John C. Wright's Journal

5600 words written so far this week.
Not bad.

Here is a paragraph I particularly liked. Copyright (c) 2010 John C. Wright. All rights reserved!

Between times he read, or watched, or had fictional conversations with library figments, to learn a bit about the history of what had happened while he slumbered. He soon found he could not trust anything presented to him from a library cloth. The systems were more interlinked and more heavily edited than in his day. Fortunately, Del Azarchel had a well-stocked library, and, since he was the world ruler, of course he could afford to read the stuff his own police forbad elsewhere.

Montrose decided then and there that a full library, one made of old-fashioned paper books with bindings, the kind that cannot be electronically re-edited at by anonymous lines of hidden code, was just as much a necessity for a free man as a shooting iron or a printing press. 

Even so, hard print did not have search features, so he could not go back and find previous passages except by flipping pages and trying to remember which page said what. There was no way to shorten or expand paragraphs, or ask for additional information. He had to actually get up from his chair and look in another dumb book, called a dictionary, to get the meaning of a word he did not know. He also could not personalize any hard books in their font or lit-settings, or set the text in quotes to be read aloud by different voices, or even read aloud at all. It was like something from the Dark Ages. And the pictures did not move.

No wonder students back in the bad old days were bored.

From the website of the US Coptic Association

It is often asked what harm, if any, it would do to heterosexual marriage if gay marriage were legitimized?

I suppose if we lived in a strictly Libertarian Commonwealth, where marriage was nothing more than a contract enacted for the services (sexual, child-rearing, companionship, and so on) of a willing and fertile young wageearner-ess needing a steady income and a place to stay, the presence or absence of a member of the opposite sex would not matter to the work contract. Libertarians hold that all manners and morals (even those that have negative external outcomes, such as fathering and abandoning bastard children or experimenting with mind-altering drugs) are strictly private, and ain’t nobody’s business what you do, or to whom, or how many. Just get it all in writing first.

However, in the intrusive nanny welfare state that America now is, and in the Euro-socialist failed state America shall most likely soon become, there are no private manners or morals.

In a socialist commonwealth, if a man fathers a bastard child and abandons it, the taxpayers pick up the tab and raise the child. If the man takes drugs and debilitates himself, the taxpayers pick up the tab and send him to the doctor, or to rehab. Everything is a public matter. If Joe the Plumber, tax cow, pick up the tab for your motorcycle head injury, then he, not you, get the say whether you wear a motorcycle helmet, because he underwrite your risks.

And modern socialists are primarily concerned with changing the minds and personalities, the values and attitudes of the subjects of the social engineering experiments.

Socialism started as an experiment in millenarian pseudo-economics, and it made windy promises about being more efficient and producing more wealth than the engines of capitalism. But that is from last century. Modern socialism is social, that is to say, it deals with mind-control. It wants to teach, educate, condition, mold and reprogram human beings.

In its own way, modern Socialism is Aristotlean, because it seeks to carve and shape the subjects of the state, and train them to certain virtues. In Aristotle’s case, the virtues were justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude. In the case of the modern socialist, the virtues sought are lust (especially perverted lusts), envy (especially class envy), greed (especially greed for the unearned), pride (also called self-esteem), wrath (see the rioters outside World Bank meetings for details) and so on. Where Aristotle wanted men of self-control and Spartan discipline, the modern Left wants the opposite.

Hence, normalizing homosexual marriage, in a modern socialist commonwealth, will impose upon the state a duty (if not a holy crusade) to seek the destruction of any remaining pockets of normalcy and decency. Perhaps in a libertarian commonwealth where everyone minded his own business, perverts and straights could live alongside each other in peace: but in a community where the state has the task of molding the public mind, one must prevail over the other, and mutual toleration is impossible.

Suppose, for example, a Catholic charity that seeks to find homes for orphans wishes to follow its own sacred teachings, and not to place orphans the homes of a gay couples If the Catholic Church gives instructions to her flock to that effect, in a socialist commonwealth, this is no longer a private matter: instead the hierarchy of the Church will be pressured, or commanded, to disobey the Church officers and obey the state.

This is not a hypothetical. It has already happened. The City government of (where else?) San Francisco officially condemned the Catholic church and asked the sitting archbishop to defy church teaching. Below is the document:

http://www.thomasmore.org/downloads/sb_thomasmore/CatholicLeagueSF-CityofSFResolution.pdf

I note with wry displeasure the return of the "Rome is a foreign power" language which figured so predominantly in nativist denunciations of Irish immigrants. It seems those days are not behind us.

The topic of bioethics is of some interest to me because my latest science fiction book examines some of the implications of Transhumanism, which were touched on only tangentially in my earlier book THE GOLDEN AGE. In that book I simply assumed the men of the far future to be all of morally upright and perfect sanity, human weaknesses having been long ago bred and trained out of the race: ergo none of the particular moral quandaries pertinent to men with the power to remake mankind would arise.

