John C. Wright's Blog, page 44
November 14, 2014
Pale Moon and Firefox
I switched to Pale Moon immediately after Firefox forced its CEO out of office on the grounds that he once made a contribution to a pro-Prop 8 group. But I did not set my browser to register my pageviews as non-Firefox views. I saw these instructions today on my publisher’s site, and I here reprint them, if you are in a like situation:
Fortunately, it is trivially simple to turn this off and cause the browser to correctly report itself as PaleMoon.
Create a new tab.
Type “about:config” into the Address Bar as if it were an internet site (URL).
Type “compatMode” into the Search box that will appear right below the Address Bar.
On the line general.useragent.compatMode.firefox there are three settings: user set, boolean, true. Click on “true” and it will change to false.
Close the tab.
That’s it. Web sites will no longer incorrectly attribute your pageviews to Firefox. This is important, because Firefox’s only real value is in its brand, and as the number of reported Firefox users continues to fall, Google’s rationale for propping up Mozilla is reduced as well.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
No newspapermen did his job, no, not one
I wondered who had found those videos of Gruber, and someone has covered that story, too. It’s a great one:
Rich Weinstein is not a reporter. He does not have a blog. Until this week, the fortysomething’s five-year old Twitter account had a follower count in the low double digits…
Weinstein dates his accidental citizen journalism back to the end of 2013 and the first run of insurance cancellations or policy changes. He was among the people who got a letter informing him that his old policy did not meet ACA standards.
“When Obama said ‘If you like your plan, you can keep your plan, period’—frankly, I believed him,” says Weinstein. “He very often speaks with qualifiers. When he said ‘period,’ there were no qualifiers. You can understand that when I lost my own plan, and the replacement cost twice as much, I wasn’t happy. So I’m watching the news, and at that time I was thinking: Hey, the administration was not telling people the truth, and the media was doing nothing!”
So Weinstein, new plan in hand, started watching the news. “These people were showing up on the shows, calling themselves architects of the law,” he recalls. “I saw David Cutler, Zeke Emanuel, Jonathan Gruber, people like that. I wondered if these guys had some type of paper trail. So I looked into what Dr. Cutler had said and written, and it was generally all about cost control. After I finished with Cutler, I went to Dr. Gruber. I assume I went through every video, every radio interview, every podcast. Every everything.”
Read the post: http://neoneocon.com/2014/11/13/the-thorn-in-grubers-side/
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Much Needed Moral Clarity from Sarah Hoyt
Sarah Hoyt writes about the nature of Utopianism, and gives reasons why the the Utopian revolution, mean to turn men into angels, always end up turning them into devils. She explains a point which always confounded me, namely, why there is a strong streak of sadism in Leftism, when the individual Leftists themselves seem mild and meek and cowardly to the point of masochism. I am grateful for the illumination.
Read the whole thing, by all means. http://accordingtohoyt.com/2014/11/14/table-settings-at-the-cannibal-feast/
But here is a sample:
Revolutions like the US, which changed governance but didn’t presume to change the way people worked, in their minds and hearts, don’t turn into cannibal feasts. OTOH revolutions like the French, where people descended/aspired to changing the names of the weekdays and the months, in order to construct a completely different humanity, inevitably end up in a pile of blood-soaked corpses.
So do revolutions like the Russian and the Chinese, and others.
The difference is this: these revolutions make functioning as a normal human a crime. This requires changing your very thoughts and the way you process reality. And they presume to divine from your smallest actions, your most casual lapses, that you have commited a thought-crime.
This, of course, requires special people who can look into the actions and every day assumptions of others and tell them where they went wrong.
The process is bad enough when done by a minister or another nominally trained person. (I am not talking here of ministers in normal denominations, who are usually trained and don’t want to remake humanity, just get it to behave a little better.) In extreme cases, it creates Jim Jones. It is nightmarish when done by the left, which means it is done by people given power and authority to do this by the grace of totally arbitrary characteristics: where they were born/when/what pigmentation their skin has/what happens to be between their legs/whom they like to sleep with. This is not an exhaustive list, but it should give you an idea that none of these attributes is magical, and none of them should confer the authority to discern and judge the secrets of other’s hearts.
