John C. Wright's Blog, page 52

Victory

A reader named VunderGuyasks how we Christians and our allies among all men of goodwill shall win the Culture Wars?

How do we especially take back Hollywood? How do we take back academia? How do we take back the publishing world?

Another reader, Brain Niemeier, speaking on another topic, nonetheless answered this question so well, that I here quote him in full:

PC’s ability to perpetuate itself is limited by what Mr. Wright calls the Unreality Principle. In everyday life, real world experience slowly but inevitably “rebuilds the compiler”. That’s why the Left must cling to their control over academia and the media. They use these mouthpieces to constantly barrage us with PC propaganda while the government coerces our conformity via hate crimes legislation and affirmative action.

Human nature cannot be changed and always reasserts itself. The fire always burns no matter how often the PC Commissars insist that we can touch it without harm. If that weren’t the case, there would be no reason to oppose them.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Storming the Moral High Ground! — New Blog Feature. Guest Blog Opportunities!

 

A message from the beautiful and talented Mrs Wright:

Hey folks.

I plan to start a new Wednesday Blog Feature:

Lighting the Lamp

A blog of the Superversive Literary Movement

because fiction should not be less glorious than life

This feature will include, but not be limited to:

 

Inspirational stories — to help us remember what we are writing for.
Stories of perseverance in sorrow – to remind us of the indomitable human spirit
Reviews of books, movies, etc that are inspiring, heroic, or merely good fun
Musings on literature, life, and other related topics — ranging widely

Anyone who would like to guest blog on some even vaguely related topic,

let me know:

http://arhyalon.livejournal.com/360031.html?mode=reply#add_comment

or:

At gmail Username: arhyalon

 

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

Rightwing Political Correctness?

A reader complains of the obvious incompetence and blatant dishonesty of Politicians of the Right, and asks a perfectly reasonable question of me:

“So why, then, do you associate ‘progressiveism’ with PC, and ‘conservativism’ with NOT PC, when it seems clear to me that EVERYONE in the realm of American politics is full of bull hockey?”

The answer is simple: Political Correctness does not mean ‘bull hockey’. It is a specific political philosophy with a particular origin story and a particular goal.

It does not refer to dishonesty, but to the particular type of philosophical dishonesty as first preached by the Frankfurt School of Marxism, which has since formed the foundation of modern Progressivism.

Allow me to quote from others, who can describe the phenomenon more succinctly than I.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Your Book of Gold

A guy with the vunderbar name of VunderGuy takes a frustrated pen in hand and writes:

Even great authors like you, Vox Day, and Larry are relatively obscure, so what’s a chump like me to do to have an impact, ESPECIALLY as a writer?

All Saint Veronica did was wipe the face of Christ with a cloth as He was being led off to crucifixion, a single moment of compassion and pity. And she was granted sainthood for the act.

If you only write one book in your whole life, and only sell 600 copies or less, nonetheless, I assure you, I solemnly assure you, that this book will be someone’s absolutely favorite book of all time, and it will come to him on some dark day and give him sunlight, and open his eyes and fill his heart and make him see things in life even you never suspected, and will be his most precious tale, and it will live in his heart like the Book of Gold.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Marxist Feminism’s Ruined Lives

This is from the pen of Mallory Millet, sister of Kate Millet, author of SEXUAL POLITICS.

—————————————

“When women go wrong men go right after them.”

– Mae West

“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”  Winston Churchill wrote this over a century ago.

During my junior year in high school, the nuns asked about our plans for after we graduated. When I said I was going to attend State University, I noticed their disappointment.  I asked my favorite nun, “Why?” She answered, “That means you’ll leave four years later a communist and an atheist!”

What a giggle we girls had over that. “How ridiculously unsophisticated these nuns are,” we thought. Then I went to the university and four years later walked out a communist and an atheist, just as my sister Katie had six years before me.

Sometime later, I was a young divorcee with a small child. At the urging of my sister, I relocated to NYC after spending years married to an American executive stationed in Southeast Asia. The marriage over, I was making a new life for my daughter and me.  Katie said, “Come to New York.  We’re making revolution! Some of us are starting the National Organization of Women and you can be part of it.”

I hadn’t seen her for years.  Although she had tormented me when we were youngsters, those memories were faint after my Asian traumas and the break-up of my marriage.  I foolishly mistook her for sanctuary in a storm. With so much time and distance between us, I had forgotten her emotional instability.

And so began my period as an unwitting witness to history. I stayed with Kate and her lovable Japanese husband, Fumio, in a dilapidated loft on The Bowery as she finished her first book, a PhD thesis for Columbia University, “Sexual Politics.”

