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Federalist 10

Posted February 25, 2016 By John C Wright

Curiosity got the better of me, and I looked up Federalist 10. It is the column called The Utility of the Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection (continued)

http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa10.htm

AMOUNG the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice. He will not fail, therefore, to set a due value on any plan which, without violating the principles to which he is attached, provides a proper cure for it. The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations.

It is the article arguing that a federal form of government is a better protection against the danger of factions, that is, political parties, particularly parties pitting the poor against the rich.

In effect, it contains an argument in favor of inequality of wealth as a necessary part of human liberty.

It contains the essential argument against direct democracy without which no man can understand the reason for the elaborate nature of the checks and balances of the three branches of the federal government, and the wisdom of drawing each branch from different constituencies at different times.

It is, in other words, as clear and concise a statement as possible in favor of the proposition that liberty is better safeguarded from the dangers of faction and the passions of the multitude than either a monarchy or a pure democracy.

… a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

During the Progressive Era, when the schooling that hitherto had been private were taken over by the government as a huge and absurd public project, it must have been essential to those planners to prevent high school children from reading Federalist 10, because no one persuaded of the argument therein can join the Democrat party.

The Seventeenth Amendment could never have been passed in a nation whose citizens read and affirmed Federalist 10. It is a warning against Progressivism, Leftism, Populism, Factionalism, and the lure of charismatic leaders.

******

Well, I am sharply upbraided by Mr. Madison against the conclusion of a recent column of mine. I find these considerations argue strongly against support for Mr. Trump, who is a populist, and not a republican nor a Republican. The matter bears more thought.

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Nominate Me, not Trump!

Posted February 24, 2016 By John C Wright

A fan wrote and asked which of my works are candidates for nomination to the Hugo ballot.

Unlike the year prior, where Castalia House published my entire lifetime of short stories, essays and so on, this year my output has been roughly the same as other authors. Nominating me for six awards is, hence, impossible this year. I will try to be more productive in times to come.

  • Scepter of Nowhere (short story) Dark Discoveries: Issue 31, ed. James R. Beach, Spring 2015.
  • ARCHITECT OF AEONS (novel) Tor Books (April, 2015)
  • SOMEWHITHER (novel) Castalia House (July, 2015)
  • A Reluctant Hero of Mars (essay) Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Master of Pulp Storytelling, Ed. Charles A Madison (May, 2015)
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Empire of the Ignoranamuses

Posted February 24, 2016 By John C Wright

A truly horrifying look at higher education at topflight schools.

http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2016/02/res-idiotica/

Patrick J. Deneen writes:

My students are know-nothings.  They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent.  But their minds are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation.  They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten it origins and aims, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference about itself.

It’s difficult to gain admissions to the schools where I’ve taught – Princeton, Georgetown, and now Notre Dame.  Students at these institutions have done what has been demanded of them:  they are superb test-takers, they know exactly what is needed to get an A in every class (meaning that they rarely allow themselves to become passionate and invested in any one subject), they build superb resumes.   They are respectful and cordial to their elders, though with their peers (as snatches of passing conversation reveal), easygoing if crude.  They respect diversity (without having the slightest clue what diversity is) and they are experts in the arts of non-judgmentalism (at least publically).  They are the cream of their generation, the masters of the universe, a generation-in-waiting who will run America and the world.

But ask them some basic questions about the civilization they will be inheriting, and be prepared for averted eyes and somewhat panicked looks.  Who fought in the Peloponnesian war?  What was at stake at the Battle of Salamis?  Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach?  How did Socrates die?  Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey.  The Canterbury Tales?  Paradise Lost? The Inferno? 

Who was Saul of Tarsus?  What were the 95 theses, who wrote them, and what was their effect?  Why does the Magna Carta matter?  How and where did Thomas Becket die?  What happened to Charles I?  Who was Guy Fawkes, and why is there a day named after him?  What happened at Yorktown in 1781?  What did Lincoln say in his Second Inaugural?  His first Inaugural?  How about his third Inaugural? Who can tell me one or two of the arguments that are made in Federalist 10? Who has read Federalist 10?  What are the Federalist Papers? 

