John C. Wright's Journal

Let us observe the state of the world.

Britain is now officially a totalitarian society according to this article here. (h/t

prester_scott

 )

• The Government is pushing ahead with legislation that will criminalise politically incorrect jokes, with a maximum punishment of up to seven years’ prison.
• Countryside Restoration Trust chairman and columnist Robin Page said at a rally against the Government’s anti-hunting laws in Gloucestershire in 2002: "If you are a black vegetarian Muslim asylum-seeking one-legged lesbian lorry driver, I want the same rights as you." Page was arrested, and after four months he received a letter saying no charges would be pressed, but that: "If further evidence comes to our attention whereby your involvement is implicated, we will seek to initiate proceedings." It took him five years to clear his name.
• In September 2006, a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Codie Stott, asked a teacher if she could sit with another group to do a science project as all the girls with her spoke only Urdu. The teacher called the police and a few days later, presumably after officialdom had thought the matter over, she was arrested and taken to a police station, where she was fingerprinted and photographed and placed in a cell for 3 hours.
• A 10-year-old child was arrested and brought before a judge, for having allegedly called an 11-year-old boya "Paki" and "bin Laden" during a playground argument at a primary school (the other boy had called him a skunk and a Teletubby).
• Hate-crime police investigated Basil Brush, a puppet fox on children’s television, who had made a joke about Gypsies.
• A bishop was warned by the police for not having done enough to "celebrate diversity", the enforcing of which is now apparently a police function.
• A Christian home for retired clergy and religious workers lost a grant because it would not reveal to official snoopers how many of the residents were homosexual. That they had never been asked was taken as evidence of homophobia.
• Muslim parents who objected to young children being given books advocating same-sex marriage and adoption at one school last year had their wishes respected and the offending material withdrawn. This year, Muslim and Christian parents at another school objecting to the same material have not only had their objections ignored but have been threatened with prosecution if they withdraw their children.

As a personal aside, I just saw the movie V FOR VENDETTA. In that fictional depiction of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, it was the conservative Christians, those ancient foes of love and freedom, who were hauling away the homosexuals to gulag. The contrast with the reality, where Progressives haul away nonperverts for thoughtcrime is striking and instructive. England Prevails.

In Germany, meanwhile, an enemy of humanity artist poses human corpses in postures of copulation, called "Copulation Art." I notice that this offends no principle of the hedonist or utilitarian philosophy, nor can Objectivists mount a coherent argument against the practice. The article is here. (h/t theofloinn)

In Louisiana, a man was reportedly detained by local police for no other reason than having a "Don’t Tread On Me" sticker on his vehicle. (h/t

prester_scott

 ) That this trails in the wake of a notorious and shameful DHS memorandum warning police against returning veterans, pro-gunners, pro-lifers, and pro-border-controllers, is perhaps no coincidence.

In Maui, a lesbian couple just married a man, with the polygamous trio defending their desecration of marriage using the same arguments and legal precedent as defend the homosexual desecration of marriage. I notice that this offends no principle of the hedonist or utilitarian philosophy, nor can Objectivists mount a coherent argument against the practice.  The article is here. (h/t theofloinn)

In personal news, I just got out of thehospital and back into the outside world. Strangely, I now wonder whether it is not the outside world where the sick people are kept.

I am back home, safe and sound and recovering as well as can be expected. Thank you for your prayers and good wishes: More things are wrought by prayer / Than this world dreams of

John had his appendix out on Sunday. The doctor decided to keep him one last night, but he’s doing very well. He’s up and walking around and in a cheerful mood.

Thank you all for your prayers. They mean a great deal to us. Many things went surprisingly smoothly, and we really felt that God’s Hand was upon us.

Hey Folks,

John is in the hospital. He should be home by Tuesday.

Prayers are welcome!

Jagi

Golly. I thought ANGELS AND DEMONS by Dan Brown would turn out to be just an ordinary run-of-the-mill Catholic-bashing hate-fest. But, no, the whoppers told strain credulity. Do people actually know that little about history? It seems that they do.

Here is what I picked up here and here.

Brown claims: Copernicus was murdered by the Catholic Church.
Fact: Copernicus died quietly in bed at age 70 from a stroke, and his research was supported by Church officials; he even dedicated his masterwork to the Pope.

Brown claims: “Antimatter is the ultimate energy source. It releases energy with 100% efficiency.”
Fact: CERN, the lab which plays an important role in his story, actually debunked this claim on their website: “The inefficiency of antimatter production is enormous: you get only a tenth of a billion of the invested energy back.”