But the SJWs believe it does. They believe someone who is born with more victim cards, even if the person was in fact born very wealthy and never experienced a day’s hardship, immediately can judge them and tell them when they’re exhibiting “privilege” which is a taint that attaches to other seemingly arbitrary characteristics, no matter how poor or downtrodden people born with them are.
This sets them up to be abused in exactly the way that Synova describes. Worse, it sets them up to join the mob and wail for the blood of innocent people in whom one of these “anointed ones” discerned guilt. Not to do so, might mean they were tainted with the guilt themselves, after all.
By this process, they saddle themselves with psychopaths as leaders (yeah, some of the anointed ones are merely true believers, but that kind of power inevitably attracts psychopaths and sadists) and make any organization, place, country or government they take over into hell on Earth, instead of the utopia they imagine.
The state of irrationality is demonstrated by the commenter who thought I was RH because of our “similar rhetoric.” There are in fact not even mild similarities between an extreme leftist and myself. BUT both of us made him feel pain. So, therefore we are similar and possibly the same.
That means the commenter had the ability to think/react/avoid pain of a nematode, if that high.
I would enjoin those people caught in the vortex of accusation/appeasement/abasement to take a good look at what they’re doing.
A society where the rules have to be divined by special individuals (no? Would any rational human being think of “lady” as an insult, till the SJWs declared it so?) is not conducive to liberty. It’s not conducive to kindness. It’s damaging to the ability to think.
In the end it makes you animals, joining a mob to avoid being killed.
I suggest if you are caught in it, or suspect you might be, that you re-read Animal Farm.
Oddly enough, I recognize that name of the blogger who, on James Nicoll’s site, accuses Sarah Hoyt of being Requires Hate. He used to leave fewmets regularly on my blog. Since his comments were routinely toward the Nutbag side of the Nutbag-to-Sadist spectrum of Leftwing politics, I would have assumed it far more likely than he himself is Requires Hate than any otherwise.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
He Gets It
http://techraptor.net/content/gamergate-media-gave-away-america
There is someone out there whose faith in Leftism was shattered by Gamergate, and the scales fell from his eyes. I had assumed Leftists, one and all, would do their typical Doublethink trick and ignore reality, and not see what the media is. My faith in mankind is restored.
After Tuesday, I don’t know that I can call myself a liberal anymore.
It’s not that I don’t want to call myself a liberal. After all, as I understand liberal ideals, I still believe in most of them, if not all of them. No, I guess I’m not a liberal anymore because Bustle, The Verge, Salon, Polygon, Kotaku, Gamasutra, The Mary Sue, The NY Times, The LA Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC, and others spent the last 2 months telling me I’m no longer wanted as an unashamed, voting liberal. They did this based on my primary hobby and the Y chromosome I was born with. They did this after some of them told me I was dead or needed to die for the crime of holding my primary hobby as a part of my identity. They did this because some people I don’t know made threats against people I’d never heard of before; subsequently, I was told I needed to die because of my Y chromosome and my hobby.
And for what? The nebulous notion of making gaming “better” than it is now? To stroke the sense of entitlement of self-proclaimed “game developers”? To turn game developer into the third vocation in human history that is competence optional behind politician and journalist (apparently)? Equality of Outcomes between AAA game development, good independent game development, and terrible independent game development? An esoteric notion of games as art, based on meaningless definitions of “gamer” and “game” combined with a pejorative definition of “consumerism”? A wanton desire to usurp the will of the consumer and the creative process?
I hope character assassinating gamers without regard for collateral damage over the last 2 months was worth it.
Tuesday resulted in several firsts for me. I’d never voted full ticket—not in 20 years of participating in my civic duty. I did on Tuesday. I’ve often considered or voted for third party candidates when at the polls over the last 20 years. Tuesday I did not. Over the past 20 years, I’d spent between 2 and 6 weeks studying candidates and ballot measures to be as informed as possible. This election cycle, I was finished in hours. On this day, I stand before you to say that I did my part to hand the Legislative branch of the American government to the Republicans. Not that one vote matters in the grand scheme of things, but every traditionally Democratic vote that goes Republican is a two vote swing. So the Republicans own the Senate, but not with a “super majority” to completely dictate terms legislatively.