Some students, due most often to serendipitous class choices or a quirky old-fashioned teacher, might know a few of these answers.  But most students will not know many of them, or vast numbers like them, because they have not been educated to know them.  At best they possess accidental knowledge, but otherwise are masters of systematic ignorance.  They are not to be blamed for their pervasive ignorance of western and American history, civilization, politics, art and literature.  It is the hallmark of their education.  They have learned exactly what we have asked of them – to be like mayflies, alive by happenstance in a fleeting present. 

Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement.

For the record, I went to a Catholic High School, a typical modern college where I learned exactly nothing for a year, and then to St. John’s College in Annapolis. After that I went to a three year trade school to read for law.  I have been educated to the level that once was the average norm for literate men.

Let’s see how well I do on the impromptu test:

  1. The Peloponnesian War was fought between Sparta and her allies versus Athens and her allies. Thucydides reports it to have been a war greater in extent and magnitude than any known in the Greek world up until that time.
  2. What was at stake at the Battle of Salamis was Athenian supremacy of the sea against the Persian conquerors.  In effect, what was at stake was Greek freedom and the entire Western world.
  3. Socrates taught Plato and Plato taught Aristotle. (Who taught Alexander the Great).
  4. Socrates died by drinking Hemlock at the command of the Athenian mass jury.
  5. Hand up. I’ve read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Lattimore and Fitzgerald translations. I am not enough of a scholar to read more than a few verses in Greek.
  6. Hand up for Canterbury Tales. Was not greatly impressed.
  7. Enthusiastic hand up for  Paradise Lost. I reread it periodically.
  8. Hand up for Inferno. However, I have read and reread Purgatorio and Paradisio.
  9. Saul of Taurus was a pharisee and Roman citizen, and the persecutor of the early Christians described in the book of the Acts of the Apostles. After his conversion on the Damascus road, he changed his name to Paul, was martyred in Rome, was later canonized as St. Paul. He is the single most influential writer in all of the West: His influence is comparable to what Confucius and Gautama Buddha exercised over the East.
  10. The 95 Thesis were the points of argument nailed by the heresiarch Martin Luther to the gates of the Wittenberg Church. Their effect was to produce Protestantism, the only truly successful and heresy in history, which shattered the Church and severed Christian nations with a mortal blow from which we have never recovered.
  11. The Magna Charter matters because it is the foundation for all Anglo-American law, establishing the basic principle of rule of law, and imposing limitations on the powers of the sovereign.
  12. Thomas Beckett died at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral, stabbed by four knights of the King, formerly his friend, who overheard him muse that he wished someone to rid him of this vexatious priest.  The disagreement between the King and Beckett was over the jurisdictional limits of clerical as opposed to secular courts trying clerics.
  13. Not sure. One of the kings named Charles was seized by the Parliament in an outrageous act of mutiny and, after a mock trial, put to death. But I have no head for numbers, so I don’t know if that was Charles I or Charles II.
  14. Guy Fawkes was a Catholic patriot who sought to blow up the Parliament building on November 5th, in order to bring down the heretical Protestant government. The plan miscarried, and he was caught and executed. There is a day named after him because he is burned in effigy around village bonfires, complete with fireworks, dancing, beer and rum.
  15. Yorktown 1781 was the surrender of Cornwallis to Washington, and the end of the Revolutionary War.
  16. Lincoln in his first inaugural prayed for peace between the North and South, and in his second asked the Union to stiffen its resolve to preserve the Republican form of government. There was no third inaugural, since he was assassinated by a Democrat stage-actor.  
  17. I cannot tell two, or any, of the arguments in Federalist 10, since I don’t remember which article that was.   I have no head for numbers.
  18. I have read the Federalist Papers more than once, so I read Federalist 10. I just don’t remember which one it is.
  19. The  Federalist Papers are a series of newspaper columns arguing to the people of the state of New York the reasons to adopt the proposed US Constitution. They were written by Jay, Madison, and Hamilton under the pen-name Publius. These papers are the single clearest and most powerful apology for a Republican form of government of limited powers and checks and balanced ever penned.

For any literate person living in America not to know these things is outrageous.