It was 1969. Kate invited me to join her for a gathering at the home of her friend, Lila Karp. They called the assemblage a “consciousness-raising-group,” a typical communist exercise, something practiced in Maoist China.  We gathered at a large table as the chairperson opened the meeting with a back-and-forth recitation, like a Litany, a type of prayer done in Catholic Church. But now it was Marxism, the Church of the Left, mimicking religious practice:

“Why are we here today?” she asked.

“To make revolution,” they answered.

“What kind of revolution?” she replied.

“The Cultural Revolution,” they chanted.

“And how do we make Cultural Revolution?” she demanded.

“By destroying the American family!” they answered.

“How do we destroy the family?” she came back.

“By destroying the American Patriarch,” they cried exuberantly.

“And how do we destroy the American Patriarch?” she replied.

“By taking away his power!”

“How do we do that?”

“By destroying monogamy!” they shouted.

“How can we destroy monogamy?”

Their answer left me dumbstruck, breathless, disbelieving my ears.  Was I on planet earth?  Who were these people?

“By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution and homosexuality!” they resounded.

They proceeded with a long discussion on how to advance these goals by establishing The National Organization of Women.  It was clear they desired nothing less than the utter deconstruction of Western society. The upshot was that the only way to do this was “to invade every American institution.  Every one must be permeated with ‘The Revolution’”: The media, the educational system, universities, high schools, K-12, school boards, etc.; then, the judiciary, the legislatures, the executive branches and even the library system.

It fell on my ears as a ludicrous scheme, as if they were a band of highly imaginative children planning a Brinks robbery; a lark trumped up on a snowy night amongst a group of spoiled brats over booze and hashish.

To me, this sounded silly.  I was enduring culture shock after having been cut-off from my homeland, living in Third-World countries for years with not one trip back to the United States. I was one of those people who, upon returning to American soil, fell out of the plane blubbering with ecstasy at being home in the USA. I knelt on the ground covering it with kisses.  I had learned just exactly how delicious was the land of my birth and didn’t care what anyone thought because they just hadn’t seen what I had or been where I had been.  I had seen factory workers and sex-slaves chained to walls.

How could they know?  Asia is beyond our ken and, as they say, utterly inscrutable, and a kind of hell I never intended to revisit.  I lived there, not junketed, not visited like sweet little tourists — I’d conducted households and tried to raise a child. I had outgrown the communism of my university days and was clumsily groping my way back to God.

How could twelve American women who were the most respectable types imaginable — clean and privileged graduates of esteemed institutions: Columbia, Radcliffe, Smith, Wellesley, Vassar; the uncle of one was Secretary of War under Franklin Roosevelt — plot such a thing?  Most had advanced degrees and appeared cogent, bright, reasonable and good. How did these people rationally believe they could succeed with such vicious grandiosity?  And why?

Read the rest: http://www.truthrevolt.org/commentary/millett-marxist-feminisms-ruined-lives

 

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

Saint James Matamoros, Open the Eyes of the Blind

This is a reprint of material essays previously appearing in this space on this date, for the benefit of any readers who missed them the first time, and in memory of those who died this day:

I have three questions: What is this war? Who is the enemy? How shall it be fought?

WHAT IS THIS WAR?

This war is a Jihad. This war is the first in history that is entirely a psychological and propaganda war with little or no military component to it. The losses of Coalition troopers in Iraq so far have not equally one hour of losses storming Normandy Beach: painful as they are to the families and loved ones, from a historical point of view, they are utterly insignificant.

Only propaganda victories are significant. The enemy does not seek land or gain. They seek hegemony in the Middle East, culminating in the destruction of Israel, and an increase in their power and influence in the West, culminating in an unwillingness or even an inability of Western powers to halt the spread of Sharia law. To achieve this, they must make us afraid, and must make us seem weak and vapid. Our goal is the opposite: to so terrify the practitioners of Jihad that they are ashamed to practice their evil and bloodthirsty religion in public, much less to spread it. Our goal is to halt and to reverse the spread of Sharia law, by any means, peaceful or violent.

Those who practice a non-violent or non-Sharia version of Islam make no more difference to the outcome of the war than the peaceloving Germans who supported Hitler or the freedom loving Chinese who supported Mao: to be precise, no difference at all. We need not seek their approval nor avoid offending them. We may safely disregard any mention of them at all until and unless they make a difference, and they purge the Jihadist from their midst and actively hound them to shame and to death.

On a military level, we have taken no damage: the loss of trains in London or Madrid or a skyscraper in Manhattan does not decrease our war fighting capability in any way.