From my new perspective after Tuesday, it’s one down and three to go: Super majority in the Senate, the Presidency, and one Supreme Court justice. I’m disgusted for writing that last sentence.
What choice did I have? It would appear that the DiGRA was right—The Playful is Political. It would also appear that my politics are now a matter of survival for pieces of my identity that I hold dear. It can never be emphasized enough that 10 news outlets on the same day said I was dead or needed to die because of those parts of my identity. Will I forgive? Eventually. Time heals all wounds, after all. Will I forget? Never. The imgur’s will exist forever, as will the archives and screen caps of everything the hypocrites, charlatans, and their willing media puppets said and did to make me question two parts of my identity: gamer and liberal. It is only by force of will and self-determination that I don’t let those people immure me in self-doubt and regret. Right now, there is virtually no price too high for them to pay for what they tried to do to my identity.
There are roughly 730 days until Election Day 2016. The media that drove me away from my political leanings is going to need every one of those days to convince me that bashing gamers from August 28th until Tuesday was just a misunderstanding. They will need every one of those days to convince me that my input into the liberal ideology is valued regardless of my hobbies, support for GamerGate, or my gender. The alternative is to hand both the Legislative and Executive branch of the US Government over to Republicans, and as I found out on Tuesday, it is well within my capability to do so.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
November 12, 2014
Star Wars On Women
An update on the war on women!
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Superversive Blog: Christian Magic — Part Two
The beautiful and talented Mrs Wright holds forth on the topic of Christian Magic:
In Part One, Deeper Magic From Before the Dawn of Time, I discussed the philosophy, the idea, of Christian Magic. In this second part, I want to give some practical examples.
First, the definition: Christian Magic is when objects or ideas from the Judeo-Christian tradition appear in the story as part of the magic. By magic here, I mean specifically “a mood of mystery and wonder,” and not “the occult” per se.
Also, I am differentiating between this use of Christian ideas and stories that have a pious nature. By pious, I mean a kind of assumption that Christian and holy things are good but everything else is bad. In case not everyone understands what I mean by the term pious, as applied to writing, here is an example from the work of fanfiction, Hogwarts School of Prayers and Miracles:
“Tell me how to get to this heaven place!” Harry cried wistfully, clapping his hands together. Sometimes the wisdom of the little ones is really amazing. We think we grownups know it all; but then God speaks through the mouths of little ones; and shows us how we are all mortals struggling along the path of life. Humility.
This is a superb example of what Christian Magic is not.
Pious stories do not feel magical. There is no mystery, no wonder. Instead, the basic assumption is that everyone (who matters) already agrees with the premise, so things “we” agree with are praised and everything else is trashed.
In stories of Christian Magic, on the other hand, the Christianity is introduced in the same mood and manner as the rest of the magic.
And now, some examples:
First, I will include, yet again, the quote from C. S. Lewis about deeper magic from before the dawn of time. Yes, we just read it in part one, but it’s that good…
“It means that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.” (Aslan, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.)
At this point, perhaps you are asking, is there Christian Magic, outside of Narnia? The answer is yes—even if no one else does it quite so well.
An early example of Christian Magic comes from the book Dracula. We now think of it as par for the course that crosses drive back vampires. So much so, that many vampire stories have to take time to establish that crosses do not affect vampires, if they don’t want readers to assume they will. But when the matter came up in Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, it was new. (Or rather, it was an old folk lore idea brought to light in a new way.)
By all means, read the whole thing: http://www.ljagilamplighter.com/2014/11/12/superversive-blog-christian-magic-part-two/
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Building a Library
An expectant father has paid me the high honor of trusting my judgement and asking me what books he should buy and stock in his nursery for this children. And he hopes to have many (may God hear him!)
I will recommend some books, but I’d like to hear your recommendations as well, dear reader.