Patrick J. Deneen continues:

We have fallen into the bad and unquestioned habit of thinking that our educational system is broken, but it is working on all cylinders.  What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, historyless free agents, and educational goals composed of contentless processes and unexamined buzz-words like “critical thinking,” “diversity,” “ways of knowing,” “social justice,” and “cultural competence.” Our students are the achievement of a systemic commitment to producing individuals without a past for whom the future is a foreign country, cultureless ciphers who can live anywhere and perform any kind of work without inquiring about its purposes or ends, perfected tools for an economic system that prizes “flexibility” (geographic, interpersonal, ethical). In such a world, possessing a culture, a history, an inheritance, a commitment to a place and particular people, specific forms of gratitude and indebtedness (rather than a generalized and deracinated commitment to “social justice), a strong set of ethical and moral norms that assert definite limits to what one ought and ought not to do (aside from being “judgmental”) are hindrances and handicaps. 

…

Understanding liberty to be the absence of constraint,  forms of cultural inheritance and concomitant gratitude were attacked as so many arbitrary limits on personal choice, and hence, matters of contingency that required systematic disassembly. 

My comment: The American Progressives wanted to have a government-run and government-funded education system to prevent the Catholic Church from educating the youth.

Suckers.

You did not trust the pastor to look after the sheep, so you hired the wolf to do it. The wolf bred the sheep for their docility and tastiness, and makes sure they are trained to be easy to swallow without fuss or bleating.

And now the same government is given charge, thanks to Obamacare, to your life-and-death medical decisions, and, thanks to sexual harassment laws, with the signs and gestures of courtesy and courtship to obtain between men and women.

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Nominations Open for 2016 Hugo and 1941 Retro!

Posted February 23, 2016 By John C Wright

Got this in the mail:

MidAmeriCon II is pleased to announce that nominations for the 2016 Hugo Awards and the 1941 Retro Hugo Awards is now open!

As a member of Sasquan, you are eligible to nominate works for both awards. The nomination period is now open, and will close on March 31, 2016 at 11:59 pm PDT. You can find all the details for this process on the MidAmeriCon II website at http://midamericon2.org/the-hugo-awards/hugo-nominations/.

 

Well, I don’t know about you, but the enmity and illwill surrounding the nominations last year have made me want to win seven nominations this year. Let us break the record! Again!

All that is needed to provoke the usual suspects into their usual paroxysms of public phrenzy is to recommend works on their merits, regardless of various politically correct checklists making sure authors are awarded on the basis of skincolor, ethnic origin, sex, sexual perversion, political utility, or connection to the insiders who regard the award as theirs. It is yours, dear reader.

Myself, I have not decided for which works to vote, except that  I hereby encourage my readers to vote for my work, and encourage fans of Jeffro Johnson to put him on the ballot as Best Fan Writer, or for multiple columns on Appendix N on the ballot for Best Related Work.

Does anyone have anything he suggest I read as a worthy of nominating?

For the 1941 Retro-Hugo, this was smack in the richest period of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, and so there is plenty of tales by Manly Wade Wellman, L. Sprague de Camp,  James Blish, Theodore Sturgeon, Frank Belknap Long, Willy Ley, Henry Kuttner, Frederik Pohl, C. M. Kornbluth Alfred Bester,  Eric Frank Russell and Clifford D. Simak to chose from.

I list only the ones I have read:

  • Second Stage Lensmen by E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith
  • The Vortex Blasters by E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith
  • Goddess of Fire by Edgar Rice Burroughs
  • The Living Dead by Edgar Rice Burroughs
  • Jorge Luis Borges – The Garden of Forking Paths (El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan) for short story
  • Nightfall by Isaac Asimov
  • Seesaw by A.E. van Vogt (Weapon Shops of Isher)
  • Not the First by A.E. van Vogt
  • The Howling Tower by Fritz Leiber (Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story)
  • Jay Score by Erik Frank Russell
  • Reason by Isaac Asimov
  • Liar! by Isaac Asimov
  • Not Final! by Isaac Asimov
  • Half Breed by Isaac Asimov
  • Logic of Empire by Robert Heinlein
  • We Also Walk Dogs by Robert Heinlein (Future History)
  • By His Bootstraps by Robert Heinlein
  • Universe by Robert Heinlein
  • Common Sense by Robert Heinlein
  • Solution Unsatisfactory by Robert Heinlein
  • Elsewhen by Robert Heinlein (aka Assignment in Eternity)
  • Sixth Column by Robert Heinlein
  • –And He Built a Crooked House by Robert Heinlein
  • The Incomplete Enchanter by  L. Sprague de Camp , Fletcher Pratt
  • The Iron God • novelette by Jack Williamson
  • L. Sprague de Camp – Lest Darkness Fall (novel)
  • Robert A. Heinlein – Methuselah’s Children
  • C. S. Lewis – The Screwtape Letters

Good heavens! Merely seeing the names of the authors writing in 1941, from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Fritz Leiber brings a sense of wonder and loss: Wonder, for these humble pulps produced so much worthy science fiction and seeded so many dreams. Loss, that there are none their equal writing today.

