John C. Wright's Blog, page 73

Quote for the Day: The tiny, thwarted blastema of a thought

From David Bentley Hart, my hero:

Simply said, we have reached a moment in Western history when, despite all appearances, no meaningful public debate over belief and unbelief is possible. Not only do convinced secularists no longer understand what the issue is; they are incapable of even suspecting that they do not understand, or of caring whether they do. The logical and imaginative grammars of belief, which still informed the thinking of earlier generations of atheists and skeptics, are no longer there. In their place, there is now—where questions of the divine, the supernatural, or the religious are concerned—only a kind of habitual intellectual listlessness.

You may read the article in context here: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/05/gods-and-gopniks

And, come to think of it, if you have the free time to read my humble journal, you have the time to read FIRST THINGS, which is somewhat higher than I on the Great Scale of Eternal Being.

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

On the Way!

I wrote a short story in honor of Easter I hoped to share with my readers. But my schedule has been a little hectic, and I had to take the kids to see CAPTAIN AMERICA — well worth the ticket price, may  I add.

I hope to get the story up this week. It was based on an opening of the story I wrote for a workshop. We each had an hour to write a one hundred word opening paragraph. I wrote a thousand, and I read mine last because I was the pro in the room. I did not know what to do with the opening until now.

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

Banned

Just a note for those of you who do not take me seriously.

Someone whose name I will not bother to repeat had the effrontery to write this question to me:

(quoting me) I am as patient as Job, and so entertain any comment that does not devolve either into swearwords or Holocaust denial.

Mr. Wright, would you have any respect at all for a Protestant blogger who refused to countenance “Spanish Inquisition denial”, let alone, say, a Buddhist blogger adopting the same stance in a show of solidarity with Protestants?

My father in law was a Jew in Germany during the war. He saw the camps. He wounded his hands tearing down the fence of one when it was liberated. He was awarded a Purple Heart.

I am not required by any possible interpretation of the rules of courtesy and goodsportsmanship in debate to listen to lying-ass would-be National Socialist vermin racist filth call my dead father-in-law a liar. Such a creature is an enemy to whom no quarter nor parley need be granted.

Let no one dare to send any message to me on this topic again.

[image error]If the picture is too small to be clear, it is the shoes of the victims gathered at Dachau by the efficiency of the Germans. Count the number and divide by two.

 

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

A Sneer is Not an Argument

Eoin Moloney writes and asks:

Mr. Wright,

I have read you for some time, and respect your opinion, but I was hoping you could respond in more detail to the claims advanced by the commenter on Strange Notions, the one that is quoted earlier in this thread. I reproduce here a few of the choice points that the commentators seem to be making against you.

This is the second time I have been asked this. It is a complete waste of time. I thought I was clear that there is no point to answering heckling. One cannot reason with a sneer because a sneer is not a rebuttal of anything.

However, out of sheer courtesy and generosity of soul, I will answer what I can. The questions are in bold.

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

Teoria Unificată a Cîmpului Scrîntelii

My grand unified field theory of madness has been translated and published in Romanian at the conservative website Inliniedreapta.net. It is just in time to help the Romanian public understand the insane viciousness of the pro-Putin newspapers attacking them, and to understand why the center-right caved.

For those of you who speak the language, here is the link: http://inliniedreapta.net/dereferinta/john-c-wright-teoria-unificata-cimpului-scrintelii/

This is the first part (sections 1-4); the second part will be published in the next weeks.

For those of you curious to read the original in English, it is here: http://www.scifiwright.com/2014/03/the-unified-field-theory-of-madness/

My thanks go out to Mr. Liviu Utiu who honored me with this opportunity to address readers on the battlefront of the Long War for Civilization.

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

Total Conversion

Vox Day looked up somewheres online and found my conversion story. Here it is:

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-testimony-of-john-c-wright.html

For those of you who are interested in hearing the same story told impromptu, without notes, and curious about what my voice sounds like, here is a podcast of a radio program where I was interviewed on my conversion experience:

http://radiomaria.us/conversionkeepshappening/2014/04/11/april-11-2014/

For those of you who read my words in this space, and somehow imagine a ranting, driving, bellowing voice of startling anger and grinding seriousness, rest assured that is not what I sound like. Frankly, to me, I sound pompous and ridiculous and ridiculously amused at myself. I am not laughing with me, I am laughing at me. I cannot possibly take myself seriously, and I am always shocked and confused when others do so. So if you do listen, pay no attention to me. Pay attention to Him of whom I speak.

ADDED LATER: Whoa. There was one topic I had forgotten: I should have remembered that there was a moment when I spoke of the doctor who wanted to murder my son. Yes, friend, there I am angry, and deeply angry, and still angry. A man who is not angry when someone tries to kill his children is not a man.

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

He is Risen

Rejoice! He is Risen indeed. Why seek ye the living among the dead?

 

Joyous Easter to all. Let the victory celebrations shake the world!

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Chronophobia

As befits Good Friday, all my posts today will be as bitter as the passover herbs. Turn and look back, all ye, at the Egypt we should flee. Freedom is a wasteland for many long and weary years of tramping: but beyond it, the river, and beyond that, the promised land flowing with milk and honey.

