John C. Wright's Journal

Only posting a link.
http://www.ironsky.net/
This is a follow up to my post here http://johncwright.livejournal.com/282772.html?nc=27

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxlLbKspcQQ
In case you were suffering from a distinct lack of Alexandr Nevsky today, here is a clip.
For the one of you who read my LAST GUARDIAN OF EVERNESS (Hi, Mom!), I had always envisioned the dream-armor of Galen Waylock to look something like the panoply of Alexandr Nevsky (conical helm, scale jerkin, etc.) seen here at 3.08

My dearest friend Partywhipple sends along this link.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,26135072-2,00.html

He makes this comment:

My comment: I love it when the real world turns out to be stranger than a Tim Powers novel. Someone put in a call to Elijah Snow of Planetary magazine–there is clearly much secret history here we know nothing of.

And of course I agree about destroying the moon. Suppose the first aliens we meet are not friendly vegetarians like the Vulcans, but are instead ferocious Kzin, or remorseless Klendathu, or sinister Eeich?

Suppose even now minds immeasurably superior to ours, but as mortal as our own, scrutinize our world as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water?

Ah! But they would no more dare to assault us, once they saw the evidence the Luna had been smashed into a belt of asteroids, than we would dare to attack lordly Saturn that so casually consumed two or more of its own children, once moons inhabited by rebellious slave-races: nor to attack those cold and disembodied Minds, whoever they were, that destroyed the nameless Fifth Planet which once sailed happily through space between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, now shattered into fragments! Then to deter intergalactic foes, we should destroy the sun.

Annihilating the Moon would also have the beneficial side effect of exterminating the Grand Lunar and all the socialist bugs of that cold sphere, as well as the abhorrent and cannibal quadruped race known as the Va-gas of Va-nah, and not to mention killing off those nameless inhabitors of the cold sphere of Sulva who are an accursed people, full of pride and lust. There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by deveilsh arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.

Sadly, the secret compacts between the White House (made during the administration of James Norcross, the Super-president), the U.N.C.L.E., the coven of dark warlocks headed by Alan Moore, not to mention the secret Lord of the Earth, Red Orc, together have signed with the Inhumans of the oxygen-bearing Blue Area of the Moon, forbid us from destroying Luna until after the Inhuman city of Attilan is removed (by means of a spindizzy engine) to a safe location on a second yet invisible moon of Earth, known as Basidium, the mushroom planet. Unfortunately an environmental impact statement is needed before the Great Refuge can be spirited from one sphere to another, and this process takes years or decades.

… The speech by Prime Minister Netanyahu before the United Nations would have made me one.

I contrast this moral clarity with what little I heard of Mr. Obama’s speech before that same body yesterday, ere I fled in disgust, holding my ears as I ran screaming, lest his words, like some verbal version of the image of Medusa, would turn me to stone, and freeze my face forever in a rictus of horror.

Mr. Obama, according to poling data, won 78% of the Jewish vote. That is extraordinary, considering how little this administration, the Democrat Party or the European elites from which this administration and the Democrat Party takes its cues, can bring itself to support Israel. The love and sympathy poured by the Left over every enemy of the Jewish race, from Stalin to Muslim Terrorists, give aid and comfort to deadly enemies who both deny and seek to replay the holocaust. Almost every instance of Jew-hatred I have seen in the last 20 years has issued from the Left, not from the Right, particularly from bodies like the U.N., which is notoriously and consistently antisemitic as well as being notoriously and consistently left-of-center in its policies and public statements.

Mr. Netanyahu, I salute you.

A reader (and forgive me, I cannot remember what your nom de cyber is) in a startlingly magnanimous act gave me a copy of Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot authored by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn from Austria. The terms of the bargain were that I would write a review in return.

First impressions: Mr. von Kuehnelt-Leddihn displays an impressive and deep grasp of history and politics, and, like others who have encountered him, I am almost awed by how well read and well traveled he is. If you want an American to realize he is provincial, have him read Kuehnelt-Leddihn.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn is an unabashed monarchist, a conservative in what might be called the European sense of the word: one who upholds the dignity and sacral character of the throne and the altar, the crown and the miter.

A point of view more foreign to my own cannot be imagined: on the flag of the commonwealth in which I live blaze the immortal words SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS, and the seal displays armed Liberty with a naked sword over a fallen king, his crown in the dust. My commonwealth, Virginia, also (perhaps unwisely) entered into an alliance or federation with other sovereign states surrounding, and much of our sovereignty, far beyond what was originally agreed, has been stolen away. They could not have won their liberty from the British Crown without us, and so we have been ill repaid. Nonetheless, I am the heir of the deeds and words of Virginians such as Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Zachary Taylor, John Marshall, Patrick Henry, George Wythe, John Paul Jones, and so on.