 

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Repeal the 19th Amendment

Posted February 23, 2016 By John C Wright

Perhaps you have already seen this video. I heard about it on talk radio as I was driving. It made me revisit a question which, in my mind at least, I would have thought was settled and resolved: the question of female suffrage.

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John C Wright Endorses The Devil

Posted February 22, 2016 By John C Wright

My latest article at EveryJoe is up. Despite how early in the election cycle it is (I usually start thinking about whom to support in late October) my editor asked me to endorse one candidate or another, so I held my nose and picked one. One candidate, I mean, not one nose.

When deciding which candidate for the Presidential nomination to support, one should take a step back, look at the larger picture of where we stand in the tragic debacle called history, and take both the long-term strategic goals into account as well as the short-term tactics.

The big picture is a dark one indeed.

America, as the world’s sole superpower, is effectively beyond the strength of any foreign enemy to defeat, or even to wound severely. We cannot be killed, that is the good news.

But we have committed suicide. That is the bad news. We have already swallowed the cold poison, soaked in the tubs, and slashed our wrists. The question is whether enough time remains – even as the warm, fuzzy, comfortable sensation of numbness comes over us and urges us to close our eyes – to rouse ourselves, vomit out the poison killing us, and bind up our wounds to stop the bleeding.

Even the destruction of the Twin Towers, which killed as many Americans as a Civil War battlefield, was due not to the cunning and might of the enemy, but to political correctness that forbade the government officers who allowed the terrorists into our nation to expel or investigate them, for fear of being called racist.

The shootings in San Bernardino likewise were due not to cleverness or strength, but to the politically correct unwillingness of a suspicious neighbor to report the arsenal she saw being gathered.

The case Ahmed the Clockmaker is even more instructive: a Muslim boy brought a mock bomb to a school as a prank, and, after being warned, displayed it to teachers who were required during wartime to treat all terrorist threats as real. He found himself suddenly invited to the White House, and lavished with praise and adoration for achieving the one supreme felicity political correctness holds up as the goal of all life: to be the victim of racism.

What does one conclude from this firestorm of evil and nonsense?

The proper conclusion is there are two religions, two cultures, and two Americas in America. One is the real America, lived by real people living their real lives. These Americans believe in individual liberty, the free market, the rule of law and the Word of God.

The other is a sick delusion that is created and maintained by the press, by the academics, by the entertainment industry, and by flocks of hysterical liars. In this America, a patriarchy of white, straight Christian males ruthlessly and by numberless invisible and undetectable evil magic spells oppresses, robs, cheats, rapes, and kills all its helpless and saintly victims.

But, by the twisted logic of modern Leftwing lunacy (a doctrine called intersectionism) everyone is also an oppressor in turn, so that a black Christian is an oppressor of heathens and homosexuals merely by virtue of his Christianity; a homosexual male oppresses women merely by virtue of being male; a white woman oppresses blacks merely by virtue of being white; all hale people oppress all cripples merely by virtue of being non-crippled; all sane people oppress all crazies merely by virtue of being neurotypical; all non-perverts oppress all perverts merely by virtue of being cisnormative.

The religion of the real America is anything within the Judeo-Christian tradition. The religion of delusional America is Political Correctness. The real Americans love America, see it as a shining city on a hill, and as the last best hope for human liberty on the planet. The Delusional Americans see America as the only evil in the world, a pathless forest of monsters and boogermen, and the only threat to the planet.

Read more: http://www.everyjoe.com/2016/02/22/politics/election-2016-real-and-delusional-america/#ixzz40vmpKDGC

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Worth Dying For

Posted February 22, 2016 By John C Wright

In deciding one’s political philosophy, one should look first at what makes a man willing to lay down his life for another, because that is the fundamental political bond.

