without regard to your enemy’s status. Contempt is reserved, solely for the weak, whom you can afford to hold in contempt, and it is most often expressed by cowards who only attack their lessers, and who hold little in regard beyond their own immediate safety.

Rabbits have contempt for John because he is kind, rational, and compassionate, and they see that all as weakness.

Read the whole thing.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

On the Sexual Nature of Man

Here below is a republication of a long essay I wrote back in 2009 under the general title Apologia Pro Opere Sui.  At the request of more than one reader, I have stripped out the specific comments related only to the event that provoked it, in order to frame the argument in more general terms.

*   *   *

As a faithful Roman Catholic who was an atheist for all his adult life (and most of his childhood) I occupy an interesting position in the ongoing debates concerning the social turmoil caused by sexual unchastity, particularly that unchaste practice which issues forth from what is delicately called same-sex attraction.

One is tempted automatically to assume that atheists should support or ought to support the sexually liberated position that declares all sexual acts licit between two or more consenting adult partners in their right wits. One is tempted to assume that no rational grounds to condemn sexual libertinism exist, aside from the dogmas and supernatural reasoning of Christian theology.

This temptation must be resisted at all costs, since not only is it untrue, it is foolish, for the drives the conversation out of the realm of natural and logical reasons to avoid sexual immorality and into the realm of the supernatural and theological. Once the issue is falsely labeled as a theological one, is the falsely libeled as an issue where all discussion is offlimits for being a personal matter of irrational faith, then the topic is ejected forthwith from the public forum.

Allow me, then, to give a personal account of how it was that I, resting only on my human reason and with no particle of loyalty to or faith in any theological speculations (which, at the time, I frankly dismissed as egregious and base superstition), was drawn step by step against my will and very much against my inclinations away from the comfortable libertine and libertarian opinions of my youth to the conclusion that the sex act is licit only within marriage, that unchastity is illicit, and that unnatural sexual acts are illicit as well as unnatural.

There are perfectly natural and worldly reasons for a rational atheist to support the Christian position on sexual morality. The following argument shows that the Christian position is the only logical position to hold, given the realities of human nature.

One a personal level, I did not change my conclusions about sexual morality because I became a Christian. The cause and effect was the other way. After cold logic lead me to the conclusions that the only logical position to hold just so happened to be the one held by my (at that time) hated enemies the Christians, I began to look at their egregious and base superstition with a less hostile gaze.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

The Four Last Things in Science Fiction

This is a reprint, in part, of an essay of mine from AD 2011. I wanted to introduce it to any new readers of mine since that year, and to use it as a way of saying Happy New Year:

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Most futures in most SF stories are monocultures, much in the same way, and for the same reason, most worlds visited by the starship Enterprise have but one culture. There is not enough room in a single novel, or a single movie, to do more than hint at complexity.

Indeed, complexity would destroy the mood and theme of the story. Imagine someone writing a realistic version of Orwell’s NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR or Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD. In both cases, the totalitarian dystopia cannot project an air of suffocating omnipotence if it is hinted anywhere that they will pass away in less than sixty years. The absurdly over-regulated world state in Huxley, realistically, would last even less time. Imagine if every baby born had to be decanted and birthed by the same bureaucracy that runs the Department of Motor Vehicles or the Post Office. The idea that they would produce the correct number of the different intellectual castes, Alpha to Epsilon, as conditions changed from year to year is absurd. Recall that one of the Epsilons is an elevator operator. When the book was written, every elevator had an operator the same way, now, every automobile has a driver. Science fiction writers have been predicting in vain for years now cars that would drive themselves, or fly, but Huxley did not anticipate elevators operated by a pushbutton. Realistically, the world-bureaucracy of the Ford world-state would have no more ability to predict the actions of the market place, or the needs of its wards, than Huxley himself. In the real world, the utter incompetence even of public servants who are not venal is legendary.

Obviously, the police state in Orwell would go broke the same way the Soviet Union did and communist China is (despite our heroic efforts to prop them up) going to. Perhaps it could last one hundred years, or two. But the whole theme of Orwell was that the state was like a boot that would trample a human face forever. The hopelessness is the core of the book’s message. Even Goldstein, the rebel against the system, is manufactured by Big Brother as part of the totalitarian control process.