On the spiritual and psychological level, as far as the Left is concerned, the war is already concluded. Psychologically, the Left regard fighting this war as absurd, impossible, unimaginable and unjust — fighting is simply unimaginable to them, or if they imagine it, they picture our side as the purveyors of genocide. Liberals do not thing logically; they think in vivid pictures and simplistic black and white images and short, uncomplicated slogans,. In this case, the word “war” produces in their minds the image  of the sullen and smoking chimneys above Auschwitz, dark with human ash.

The Left never meant to fight on behalf of Western civilization in any case; most know so little about it that they cannot imagine it being threatened; or they are ashamed of it; or they are too high minded to fight for any cause, no matter how noble; or too stupid to see any threat, no matter how plain.

Those of you aligned with the political and cultural Left who have some reservations about the eventual predominance of Sharia law, those of you loyal to Western ideals, you have been betrayed by your leaders and mentors.

WHO IS THE ENEMY?

The enemy is Islam.

Islam is a political party with religious trappings; it is a system of laws which, because it controls all aspects of life, also controls the religious rites and beliefs of its adherents.

It is a theocracy, not a denomination able or willing to live under a scheme of religious liberty.

In the West, the consensus of history came to the agreement that the wars between the Christian denominations was too violent to maintain peace and civil order, and that therefore the state would be amputated of its power to interfere in Church affairs. Matters of religious conviction and conscience, in civilized and Christian nations, were ruled to be beyond the orbit of state power.

This reasoning does not apply to totalitarian political movements that just so happen to have a theocratic legal theory demanding the conquest, conversion, or extermination of all rival faiths.

A theocracy is not a denomination.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

The Wright Perspective: New Wave Utopias

My latest is up at Every Joe: http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/09/10/lifestyle/best-utopian-world-science-fiction-raising-family/

We continue our leisurely tour through the Utopian worlds proposed by science fiction with an eye to which one would be best for raising a family.

I should mention my reason for using childrearing rather than sightseeing or adventuring as the touchstone for selecting a society to join: when you rear children, you are obligated to give moral instruction and leadership, to guide their formation of virtues and priorities. Your society at large and your neighbors (real or, through the entertainment industry, electronic) either help or hinder the process. By the thought-experiment of choosing our neighbors in utopia, the values and virtues of the neighborhood, and, more to the point, of your own soul, are brought to light.

In last week’s episode we looked briefly at three Golden Age views of utopia, from A.E. van Vogt, from Ayn Rand, and from Robert Heinlein. Each seemed to be an exaggeration of the primary virtue with which the writer was concerned: for Van Vogt’s Null-A Venus, that virtue was sanity, the proper orientation of the mind to reality; for Ayn Rand’s Galt’s Gulch, it was self-reliance taken to a logical extreme, as if the quid-pro-quo of capitalism could also be used for personal relationships; for Robert Heinlein’s Covenant, it was something of the humble yet frontier spirit of ‘grit’ and gumption that made America, oddly combined with the smug Sexual Revolution vices of self indulgence and sexual perversion which so rapidly are unmaking America.

The problem is that any virtue, if it becomes the sole virtue of a society, crowds out other virtues: there is no portrayal of artistic wildness in the sober Venus of van Vogt, no altruism in Ayn Rand’s Utopia of Greed, no chastity nor prudence in Heinlein’s vision of a tomorrow of orgies.

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

An Anecdote

Few things are duller than gamers talking about old games, but I will risk it here, because this anecdote so neatly encapsulates the problem of games with overpowered, or even superpowered characters.

Once upon a time, I fell in with a group of role players who worked for West End Games, the company that brings us both PARANOIA and STAR WARS RPG’s. They were a fine bunch of fellows, and we found we had an evening to kill, so I suggested that I moderate a roleplaying game of my own devising: a pick-up game, so to speak.

Over the years, I have adduced a relatively simple method to start a game at the drop of a hat without the cumbersome process of rolling up characters.

Typically, I tell players, “You can play any character from any book or story I have read or seen. Anyone. If you are from a movie I’ve seen or a comic I’ve read, I will know your background, powers, and limitations.”

The reason for my generous indifference to how strong your characters are, or what powers they have, is that I like to put players in a background where they are faced with a moral quandary, or a threat that can only be solved by tact or cunning or creative thinking.

For background, I have a multiverse setting which is a combination of Norse Myths, Zelazny’s Amber, Zelazny’s Roadmarks, Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion, miscegenated with LeGuin’s Earthsea, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, Gene Wolfe’s Urth, Highlander, Dr Who, HP Lovecraft.

