John C. Wright's Journal

Once upon a time, I was agnostic on the issue of abortion. Being a very logical and cautious thinker, I thought, that the premise of the proabortionist (that the fetus is a clump of cells, not human) and the premise of the antiabortionist (that the baby should be treated like a human being even if his humanity is still in question, just to err on the side of morality) had no common ground that could be used for discussion. If there was no logical common ground, I thought the issue was beyond the power of the reason to settle rationally.

Then I had a kid. Thanks to modern sonic photography, I saw my son Orville in my wife’s womb. He was still within the first trimester. He was playing with his toes.

It was as if I had been struck by a lightning bolt. Dear God, how I felt cheated. I had been, all this time, giving the generous benefit of the doubt to a pack of bloody child-murderers.
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A reviewer who is kind to my book. Yeah for me!

From http://www.scifi.com/sfw/advance/12_books.html

This novel forms the conclusion to the trilogy begun in The Golden Age (2002) and continued in The Phoenix Exultant (2003). We have watched our hero, Phaethon of Radamanth, as he has struggled against the enmity and censure of the vast and complex society—the Oecumene—that inhabits every niche of a far-future solar system. He has fought to regain lost memories and possessions, not the least of which is his unique 100-kilometer-long starship, the Phoenix Exultant, undergoing strange odysseys across the planets and virtual environments of his byzantine age. Additionally, he has had to fight the ploys of an invader from the Silent Oecumene, the lone human colony at Cygnus X-1, which long ago went rogue. As this last book opens, more here

From http://www.selectsmart.com/PHILOSOPHY/

Oboy. I am shocked, shocked. Not only did I not get 100% agreement with my own school of philosophy (I follow Stoicism), I got 100% with St. Tom the Catholic! Ayn Rand is also much further down on the list than I would have thought.

Either the test is screwball, or I am.

Your Results:

1. Aquinas (100%)
2. Aristotle (79%)
3. St. Augustine (74%)
4. Ayn Rand (70%)
5. Plato (69%)
6. Cynics (67%)
7. John Stuart Mill (59%)
8. Jean-Paul Sartre (56%)
9. Stoics (53%)
10. Jeremy Bentham (50%)
11. David Hume (48%)
12. Spinoza (44%)
13. Thomas Hobbes (38%)
14. Epicureans (35%)
15. Ockham (33%)
16. Nietzsche (30%)
17. Kant (29%)
18. Nel Noddings (23%)
19. Prescriptivism (10%)

Bugger that. I am taking the test again until I get it right.

Oh my goodness, I thought this was funny. As ever, G.K. Chesterton is wise and witty, and writes on a topic that still has some application today. The heirs of the Futurists are still among us, in one form or another.
THE FUTURISTS
(by G.K. Chesterton, from his book ALARMS AND DISCURSIONS)
IT was a warm golden evening, fit for October…when the postman handed to me, with a perfunctory haste which doubtless masked his emotion, the Declaration of Futurism. If you ask me what Futurism is, I cannot tell you; even the Futurists themselves seem a little doubtful; perhaps they are waiting for the future to find out.
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You will not believe me, but I was once a strict egalitarian when it came to the whole man-woman question.

I became disillusioned with the prospect of equality between the sexes once I began to suspect that the partisans of that equality proposed to abolishing romance.
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