As with Orwell and Huxley, most science fiction writers do not have the space on the page to invent a future as complex as the future will be. To introduce the reader to more than one idea takes more than one story.

This is one reason the Future History stories of Robert Heinlein were monumental in science fiction history: aside from Olaf Stapledon, no writer before had worked out over a number of tales placed in a number of eras the complexity realism requires.

Like his mentor Olaf Stapledon, Heinlein anticipated a future that was fairly complex, with ups and downs, its advances and its setbacks. After the theocracy of Nehemiah Scudder, a libertarian style Covenant government would become supreme in the world, ushering in the golden age called ‘The Maturity of Man.’

In TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE, we catch a glimpse of this utopia, where mankind is spreading rapidly across the galaxy, war is unknown, disease and aging are unknown, fathers are good to their children, and everyone has sex with everyone, male or female, human or machine.

Plus, space is a frontier without end, so the rugged frontiersmanship so beloved of Heinlein, and, in the days before PC, beloved of all Americans, finds infinite scope for its exercise. Heinlein’s future contains all the freedom of the wilderness and all the comforts of civilization wrapped up in one.

There is one oddity in the Future History of Heinlein, which I also perceive in Isaac Asimov, or, at least, in his FOUNDATION series. They do not have a satisfactory endpoint.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

An Open Letter to Mr Hines

Mr Jim Hines takes exception to the grave insult done to all fans of LEGEND OF KORRA by asserting, first, that I am the only one dismayed and dissatisfied by the bad writing, cheap ending, lame out-of-nowhere romance between two female characters (neither of who previously was homosexual) being shoehorned into the last scene in the closing episode of LEGEND OF KORRA for reasons of Political Correctness; and second, that the reason for my dismay was not my artistic judgment, love of the show, and a normal human sense of decency, but the pure evil of my character. Evidently Mr Hines, like The Shadow can knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.

Alas, I am not the bigot here. The bigot is the one who denounces everyone whose opinion differs from his own as bigots.

Here are his remarks. I do him the courtesy he does not do me, by linking to his column. He did not wish me to learn of his backbiting. That is understandable. I would also be ashamed of my cowardice, were so cowardly as to slander and denigrate a man behind his back, and call him by name, but not let him speak a word to defend himself.

http://www.jimchines.com/2014/12/john-wright-legend-of-korra/

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Dear Mr Hines: If a writing team betrays me for my loyalty by halting the story to preach a sermon on a religion that is alien to my religion and hostile to it, those writers get no grief for being treacherous, sly, or underhanded; but I get grief for daring to have a religion that differs from theirs, and for following as my conscience dictates, even though I am not being treacherous, sly, or hidden here.

I am the not ashamed of my beliefs, ergo I do not need to sneak in little sly advertisement for them into a children’s show, into the literal last two minutes, without warning, and so ambiguously that it requires a later public statement to take a stand.

Nor am I, Mr. Hines, the bigot here. You are. You are so craven in your bigotry, that you do not even do me the courtesy of addressing me directly, nor linking to the column with which you took exception, nor discussing the merits of the case.

(Also: learn to read English, please, sir. I did not call for the extermination of people, but of ideas.)

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Unexpected Enlightenment from Instapundit

Instapundit is boosting the Hermione-Granger-meets-Aslan-and-Cthulhu juvenile novels of L. Jagi Lamplighter, the greatest living writer today, living in my house:

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/199591/

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/199588/

You must read them to see the illustrations. They were done by her husband, who I assume is named Mr. Lamplighter.

The cover art is top notch, painted by top notch cartoonist Dan Lawlis.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Christmastide

Some say that ever ‘gainst that season comes

Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,

The bird of dawning singeth all night long:

And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad;

The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,

No fairy takes, no witch has power to charm,

So hallow’d and gracious is the time. –Hamlet

It has become something of a tradition here at John C. Wright’s Journal for yours truly to list the feast days of the Twelve Days of Christmas, and to urge my fellow traditionalists to continue the Christly and Christian work of Keeping the Feast and Partyin’ On! Let us pause for unsolemn reflection on these solemnities.