Be that as it may, I confess I am a little disappointed by the current state of what is called Bioethics, which seems to consist of finding clever-sounding excuses to commit things we all instinctively know to be gruesome, or criminal, or both. ( I would have thought the final defeat of the Nazis would have put paid to the idea of breeding humans like showdogs, and suchlike. Apparently not. The next generation with no living memory of the Nazis will know nothing of them, except perhaps they will learn in public school, or by reading mainstream news commentary, the someone named George W. Bush was their leader, and that the Nazis opposed gun control, high taxes, diversity quotas, vegetarianism and opposed speech codes. To the next generation a ‘Stormtrooper” will mean a good-guy soldier from STAR WARS who fights bounty hunters. )

Wesley J. Smith lists what he considers to be the Top Ten Bioethics Stories of the Decade. http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzkzNjkzZGJhYmMwYzQ1MjFjNjZhYjE5ZDEyOGU4Mzk=

I give a heavily edited version of his list below, with his comments.

10: The ascendance of an anti-human environmentalism. Deep ecology, the most radical expression of environmentalism, maintains that human beings are the world’s enemy … during the last decade, vocal and unapologetic support for draconian depopulation has become a part of the environmental mainstream.

9. The growth of biological colonialism. Desperate and destitute people are increasingly being exploited for their body parts and functions. Matters were even worse in China, where it was credibly charged that prisoners — perhaps practitioners of Falun Gong — were executed and their organs sold…. Poor women in India are renting their wombs to rich women for gestation….

8. The increase in American pro-life attitudes. Polling showed a dramatic increase in the number of people who identify themselves as pro-life.

7. The struggle over Obamacare. The debatewill not end with the passage or failure of a bill, and health-care reform will likely be one of the most important stories of the coming decade.

6. Legalization of assisted suicide in Washington. As soon as the law went into effect, so did the pushback: Many Washington doctors and health-care systems publicly opted out of participation. A month later, a Montana trial judge declared a constitutional right to assisted suicide; the Montana supreme court eventually vacated the decision…

5: The success of adult-stem-cell research. Embryonic stem cells proved difficult to …  In contrast, adult stem cells have …  helped diabetics get off insulin, restored sensation to paralyzed people with spinal-cord injuries, helped heal unhealthy hearts, and provided hope to patients with autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis.

4. “Suicide tourism” in Switzerland. Over the last decade, Switzerland became Jack Kevorkian as a country, its suicide clinics catering to an increasingly international clientele — mostly from the United Kingdom — with the victims ranging from the terminally ill, to people with disabilities, to even a double suicide of a terminally ill elderly woman and her frail husband, who wanted to die rather than be cared for by others.

3. IVF anarchy. The story of Nadya Suleman — better known as “Octomom” — Because there were no regulations on the number of embryos that could be made during an IVF procedure, we now have 400,000 “spare” embryos on ice, looked upon by some as being akin to a crop ripe for the harvest…

2. The Bush embryonic-stem-cell funding policy. When Pres. George W. Bush signed an executive order restricting federal funding of embryonic-stem-cell research to lines already in existence on Aug. 9, 2001, he set off a nearly decade-long firestorm. … the real poke in the eye for the Science Establishment and liberal media was that Bush’s policy sent a clarion message that embryos — which are, after all, nascent human life — matter, thrusting his policy into a buzz saw involving our most touchy cultural issues, particularly abortion.

1. The dehydration of Terri Schiavo.  The culture of death.

My comment: One frequent criticism of the Catholic Church is that she forbids not only abortion and contraception, euthanasia and suicide, but artificial insemination. The common thread in these prohibitions is not hard to see. The detractors of the Church are reduced to senseless sputtering about Christians being “against science” — conveniently forgetting the entire history of the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Counterreformation, and remembering only the trial of Galileo.

I notice that we never would have heard either of Nadya Suleman nor of Terri Schiavo in a nation that adhered to Christian conclusions about the sacredness of human life, rather than pagan or postchristian notions about the convenience or inconvenience of human life.

In a recent discussion in this space, a commenter offered the opinion that I must be a supporter of multiculturalism, on the grounds that I recently adopted a daughter from Canton. Perhaps his point was that I ought to be a supporter, or that I was a supporter without realizing it, or somesuch. In my imagination, I heard the gentleman’s remark in that ‘Gotcha!’ tone of voice which is the sum and summit of what passes for reasoned discourse among the Left. (I admit the gentleman bears no responsibility for my imagination, and I make no claim that my imagination is not overactive, for otherwise I would be writing whodunits and not space opera.) 

I need not say that I did not regard the act of adopting a Chinese daughter, making her American and therefore no longer Chinese, to be an act that reflects to the glory of the Middle Kingdom. Now that she is safely out of reach of the Chinese officials, I need keep my motive secret no longer: I want her to grow up and be governor of California! (I would say President, but then there is that pesky native-birth requirement). 