In ancient times, it was tribalism, that is, the bonds of bloodkinship, shared religion, shared lore and myth and legend and worldview.

In the city-states of Greece tribal bonds were less important, and the agora of shared laws, shared gods, and shared history more.

The Roman Imperium shared the Roman Law, literature, culture and the shared sense of being civilized, of being part of the ‘Ecumen’ the civilized inhabited world.

Then came Christianity, and that was a bond that survived when the laws and imperial military failed.

After the fall of the Western Empire, the shared things were princedoms, religion, history. After the Reformation, the nation-state was the shared bond.

In the United States the attempt was made to have the shared bond be the dedication to a proposition that all men are created equal, but the informal bonds of religion, language, culture continued to bind the federal nation.

With the French and Russian revolutions, and the rise of Fascism, the bonds of propositional nations were attempted with different and evil propositions. They failed in a spectacular fashion, as shown in the high cost of blood spilled needed to maintain their regimes.

Since 1960, the Left has been willfully, carefully, and relentlessly obliterating all the shared values of the Americans, erasing our history texts, forbidding public religion, bringing our laws into contempt and disrepute.

For myself, I am willing to die for the Constitution, but not for the opinions of four liberal justices of the Supreme Court who claim the Constitution allows the government to make the Little Sisters of the Poor pay for contraception and Abortion, trample the cross, spit on images of Mary, etc. The Laws of this nation form no bond between me and other patriots, not these laws, not any more.

But neither is whiteness for the sake of whiteness something for which I would die. The bond is too attenuated: why should I pick a white guy like Joe Biden over my daughter, who is Chinese?

On the other hand, I would gladly side with Christians of any sort against Mohammedans of all sorts, and fight and die shoulder to shoulder with them, because that is the core of my worldview, the thing that makes life meaningful.

The Leftists feel the same way about Political Correctness. They will die before they speak or think a true thing: their devotion to falsehood is absolute, beyond reason, and beyond comprehension. It is their God.

The free market, free trade, and the various other Enlightenment concepts seem to have failed in the modern day — but why?

My suggestion is that the Enlightenment was a cease fire in a Protestant-Catholic civil war ripping Christendom in two, and the only way to step back toward the limited government the Feudal system imposed on kings (who neither made laws nor governed religious matters).

My suggestion is that Constitutionally limited government will work with a morally upright people, which is to say, a Christian people, and is utterly unsuited to heathens.

Limiting the power of Caesar means having faith that the problems Caesar would otherwise solve with that power can be solved some other way, such as through the Church, or by prayer, or by the voluntary efforts of the countless smaller associations and institutions men in Christendom form. Unlimited governments, on the other hand, cannot tolerate a Church which is not subordinate to the national leader, a law that is not allowed to solve current problems, or smaller institutions and private gatherings which attract the loyalty of men, and form the core of resistance against Caesar’s ambitions.

Having free trade between two peaceful Christian powers is mutually beneficial in economic terms. A free movement of peoples from crime-riddled tyrannies and deathcult infected tribal areas into Christian civilization is not mutually beneficial: it is a slow motion invasion.

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Twitter Suspends Truth

Posted February 22, 2016 By John C Wright

I do not use Twitter, so it is nothing to me that they have decreed themselves to be an arm of the Democrat Party, and vowed to use all their powers in an election year to belittle, harass, silence, and smother any conservative voices in the public arena.

But please keep in mind. The virulent strain of Political Correctness known as Social Justice Warfare, Fifth Wave Feminism, or Intersectionalism, also known as Morlockery, is hatred, pure and simple.

It is directionless, destructive, and omnivorous. They are not in favor of anything, they just hate you.

Why such creatures are tolerated among civilized men for even an instant is beyond understanding.

http://datechguyblog.com/2016/02/20/the-twitter-star-chamber-suspends-stacy-mccain/

Just posting a link. The words below are those of Datechguy from Da Tech Guy Blog.

Before there was Milo Yiannopoulos there was Robert Stacy McCain. A chain smoking, beer drinking, coffee guzzling hard nosed reporter who rather than simply going with the flow and repeating the conventional wisdom dared to go out into the field and actually see and report for himself.

And when he didn’t have a spot in the MSM to do it anymore on a regular basis he began his web site The Other McCain (named to differentiate himself from his distant cousin John in the Senate) and with funding provided by his readers (and sometimes without it going places on a wing and a prayer) he would travel the country from Alaska to New Hampshire from Nevada to New Orleans to cover stories that the MSM would not.