We all know the Twelve Days of Christmas from a famous nonsense song about a lady whose true love gives her 184 birds of various types, not to mention 12 fruit trees, 40 golden rings, 106 persons of the various professions either musical or milkmaidenly, and 32 members of the aristocracy variously cavorting.

No doubt you have ever wondered how the lady in the song feeds all the leaping lords and dancing ladies, pipers, drummers, and milkmaids now living in her parlor, the answer is that she feeds them the 22 turtledoves, 30 French hens, 36 colly birds, and 42 swans, not to mention the nice supply of eggs from the geese, milk from the cows and pears from the pear trees.

You may have heard that the lyrics contain a secret meaning, referring to Catholic doctrines or rites forbidden by Oliver Cromwell. This is true. The secret meaning is that the Walrus is St. Paul, and if you listen to a record of the carol backward, it says “Cromwell under his wig is bald.” All this is well known.

What is not as well known is that traditionally, these are twelve days of feasts which start on Christmas Day and run through to Epiphany on January 6th, which is the festival variously of the Adoration of the Magi and the Presentation in the Temple. (Really hard core Christmasteers extend Christmastide 40 days, ending on Candlemas February 2).

Before Christmas, during the season of Advent, while everyone else is shopping and partying, we who keep the traditions fast, pray, do penance, and make ourselves miserable. It makes the holiday much brighter by contrast.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Three Spots in the Top Ten

An anonymous character on the Internet posted his Top Ten for 2014! I am pleased to see Larry Correia’s name there, as well as my own. And ‘D.B. Jackson’ is a cherished acquaintance of mine.

http://derekthornton71.blogspot.ch/2014/12/my-top-ten-fiction-books-of-2014.html

I doff my hat to you, Mr Thornton, and will aim to please you again in the coming year. We Southerners must hang together.

The following words are his:

Here is a list of the top 10 fiction books I have read this year.

10. Fallen King (Cirian War Saga Book 1) by Eric Lorenzen

9. Warbound (The Grimnoir Chronicles Book 3) Larry Correia

8. Thieves’ Quarry (The Thieftaker Chronicles) by D.B. Jackson

7. Count to a Trillion by John C. Wright

6. Monster Hunter Alpha by Larry Correia

5. Monster Hunters International by Larry Correia

4. City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis by John C. Wright

3. Sixty-One Nails: Courts of the Feyre, Book 1 by Mike Shevdon

2. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

1. Awake in the Night Land by John C. Wright This one I read twice this year. Just got through reading it again!

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

The Perversion of a Legend

http://www.vanityfair.com/vf-hollywood/2014/12/legend-of-korra-creators-confirm-korrasami-is-canon

Dear Mr DiMartino and Mr Konietzko,

I admire your creative effort tremendously. I watched your shows, bought your merchandize, and supported and lauded you. I made your work a part of my imagination and a part of my life, and introduced your show to my children.

And this is how you repay loyalty and affection?

A children’s show, of all places, is where you decided to place an ad for a sexual aberration; you pervert your story telling skills to the cause of propaganda and political correctness.

You sold your integrity out to the liberal establishment. In a craven fashion you deflect criticism by slandering and condemning any who object to your treason.

You were not content to leave the matter ambiguous, no, but had publicly to announce that you hate your audience, our way of life, our virtues, values, and religion.

From all the fans everywhere worldwide let me say what we are all feeling:

Mr DiMartino and Mr Konietzko: You are disgusting, limp, soulless sacks of filth. You have earned the contempt and hatred of all decent human beings forever, and we will do all we can to smash the filthy phallic idol of sodomy you bow and serve and worship. Contempt, because you struck from behind, cravenly; and hatred, because you serve a cloud of morally-retarded mental smog called Political Correctness, which is another word for hating everything good and bright and decent and sane in life.

I have no hatred in my heart for any man’s politics, policies, or faith, any more than I have hatred for termites; but once they start undermining my house where I live, it is time to exterminate them.

Sincerely,

A lifelong fan.

 

 

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.