But first I will recommend that no matter what you read to your kids, dear fathers and fathers-to-be, that you just READ TO YOU KIDS!
I am in the habit of reading to my children every night, weekdays and weekends, except on days set aside for novel writing, when the wife reads to the kids. I have done it regularly as sunset every night since their infancy, and also told stories orally, the most successful of which is my version of Jack and the Beanstalk. (In my version, Jack owns a pressure suit, and so can endure the drop in pressure and temperature as he climbs to the stratosphere).
The upshot of it is, that my kids heard all my favorites from when I was a child, including science fiction books and fantasies, that otherwise they never would have heard or read, and to this day I spend an hour each Sunday reading to them from the Bible, or from CS Lewis, or from GK Chesterton, or from Peter Kreeft. They are teenagers, but are bright teenagers, and none of this material is over their heads (except that the allusions and references of Chesterton I need to stop and explain. And the stopping and explaining usually turns into digressions, lectures, jokes and side material. Chesterton’s THE EVERLASTING MAN is being read so slowly, since I stop for a digression every paragraph, perhaps every line, so that we now call it THE EVERLASTING BOOK.
Making it an unbreakable habit to read is much more important than what you read.
That said, let me frame my recommendations in terms of what morals they teach. For as ‘Wright’s Ninth Rule of Writing’ states, every story teaches a moral, whether intended by the author or not. Whatever the winning behavior is, whatever behavior in the tale leads to success, achieves the stated goal, that is the moral being taught and the example being presented.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Go go Gamergate!
What can you do?
Friends, if you want the so called Social Justice Warriors and their agenda of defeminized woman and immasculate men and sexual perversion and abomination to fail, and their tactics of gossip and backbiting and anti-White racism and anti-Christian bigotry to fail and fail hard, you are probably wondering what you can do to help.
The answer is that you can do simple and persistent things.
Here is a message from my publisher:
General
Support the good. Don’t support the SJWs in any of their flavors.
Get on Twitter. Tweet once with #OpSkyNet. Retweet and favorite one #GamerGate tweet per day.
Email one Gawker (or other #GamerGate target) advertiser per week.
Join Recommend. Write one Game- or Book-related reco, good or bad, per week and I’ll add it to the appropriate list. Be sure to follow me first so I will see it.
Try an indy game from a #GamerGate developer.
Submit an article to Reaxxion.
Speak out. Do a blog post. Tell a friend.
Stand by those under attack, especially if you don’t agree with them. The primary SJW tactic is 3rd Generation. They cut off, isolate, then swarm. They can’t do that if you refuse to permit them to separate you from their target.
He says more and the topic, and with more authority than I can muster:
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2014/11/what-we-can-do.html
and here
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2014/11/what-you-can-do-part-2.html
And, for those of you interesting in what the media thinks of Gamergate (and I mean that sliver of media which is not owned, body and soul, by the Progressives) , I am pleased to see signs of support:
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
November 10, 2014
Sadohilarity from Corriea
The International Lord of Hate, Larry Correia, who is actually one of the nicest guys I have ever exchanged letters with, has a post for today which I would like any of my loyal and beloved readers to read.
However TRIGGER WARNING!! Don’t be drinking hot cocoa because you might spit it at your computer monitor if your laughter-for-sarcasm meter is not property aligned. Some men are sadistic. Some men are hilarious. Mr Correia is both at once, a condition of awesomeness that should have its own neologism, like sadohilarious.
Enjoy–
http://monsterhunternation.com/2014/11/10/sjw-cannibal-feeding-frenzy/
Personally, I love when SJWs begin to eat each other.
So this article has been making the rounds, and I’ve repeatedly been asked to comment on it.
Apparently a member of the literati SJW army—and super prestigious Campbell nominee for BEST NEW WRITER—has turned out to be a huge internet troll, with a bunch of aliases, attacking and tormenting people. Of course, those of you who read this blog or followed Sad Puppies are like, duh… They attack and torment Larry, and anybody who agrees with him nonstop, but no my friends… Benjanun Sriduangkaew did the unthinkable and used their regular SJW tactics of threats, insults, intimidation, and career sabotage against fellow SJWs, and that is super badthink!