Over the years, I have developed fairly sound guidelines as to how to handle crossovers (Kal-El of Krypton, for example, when in Amber is only as strong as Gerard) or how different ideas or systems of magic tend to work when outside their home element.

There were four players, three boys and one girl.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

On Inspiration

I am asked a rather difficult question. It is not difficult because it is unclear, but, rather, it is difficult because so many modern assumptions about the nature of mind and body are unexamined, and, upon examination, are unsound.

A reader with the addictive yet intellectual name of Concept Junkie asks:

Are you suggesting the mechanisms of unconscious mental processes are not, or cannot be the source of these inspirations? Must such an inspiration (and yes, I suppose that term needs to be defined if we are going down this route) necessarily come from the action of an outside entity (such as an angel, or the Lord Himself)?

I’m just trying to understand what you have against the idea that we don’t have a perfect understanding or control of our thoughts and memories and that they can behave in a way in which they seem to have a life of their own, or that they somehow work without our direct and explicit supervision. It seems to me that such a flawed mastery and understanding of one’s own mental processes is wholly consistent with a fallen nature.

When I eat something, I have only a vague idea of how the food is digested, broken down, absorbed, and utilized by my body, but that doesn’t mean there is there is a “secret mind” in my gut turning Slim Jims and milkshakes into bone and muscle (and fat, lots of fat).

Similarly, there are some human minds that can perform feats of memory or skill that are far beyond the norm, and these symptoms often correlate with some form of dysfunction or even injury. If you read the story of the guy who had a brain injury and suddenly manifested an impressive level of musical ability that he had heretofore never displayed (and I’m afraid I don’t recall the details of the story), does that mean the man is now possessed of some foreign intelligence that is giving him this talent, or that whatever trauma caused the neural networks and other structures in the brain to reorganize allowed processes of which he is not consciously aware to work, or work better to allow him to perform these feats?

I’m just trying to understand how you see this kind of inspiration, the inspiration that allows someone to solve a problem when he “stops” thinking about it, or allows him wake up with a unique melody or story idea in his head or any of the other ways that our minds surprise us.

My remarks:

I am not suggesting the mechanisms of unconscious mental processes are not, or cannot be the source of these inspirations?

I am stating as a conclusion of a line of reasoning at the mechanism of unconscious mental processes, assuming such a thing exists at all, are not and cannot be the source of these inspirations.

This is for the same reason that I do not think a bunny or a dog could write a sonnet.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Hannah Wallen on Social Justice War Games

An analysis of Gamergate, described in terms of the economics of social ladder climbing.

Short answer: the shrieking of the pseudo-feminists and pseudo-Marxists and pseudo-whinebabies is due to an attempt by the journalists and other social justice warriors, nerds high on the social ladder, to gain or retain their alleged social pecking order rank by demeaning the gamer nerds, accusing them of witchcraft, and throwing them to the witchhunters.

Here is the link.

http://honeybadgerbrigade.com/2014/09/07/gamergate-journalism-as-a-social-justice-war-game/

Her words:

The only people who are equipped to fight off that rushing tide of manipulation and control are those for whom potential social rejection doesn’t constitute a threat.

That, gamers, is why gamergate is not about any one of the damseling drama queens receiving the coverage in gaming media that is now spilling over into other news sources. It not about the media themselves, either, or the companies supporting the industry.

It’s about us.

We’re not under attack because we owe anyone anything we have refused to give, or because we’ve done anything we shouldn’t have done. We’re under attack because we’re one of the last shields that human individuality in western society has.

It’s absolutely vital that gamers continue to reject the shaming and demands being launched at us by elitist social engineers in journalism. We’re the line they can’t be allowed to cross, the last bastion of intellectual freedom. Out of everyone, we have the one factor that can stop them from owning the social landscape of the western world. Out of everyone, we have the power of immunity to their weapon of choice. We have the ability to turn that very same weapon around and use it against them by not only refusing to adopt their narrative, but making our rejection of it hurt them financially.

This is how we’re going to hold the line and begin pushing back. It’s going to be ridiculously ugly. The beast that is social justice elitism is not going to go peacefully, nor is it going to change its tactics. We’re going to see that  monstrous, flailing attempt to shame us into compliance continue. We’re going to see the accusations and whining, damseling and demonization all accelerate as the elites try to smash the resistance without understanding why it exists. And then hopefully we’ll see like-minded individuals joining the ranks of resistance as they realize they don’t have to be adopt the victim narrative to be part of a community. If we can achieve just that one thing by standing our ground and defending our territory, we can push that bullying force out, take our community back, and get back to gaming in peace.

 

Read the rest of this entry »

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