And when Bill Sparkman’s death became a national story and there were cries of “Send the Body to Glenn Beck” it was Stacy McCain who was the boots on the ground who actually went to Kentucky and investigated the story finding no evidence of murder and was vindicated when his death was revealed to be a suicide staged to appear like a murder.

He has managed to do all of this while raising a family of six which now includes two grandchildren who are his joy (although they have considerably slowed down his travels, after all family comes first).

Bottom line though not a rich man Robert Stacy McCain is an American Success story he has built a nationwide, dare I say worldwide following presenting his viewpoint and highlighting the public viewpoints of others who would rather keep their actual words and opinions under the radar because Robert Stacy McCain is loyal to his family, his God, his friends and the Truth.

I know this because I’m proud to say he is my friend.

Read the whole thing. It is appalling and amazing:

http://datechguyblog.com/2016/02/20/the-twitter-star-chamber-suspends-stacy-mccain/

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“Beyond the Quiet River”, music and lyrics by Sergei Trofimov.

Posted February 20, 2016 By John C Wright

Musical interlude:

За тихой рекою

За тихой рекою, берёзовой рощей
Распустится первый весенний цветок
И я загадаю желание попроще
И перекрестившись взгляну на Восток

Окрасится небо багряной зарёю
И вечное солнце над миром взойдёт
И белая птица взлетит над землёю
И Божие прощение с небес принесёт

И что-то большое откроется сердцу
Такое что жизнью моей не объять
И станет спокойно, и сладко как в детстве
Когда обнимала меня моя мать

Молитва святая слезами прольётся
Христовой любовью исполнится грусть
И в это мгновение душа прикоснётся
К великой вселенной по имени Русь

“Beyond The Quiet River”

Beyond the quiet river and birch grove
The first spring flower is bursting into bloom
And I am simply making a wish
And having crossed myself, I will glance to the East

The sky will be coloured (lit: colour itself) by scarlet dawn
And the eternal sun will rise over the world
And a white bird will fly over the earth
And bring God’s forgiveness from the heavens

And something big will make itself known to my heart
Such that it is not [possible] to take in in my lifetime
And it will become peaceful and sweet like in childhood
When my mother hugged me

A solemn prayer will flow with tears
Sadness will be filled with Christ’s love
And at that moment my soul will touch
The grand entirety with the name of Russia

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Mocking the Dead

Posted February 18, 2016 By John C Wright

The persons over at File 770 have decided to mock the memory of the late, great Mr. David Hartwell by intimating that if I compliment the editing skills of Vox Day, and call him the best editor with whom I have had the pleasure to work, this means I am somehow diminishing Mr. Hartwell’s contributions.

These sentiments are expressed with such reckless contumely, and with such disrespect for the dead, that I cannot bring myself to repeat them. It is merely horrible what people will say about a man who is no longer here to defend himself.

Mr. Hartwell, almost singlehandedly, was behind the New Space Opera Renaissance, of which I have the honor to be a minor member. With the discovery and promotion of authors such as Greg Bear and David Brin, he brought Hard SF back from the outfield into the front and center of the genre. Few men aside from John W. Campbell Jr. or Hugo Gernsbeck himself had such a profound and beneficial influence on the field.

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Twitter Meets Orwell — an FAQ by Daddy Warpig

Posted February 17, 2016 By John C Wright

Twitter Shadowbans Briefing and FAQ by

@Daddy_Warpig

What Is “Shadowbanning”?

Twitter has introduced a brave new way of screwing with users, which some have taken to calling shadowbanning.

Basically, this acts like a gag: you can send normal tweets normally, but people Following you won’t see them on their timeline. (However, people reading your profile will see them.)

The following restrictions also apply:

  • Your tweets won’t show up in certain hashtags (which and why is unknown).
  • Your tweets won’t show up in Search, either by keyword or by account name.

Tweets still show up normally in Lists.

Taken together, these restrictions have the effect of making you “invisible” to most others on Twitter, but you are never informed about them so you don’t know it. With shadowbans, Twitter censors you silently, for no stated reason, for an indeterminate period of time.

This is BOTH Kafkaesque and Orwellian.