Being an honest gentleman not particularly brave or bold, but also not particularly interested in being lead by a lemming mob possessed by extraordinary popular delusion over the lip of an abyss into madness, I have on many occasions received comments, or, rather, white noise contorted into the shape of words, from various gibbering of poop-flinging yahoos, maudlin waifs, cringing serfs, drooling children, shrill man-boys, cocoa-sipping pajama boys, gormless Eloi, eunuchs, and nyctalope cannibal troglodyte Morlocks of the Left.

The mob dislikes anyone who does not worship the mob, or their Glorious Leader, or whatever fickle idea, bright as a butterfly, wanders through their collective empty heads during the current news cycle. They will, of course, dislike with equal disdain anyone who does not worship the brief and fugitive idol darting before their glassy and unblinking wide-open eyes tomorrow, even if the first directly contradicts the second. Logic is not their strong point.

Normally I do not mind. I am as patient as Job, and so entertain any comment that does not devolve either into swearwords or Holocaust denial. However, on two and only two occasions, the comments were so blatantly dishonest, so angry, so unrelated to reality, so starkly, shriekingly, shockingly insane, that my patience was exhausted, and the conversation could not continue.

Instead of a dialog, I was exposed to overhearing a ranting monologue addressed to an imaginary character in the ranting moonbat’s head, which the moonbat could not tell was not me, even thought there was no resemblance between me and the imaginary character.

I was not permitted to testify on my own behalf to say what I believed or did not believe. THEY told me what their theory said I believed, and the tiny fact that, in non-moonbat reality, I believed no such thing — ah! That was ruled as not being evidence.

Each time I asked either moonbat to quote back to me anything I had said to justify the assertion that I believed what was being attributed to me, both moonbats simply ignored the requests. It was as if I had not spoken

Usually, when a normal but unskilled debater falls into a straw-man argument, you can correct him, and he will not continue to argue against a position you have repudiated, and will not continue to say you said something you did not say.

One of the two moonbats even had the effrontery to say that he did not believe me when I told him what position I held on the issue. No, his friends had read something I wrote, and so they told him what was the position I held. His friends were better witnesses of what were the thoughts in my head than was I.

For some odd reason, both outbreaks of Lovecraftian madness concerned the same topic: my attitude toward ages past.

In one case, it was the Middle Ages, and in the other, the 1950s.

I thought this an odd coincidence. What is it about the past that makes the raving moonbats so much more lunatic and noctilionine than usual?

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

Time to Water the Tree of Liberty

From Time Magazine. I have no comment to make about the matter, lest I abridge the law which makes fomenting an armed insurrection a crime.

On Tuesday, officials at Brandeis University backed off granting an honorary degree to Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Alian, a staunch women’s advocate and fierce critic of Islam, due to many faculty members’ requests and a large online petition. Here is Ali’s statement in response to the university’s actions:

Yesterday Brandeis University decided to withdraw an honorary degree they were to confer upon me next month during their Commencement exercises. I wish to dissociate myself from the university’s statement, which implies that I was in any way consulted about this decision. On the contrary, I was completely shocked when President Frederick Lawrence called me — just a few hours before issuing a public statement — to say that such a decision had been made.

When Brandeis approached me with the offer of an honorary degree, I accepted partly because of the institution’s distinguished history; it was founded in 1948, in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, as a co-educational, nonsectarian university at a time when many American universities still imposed rigid admission quotas on Jewish students. I assumed that Brandeis intended to honor me for my work as a defender of the rights of women against abuses that are often religious in origin. For over a decade, I have spoken out against such practices as female genital mutilation, so-called “honor killings,” and applications of Sharia Law that justify such forms of domestic abuse as wife beating or child beating. Part of my work has been to question the role of Islam in legitimizing such abhorrent practices. So I was not surprised when my usual critics, notably the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), protested against my being honored in this way.

What did surprise me was the behavior of Brandeis. Having spent many months planning for me to speak to its students at Commencement, the university yesterday announced that it could not “overlook certain of my past statements,” which it had not previously been aware of. Yet my critics have long specialized in selective quotation — lines from interviews taken out of context — designed to misrepresent me and my work. It is scarcely credible that Brandeis did not know this when they initially offered me the degree.

What was initially intended as an honor has now devolved into a moment of shaming. Yet the slur on my reputation is not the worst aspect of this episode. More deplorable is that an institution set up on the basis of religious freedom should today so deeply betray its own founding principles. The “spirit of free expression” referred to in the Brandeis statement has been stifled here, as my critics have achieved their objective of preventing me from addressing the graduating Class of 2014. Neither Brandeis nor my critics knew or even inquired as to what I might say. They simply wanted me to be silenced. I regret that very much.

Not content with a public disavowal, Brandeis has invited me “to join us on campus in the future to engage in a dialogue about these important issues.” Sadly, in words and deeds, the university has already spoken its piece. I have no wish to “engage” in such one-sided dialogue. I can only wish the Class of 2014 the best of luck — and hope that they will go forth to be better advocates for free expression and free thought than their alma mater.

I take this opportunity to thank all those who have supported me and my work on behalf of oppressed woman and girls everywhere.

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

Rest In Peace

I was just sitting down to write a letter to Mr. Andrew Robertson, my editor and my friend, when I received a brief note from Malcolm Dickenson, his brother-in-law, saying that although Mr. Robertson was expected to return from the hospital today, he suffered a massive stroke, and extensive bleeding on the brain. The doctors say he probably felt no pain. His body is on life support, but he has been declared dead.

Please pray for the repose of his soul.

 

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