My point here is that the collectivist and communist are actually closer in position to me than a monarchist, because communism springs out of (or perverts, take your pick) Enlightenment political theories, Rousseau’s social contract, Locke’s theories of the innate rights of man, Adam Smith’s labor theory of value, and so on. Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s love of monarchic polities is based on an older, I will call it Catholic, world view, and this has been tempered (or made bitter) by the sad testamony of history, the insanities and enormities, the sheer mass of bloodshed, unleashed by democracies and populist movements worldwide.

Nonetheless, I found the book thought-provoking and compelling. Nay, further, I will say it is a’must-read’ for anyone who calls himself a conservative. The analysis of the thought and history of Leftism is peerless, insightful, and lucid.

Read the remainder of this entry »

Only posting a link. Well, I say that when I post long essays, but this time I am actually only posting a link.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090923-moon-water-discovery.html

And I will mention that H.G. Wells, with the same degree of scientific accuracy describe by GK Chesterton in his NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL, predicted the presence of water on the moon over a century ago, in his scientific romance FIRST MEN IN THE

Crossposted from my better half’s livejournal:

Today, our Guest Blogger,Ginger Kenney–a writer herself–discusses the joys and wonders of raising a writer.

http://arhyalon.livejournal.com/84801.html

I hope I can be excused if I violate slightly my no-posting until Friday rule, but this is a needed follow up to yesterday’s post. This will be short. Well, it will be long, but it will be short for me, since my normal posts are Tolstoyan in length.

Those of you who regard me, John C. Wright, not-quite world-famous author, as merely a shrill echoing and partisan shill for the Republican Party, first let me say YOU’RE RIGHT!

Or, rather, let me say I WISH YOU WERE RIGHT!

I would be delighted to live in a country where one of the parties was somewhere, anywhere, near where I stood politically on any issue. Read the remainder of this entry »

I am only posting a link, and asking one question.

Here is the link: http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/pcourrielche/2009/09/21/explosive-new-audio-reveals-white-house-using-nea-to-push-partisan-agenda/

The article concerns using the NEA, the National Endowment for the Arts, to use taxpayer money (including the tax money from artists like me who make my living by the pen, brush, bow or chisel) to fund “artistes” (including those who cannot make their living by the pen, brush, bow or chisel because they are no-talent poseurs pretending to be someone like me) not to produce art for the community, such as public monuments to fallen servicemen nor public recitals of classical music written by famous native sons, but to crank out pro-Obama agitprop.

Here is my question for the members of the Republican Party (hereafter to be called ‘the Stupid Party’): why did the NEA continue to exist for even one day after your party had majority control of the House and Senate and White House?

How hard is it to run a red pen through one line in a federal budget, if you have control of the Congress, or how hard is it to send a squad of heavily armed men in riot gear into the headquarters of the NEA, have them burnt to death Waco style, and sent off to slavery in Cuba Elian Gonzales style?

I mean, when the Democrat Party (hereafter to be called ‘the Evil Party’), stubborn jackass of totalitarianism, gallops into control of the state, it can use the full power of the federal stormtroopers in their jackbboots to mug religious oddballs in Texas and little escaped slave-boy orphans in Florida, and then afterward go back to their favorite past-time of trampling a human face forever, but when the mighty GOP, elephant of fiscal responsibility, somehow tramples its path to power without tripping over its ears like Dumbo, we cannot find even one pencil-necked Bureaucrat willing to send a politely-worded eviction notice to the longhairs at NEA headquarters?

If I were asking two questions, I would ask the Stupid Party where in the Constitution the federal government is specifically enumerated the right to fund art projects? Any power not specifically granted the general government is reserved to the states or the people, remember.

My comment: very well, I will be more than happy to think and to talk about it. As a preliminary, let me call you a liar as you have called me, and all Americans, cowards. You casually assume, nameless Mouth of the Dark Lord of Newsweek, that no one can disagree with your political program except through an unwillingness to think about the issue due to quaking fear. Let me also call you a liar again, for claiming our health care system is broken. It is not even sick. But all this to one side, let us talk about this anathema idea, shall we? Let’s.

First, let us review a few facts. Read the remainder of this entry »

Ok, well, this one needs be only two words long:

SOLOMON KANE!

Read the remainder of this entry »

John Derbyshire, monger of gloom, over at National Review Online, is talking about Howard Philips Lovecraft.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MzBhMTg4YzA0ZDUyYTc5ODNmYmY0YTBhNzNmYWYzZjM=

My comment: I note this as an odd cultural artifact. You must realize my formative years were BSW (Before STAR WARS) and in the culture of my youth science fiction was an outcast literature, read only by hooded lamplight in dismal smuggler’s caves far from where the prying lamps of civilization and propriety might spy. I recall serious discussions among us that no fantasy movie could ever be made, on the grounds that no one wanted to watch half-naked barbarians cleaving skulls, or see an elf by moonlight in Lothlorien. Movies, in the Jimmy Carter years, were all grim and depressing.

