A Modest Proposal
The Rabid Puppies, led by Theodore Beale aka Vox Day, has offered for your consideration certain items for Best Related Work. These are of a trenchant and disturbing nature:
- Moira Greyland’s account of her childhood abuse at the hands of her mother, the award-winning science fiction writer Marion Zimmer Bradley
- “Safe Space as Rape Room”, a five-part series on the pedophiles and child molesters who have preyed upon children in the science fiction community.
Over at file 770, one profound yet unwittingly transparent thinker on the Best Related Work conversation proffers these remarks:
TW, you *do* realize that things that would be regarded now as pedophilia were a standard practice, and in one example I can think of a *mandatory* practice, in several societies other than the modern West, right?
And that our dealings with pedophilia are tainted by the moral panic that have transformed it into a modern witchhunt – the modern West as a whole can no more deal with the topic any more fairly than medieval Christian Europe could have evaluated Wicca if confronted by it. It’s just that paranoia that little Teddy Beale is trying to tap into with his childish smear campaign.
Meanwhile pages and pages of denials shout, scream and scold that no one is apologizing for pedophilia.
Please note that argumentum ad antiquam is just as much an informal logical error as the opposite, argumentum ad novem.
(If merely the fact that ancient pagans or modern savages once performed a deed made it admirable, wise, or right, then slavery would be right, and racism, and rape, and honorkilling, footbinding, and female genital mutilation. Contrariwise, if merely the fact that ancients never once performed a deed, but only moderns, made it admirable, wise or right, then loading Jews on cattle cars to be gassed to death in modern ovens would be right, for our ancestors never used these scientific methods to enact their genocides.)
Likewise for what one might called argumentum ad occidens, the fallacy that merely being Western proves a thing bad, and likewise again for argumentum ad xenon, the fallacy that merely because something non-Western proves it good. I suppose one should congratulate the pervertarian writing above: it is not often one invents two new logical fallacies in two paragraphs.
No logic is being attempted. The writer here is invoking multiculturalism, the central and sacred doctrine of the political correctness deathcult, which holds that any statement of right or wrong, by implying civilized White men are better than dusky savages, is racist, which is wrong.
Obviously, the statement ‘saying something is wrong is wrong’ refutes itself hence needs no further refutation.
The thing is not an argument, but a sacred chant, and invocation of spirits, a type of pagan magic. Merely by referring to multiculturalism, the witch hopes to curse her victims into silence.
Please recall that Christianity is the only worldview that ever denied, undermined, and outlawed magic. For the superstitious to call the rational ‘superstitious’ is beyond irony.
But I am inspired. I have a modest proposal:
We always hear about how foul and foolish Christians were for burning witches, but if medieval witches were overweight yet self-important nagging butchy narcissistic sexual deviants with purple hair and tattoos urging (in sneering, holier-than-thou terms) the Christians to be accepting of kiddy-diddling, one would think a quick yet fair trial, a legal conviction, and a whiner roast would both increase the average IQ of the average medieval town, and lower its mean average of mean-spirited neurotic anger.
The net result would be a calmer, wiser people.
Historically speaking this culling process perhaps meant that the average increase over time of calm and cranial capacity would usher in the legal, scientific and industrial revolutions for which we in the West are rightfully proud.
A decline in sexual disorders is a central factor in increasing the law, order, peace and security of a society. Since there is allegedly no cure for the condition, burning would seem to be a harsh, but logical, application of Darwinian principles all we atheists hold so dear.
I submit that all the progress of the modern world rests solely on the historically beneficial side effects of witch burning.
Rome had a huge purge of witches in her pagan days, larger than any Christian one, and then she won the Punic Wars and expanded to a continental empire. Coincidence? I think not!
I suggest scholarly study be made of the eugenic and beneficial side effects of the conviction and incineration of witches in the modern day?
Done purely in the interests of science to see if earthquakes, blights, cow disease, or ecological disorders which witches claim to be able, by their arts, to influence, would go down. Let us not be closed minded on the topic.
And if the peace and good order returned to society, and the average civility of men or the average good looks in women went up, so much the better.
Anyone who opposes my idea is AGAINST SCIENCE!
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