Now, when you threaten, intimidate, troll, and try to sabotage the career of anybody who disagrees with the Social Justice narrative, then that is doubleplus good! Try not to get confused.
…Basically, this “up and coming writer” who was nominated for a prestigious writing award for having one pro sale short story and being a Thai Lesbian (which is totally worth like ten books of actual writing) treated fellow SJWs the way that SJWs treat all of us, and that is the worst thing ever. And now she should be shunned by all the other proper good thinkers for hate speech crimes and unsafe feels. She will now be banned from Wiscon’s Racially Segregated Safe Zones and I’m sure people will threaten not to attend WorldCon because she might call them fat.
A note on being an “up and coming writer”, as far as I know this woman had a handful of short stories, only one of which would have counted as a professional sale, and a blog where she wrote about Social Justice crap, and that was enough to get her nominated for the Campbell Award for Best New Author. It doesn’t look like this nominee for Best New Writer has published much since.
…
f you really want to see just how stupid people can get, read the comments, where SJWs argue about “privilege”, where a bunch of white, liberal suburbanites excuse attacks on people who disagree with them, because they probably possess some nebulous concept of privilege. Like me for example, I grew up with Portuguese Dairy Farmer Privilege, where all that back breaking manual labor, knee deep in cow shit, at 3:00 in the morning, in order to scrape by in near poverty all those years, somehow turned me white and made it so that it was okay for SJWs to lie about me.
Privilege sounds awesome. You guys should totally get some of it.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Queen Victoria to give women a vote in Science Fiction
Charlie Martin and Sarah Hoyt have an article over at PJ Lifestyles demonstrating the stump-stupid unreality of the claims of the social justice warriors that ruined SFWA.
By all means read the whole thing here: http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2014/11/07/the-women-some-women-cant-see/
So The Atlantic has discovered women in Science Fiction. To be more precise, The Atlantic has discovered that women are “rising” in science fiction. Again. Apparently they asked Ann Leckie about women and awards in Science Fiction and Leckie, best known for writing a novel in which people have two genders and pretend to only see the female one, explained:
But both Leckie and Hurley express a combination of optimism and cynicism when it comes to whether or not women in the science fiction world are actually making progress, and how quickly. Leckie points out that this isn’t the first time women have been in the spotlight for writing award winning science fiction. “Sometimes I feel very optimistic about it, I say look at this, there are more women getting awards,” she says. “And then I look back and the ‘70s. The ‘70s was a decade that was crammed with prominent women science fiction writers, and a lot of women made their debut in that decade or really came to prominence.”
This was the time of Ursula K. Le Guin and Vonda McIntyre, who both won joint Nebulas and Hugos. Anne McCaffrey, Kate Wilhelm, Joan Vinge, and Marion Zimmer Bradley were all nominated for Hugo Awards that decade. In 1973, the Alice Bradley Sheldon, who wrote under the pen name James Tiptree, Jr. wrote the famous, feminist short story called “The Women Men Don’t See.” Joanna Russ’s feminist science fiction book The Female Man was published in 1975 and nominated that year for a Nebula.
Then, Leckie says, the ‘80s and ‘90s happened. The rate of women nominated and winning awards dipped down again. And today, once again, society has this idea that women who write science fiction are a strange and interesting breed. In other words, today the community is having the same conversation it had in the ‘70s about women writing science fiction.
This is beyond precious. First of all, I’d like to inform The Atlantic that the (ever-shrinking) community they’re talking about is the Science Fiction Writers of America, the same organization that went on the war path against two members for using the word “lady” which is apparently derogatory. Of course, people with such high standards are having the best conversations. At least, they’re having the best conversations, if the conversations you’re looking for are “excuse me, is the sky made of Swiss or Guyere?”
As for Ms. [sic] Leckie, I believe she is confused about the history of the field. In fact, women went right on winning awards through the eighties and nineties.
For instance, this is a list of the Nebulas won by women since 1982 to 2011.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
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