That a literate scholar, such as C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien, might read or write the stuff was astonishing, albeit allowed on the grounds that it was for children, and perhaps instructive  — all the more astonishing was that, while being universally dismissed as mere ‘Buck Rogers junk’ there were writers (and I am thinking of John W. Campbell Jr., Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov) who took seriously the idea that science fiction was meant to be sober, literate, serious, and transformative, it was propaganda (I mean that in the religious sense of the word–the literature to propogate the faith) for belief in technical progress. The message was: The Stars Are Yours! Go Up, Young Man! (I seem to recall that the only book I have seen in recent years firmly in this Campbellian tradition was Victor Koman’s KINGS OF THE HIGH FRONTIER. Are only Libertarians still believers in progress?) — but outside the SF ghetto, the scorn of the muggles for sciffy was universal. Harlequin romances had more cachet.

And now SF is mainstream. It is part of the culture, so that even conservative political commentators read and remark on writers who never published outside the pulp pages of Farnsworth Wright’s WEIRD TALES.

In a variation on last week’s theme, Mr. Mojzes writes of moral ambiguity in storytelling.

http://arhyalon.livejournal.com/84306.html

My comment: I don’t know whether moral ambiguity is good or bad. To me, it is sort of a gray area. Who am I to judge? How are we to know? Or, to get to the point, who are we to judge the issue of how we are to know whether or not moral ambiguity (if it exists) should be judged or not? These are deep and troubling questions that have given such thinkers as Ellsworth Toohey many idle minutes of entertainment and a prolific career.

I know what you are saying — "Isn’t Ellsworth Toohey one of those cardboard-stock characters Ayn Rand made up for her outrageously polemic book ATLAS SHRUGGED?" The answer is a resounding "no!" followed by a lilting laugh and a girlish toss of my locks. Ellsworth Toohey is a stock-cardboard character from Ayn Rand’s outrageously polemical THE FOUNTAINHEAD. It is a completely different book! I would laugh with a condescending sneer at Ayn Rand’s completely unrealistic and artificial and preposterous characterization of Ellsworth Toohey, except (1) laughing while sneering causes hiccoughs and (2) I know people (a lot of people) who talk and think and act just like Ellsworth Tooehy in real life, and which I think is totally unfair, on the grounds that such pure darkness offends the cherished idea that life is full of gray areas of moral ambiguity!

As always, please send any mash notes, favorable comments, gifts of flowers, or blank checks to my wife, who fights crime under the codename "Lamplighter", and who needs the money, and send your hate mail to Mr. John Scalzi, who does not need more greif, and has no time to fight crime. And while you are at it, why not ask Mr. Scalzi for some favors in your burgeoning writing career? And no, I am not cleared to know his codename.

Something I wrote a while back, but (if you will forgive the postmodern self-referential nature of the comment) it bears repeating:

I have said on many occasions that the belief in “memes” is merely a self-replicating bit of information code, passed from mind to mind through speech, and having no reality other than its ability to replicate itself further.

Grammatically, memes only ever exist in the third or second person, not in the first person. Their or Your deeply-held and cherished beliefs are memes, whereas My deeply-held and cherished beliefs are enlightenment.

This belief in memes is convenient because it excuses a debater finding himself in a position of weakness in an argument from having to address the content of opposing thoughts. By being called a “meme” the opposing thought is merely gratuitously asserted to have no content, and, hence, nothing exists to argue against.

The debater is hence able to make a response, a more or less meaningless series of words, which has the surface appearance of being an answer, and which (to the unwary) creates an impression of being a devastating riposte or counter-argument; which of course is much easier to accomplishing, requiring neither learning, thought, inside, wisdom, training, care, or patience, which might be demanded to achieve the same effect one might enjoy if actually answering the argument.

One gets something for nothing. Fools can look wise, and the uneducated and lazy thinker can rout, or seem to, the educated and rigorous argument of his opposition.

Both the victim of the meme ad hominem and the audience, being under the same pressure to minimize the effort put into thought, and craving the shallow appearance of being thinkers, will remember and repeat the belief in memes, so it becomes part of their thought-pattern, without, of course, ever being taken seriously by any thinkers. And so it spreads. That is the Darwinian selection that allows a belief in memes to continue.

No one really believes in memes, of course. Any honest thinker who actually believed that some or all thought-content was no more than self-replicating lines of words without meaning would doubt his own beliefs first (including the belief that his thought-content was no more than self-replicating lines of word without meaning).

Belief in memes is just a meme.

Please pass this idea along to as many people as you know.