[Indeed, the very existence of shadowbans is what makes people suspect that Twitter will use its new TL algorithm to silently censor “undesirable” users. It’s the next logical step.]

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  • Legatuss posted on February 21, 2016
    Twitter Is Gearing Up To Interfere In The Election http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/02/12/twitter-gearing-interfere-election/ Basically, using their new algorithms to selectively silence opponents, sort…
  • wlinden posted on February 18, 2016
    I sent a "progress note" from a Kindle app, noting that I was reading a critical anthology on THE JOKER,…
  • Legatuss posted on February 18, 2016
    The reason for shadowbanning: The media has achieved almost total dominance of information in it's field. As might be expected,…
Filed in Announcement, Puppy Sadness Syndrome

Rabid Puppy Reading List

Posted February 16, 2016 By John C Wright

Is it that time of year already? Nominations for the Hugo Awards are being gathered, and those of you who hold memberships are being asked to submit your nominations to go on the ballot for voters to vote on in the fall.
Rabid Puppies_508
The Puppy-kickers are our ideological foes bent on replacing popular and well crafted sci fi tales with politically correct science-free and entertainment-free moping dreck that reads like something written by a highschool creative writing course dropout.

The Puppy-kickers have repeatedly and vehemently assured us assured us that soliciting votes from likeminded fans for stories you judge worthy was a “slate” and therefore was (for reasons not specified) totally and diabolically evil and wrong and bad, was not something insiders had been doing for decades, and was always totally inexcusable, except when they did it, and voted in a slate to grant ‘No Award’ to categories where they had lost their stranglehold over the nominations.

In that spirit, I hereby officially announce in my capacity as the Grand Inquisitor of the Evil Legion of Evil Authors, that the following list is the recommended reading list of our Darkest Lord only, and not a voting slate.

These are the recommendations of my editor, Theodore Beale, aka Vox Day, the most hated man in Science Fiction, but certainly the best editor I have had the pleasure to work with.

This list is not complete, and I will add to it as the Dark Lord of Evil issues decrees from Skullcrusher Mountain or Yuggoth-on-the-Rim.

The words below are his. (But I second his recommendation of Andy Weir as best new writer, and Jeffro Johnson for Best Related Work.)

 

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Filed in Puppy Sadness Syndrome

Musical Interlude

Posted February 15, 2016 By John C Wright

This is Luna Lee from Korea, who developed a modern form of the traditional Korean instrument called a gayageum.

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Filed in Other

The Percent Chance that Existence Exists

Posted February 15, 2016 By John C Wright

It has been said by well accomplished and esteemed physicists that the percent chance of our universe having its current constitution, that is, the physical constants of the cosmos, such as the gravitational constant, Planck’s constant, and so on, being precisely what they are, is infinitesimal.

Bosh and nonsense. This is why argument from authority is illogical: because in cases like this accomplished physicists are making a boneheaded schoolboy error.

Ever since Pascal, people have had a confused notion of what probability is. He was asked by a Chevelier de Mere, a gentleman gambler, about the odds of wining at dice. Instead of telling him that math cannot predict outcomes, only aggregate outcomes, Pascal developed a mathematical way of expressing in how many trials out of a hundred a certain set of results out of a given set of possible results would obtain. The chance of getting a six on the roll of one die (or 1d6 for you D&D players) is one in six. The chance of rolling two sixes in a row is one in thirty-six.

But the chance of rolling a second six after you have rolled a first six is still one in six, because the die does not remember or care what the last roll was.

The chance if a man picked up the die in his finger and thumb and places it on the table so that the six is showing is a meaningless question, because this is not a case where random chance if a factor expressing our ignorance about the magnitudes involved.

Probability is when you express that number of results out of a hundred trials in terms of percent, that is, the number of times out of a hundred.

That is what probability is. That is all it is.

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Filed in Reasonings

Announcement from Ben Zwycky

Posted February 14, 2016 By John C Wright

BEYOND THE MIST’s first 99-cent Kindle Countdown deal started this morning, along with the same deal on the other two books form the same author, Mr. Ben Zwycky.

Here is the official announcement:

http://benzwycky.com/2016/02/12/kindle-countdown-deal-on-all-three-of-my-books/

I wrote the forward for BEYOND THE MIST, I liked it, and I hope you will buy a copy.

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