Brown claims: Churchill was a “staunch Catholic.”
Fact: Any history buff could tell you that Churchill wasn’t Catholic, he was Anglican; nor was he particularly religious. The only things Churchill was staunch about were cigars, whiskey, and defending the British Empire.

Brown claims: Pope Urban VII banished Bernini’s famous statue The Ecstasy of St. Teresa “to some obscure chapel across town” because it was too racy for the Vatican.
Fact: The statue was actually commissioned by Cardinal Cornaro specifically for the Cornaro Chapel (Brown’s “obscure chapel”). Moreover, the sculpture was completed in 1652 — eight years after Urban’s death.

Brown claims: Bernini and famed scientist Galileo were members of the Illuminati.
Fact: The Illuminati was founded in Bavaria in 1776. Bernini died in 1680, while Galileo died in 1642 — more than a century before the Illuminati were first formed.

The idea that Copernicus was murdered by the Church is just too stupid for words. I mean, I have a pretty low threshold when it comes to Illuminati fiction. I love that ‘secret-history’ stuff.

I am not a hard sell. If you want to put in your book that Atlantis was a superhightech civilization destroyed by the extra-dimensional Eddorians in order to thwart Arisian attempts to breed mankind to create the Kwisatz Haderach, child of the Lens and the father of the race that will rule the Sevagram, I will suspend my disbelief like it was bouyant with helium.

You want to establish that a race of robots hidden in a secret base in Mount Ararat has been guiding human history since the time of Enoch, I am your man.

You want to say the Freemasons (who built the temple of Solomon) are the archenemies of the Slavemasons (who build the Great Pyramid of Cheops) have been fighting a duel to place or remove feng-shui-significant stonehenge, monuments, and Cathedrals at goethermal accupuncture points across Europe, Asia and the New World since the Bronze Age, and that all major wars and architectural firms are under their control, and involved in a secret aeons-old Cold War to prevent the telluric current from destroying this world as unwise abuses of the geomancy of the canals of Mars did that remote, dying world? Sure!

Shiwan Khan is actually a time-travelling alien from planet Mongo, granted eternal youth by the powers of alchemy, and he long ago replaced the royal family of England with Life-Model-Decoys which he controls with the ten magic rings he found in the wreckage of a spaceship from planet Maklu IV? Why not?

Lord Byron was a vampire? You would have to pay me money not to believe that.

Queen Elizabeth ran of coven of witches whose stormcrafty drowned the Aramda of Philip of Spain, after he had secretly adopted the practice of mass human sacrifice from his wife who was secretly an Aztec princess in order to gain magical control of an entire hemisphere’s worth of demon-cursed Mexican gold? Not only possible, but likely!

The entire Middle Ages is an elaborate fraud perpetrated by the Roman Empire, which never fell but simply went into hiding once Virgil the Magician discovered the tunnels leading to Pellucidar in the Hollow Earth? Seems reasonable to me!!

The US Congress killed and replaced by shape-changing seals from the Dreamlands who talk like movie pirates? Brother, I wrote it!

But the Catholic Church MURDERED Copurnicus? Oh, my aching back. He was a churchman himself: why not simply order him to recant his findings?

This is from my "not posted yet" backlog of journal articles. Unfortunately, I sometimes forget to remove pieces from the log once they are posted, so if this is a repeat of an earlier post, I hope you don’t mind seeing it again.

What SF would you recommend to a non-SF reader?

This is a question I can answer from experience. Back during the Oil Embargo days of the Carter Administration, my mother, hardly a science fiction reader, asked her geeky son (me) for books to read while she waited for hours in the long gas lines. I deliberately chose books I thought a non-SF reader could appreciate.

And what is it that a non-SF reader appreciates? They appreciate the same things we like, but the Muggles have no taste for flat out weirdness, and no fondness for hard SF techno-talk.

Science Fiction is basically the genre that delivers those two things: a sense that the world is seriously weird beneath its commonplace exterior, or that the future will be, and a sense that the things once thought impossible, like space rockets, are technically feasible. The first kind of science fiction is like that penned by A.E. van Vogt; the second is like that penned by Arthur C. Clark. Neither are good for the first time reader.

So what did I lend to my mother that she liked? While my mother’s tastes cannot necessarily stand for all Muggles, I can tell you what about each book I recommended made it open to thereader not familiar with the standard tropes and gimmicks and assumptions of the SF world:

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