Yes, I had other motives also, some personal, some religious, and so on. Rather than reciting them, let me quote from an article from the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/19/opinion/19iht-edmirsky.html?_r=1 

Beijing does not engage in arguments. It simply bullies to discourage others. Zhang Zhixin, a young Chinese woman, was executed in 1975 for “opposing the Great Helmsman Chairman Mao, opposing Mao Zedong thought, opposing the revolutionary proletarian line and piling offense upon offense.” To ensure that Ms. Zhang could not cry out at her execution, her vocal cords were cut.

Mr. Liu’s indictment came on International Human Rights Day ….

Sadly, China now gets a free American pass on the abridgment of its fundamental human rights. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has suggested that human rights must now take a back seat behind other more important considerations, and President Obama canceled a visit to the White House by the Dalai Lama after Beijing warned that it would imperil the president’s trip to China.

Liu Xiaobo remains clear-eyed. Before his latest arrest he observed, “In the game of ban and response to ban, the people’s space for expression increases millimeter by millimeter. The more the people advance, the more the authorities retreat…."

Read the remainder of this entry »

Here is an article from National Review about the all-too-revealing reaction of the Damned to Brit Hume’s rather mild on air comment asking Tiger Wood, who betrayed his wife and family, to seek redemption in Christ. I reprint the whole thing without further comment.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2EyZDc1ODc4ZmEzNTk2YzM1NzI0OTJlOTFkZGViZGQ=

Hume’s Gentle Witness
We should welcome honest talk about faith.

By Peter Wehner

Brit Hume’s comments on Fox News Sunday — “I don’t think that [Buddhism] offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith,” and, “My message to Tiger [Woods] would be: Tiger, turn to the Christian faith, and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world” — have unleashed a torrent of criticism from the Left, including the various circus acts over at MSNBC and the Washington Post’s Tom Shales.

Shales’s criticisms in particular are manifestations of a mind that is enraged and slightly unhinged; they are ad hominem and, in some respects, unserious. But there are two lines of argument worth examining as they relate to what Hume said. The first is that he “dissed” all Buddhists; the second is that urging Woods to turn to the Christian faith is inappropriate, offensive, and out of line. Let’s examine both claims in turn.

Read the remainder of this entry »

wmtingleywrites: “[1] Al Qaeda launched the 9/11 attacks as part of an escalating terror campaign against the United States. They expected a capitulation by us, not the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.”

My comment:

Interesting. I had been assuming that Al Qaeda’s main purpose was to shore up support among their base, to awe and impress their Sunni allies and to awe and terrify their Shiite enemies. It was a symbolic, a religious act, not a military one: it was a holocaust of human victims to the altar of Allah, but with the political purpose of displaying Al Qaeda to be the “strong horse” — strong enough to kick the Great Satan in the crotch, brave enough to die in for the Cause.

To Al Qaeda, it was a win-win proposition: If American lashed out, this would stir up a general uprising and mutiny among the Faithful, and the millions of Moslems would find a unified purpose in Jihad against the West. If American did not lash out, this would show them to be a Paper Tiger.

The outcome they did not expect was that America would lash out, quickly destroy the regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, but that the Muslim world would remain mostly neutral, and offer only tepid and hesitant support for the Jihad.

And I think Al Qaeda was also expecting supernatural intervention on their behalf, which did not eventuate.

However, read all the above with a grain of salt. It is speculation on my part, an impression. I am a sci-fi writer[1], by Grabthar’s hammer, not a foreign policy expert, not a spy, so I welcome correct from any authoritative source.

****
[1] endnote: My expertise lies in other areas. If you want to know which planet Paul Muad-dib comes from, or what is the home star of the Kzinti, that I can answer without even googling it (Caladan is the third planet of Delta Pavonis, the Kzin homeworld orbits 61 Ursae Majoris). And I also know the real name of the Perfesser and the Skipper from Gilligan’s Island (Roy Hinkley, Jonas Grumby).

This is a reprint of a previous article I wrote some years ago, but I post it again today, because there has been some discussion of the composition of the factions among the political parties in America in my comments-boxes, and I thought to weigh in my opinion.

* * *

There are six political parties in America, not two.

These six align themselves into the two major political parties for convenience, but the grouping is not harmonious or even.

The elite of the Left are the Dissolute. They are idealists, concerned with ideas rather than pragmatics. These are media moguls, academicians, ACLU lawyers, and intellectuals primarily concerned with abolishing the norms of decency from society, or, rather, to alter the norms to bring them in line with a nonjudgmental, all-welcoming, but ultimately nihilist political correctness. They favor abortion and homosexual marriage. Libertarians are found here.

The elite of the Right are the Capitalists. Rightwing intellectuals and businessmen seek minimum government and free trade. Their primary concern is economics. They also tend to favor what is properly called the liberal institutions of rule of law, the constitution, the freedoms in the Bill of Rights. They are somewhat internationalist in flavor. Libertarians are found here also.

The yeomen of the Left are the Dependents. These include teacher’s unions and bureaucrats, farmers, trial lawyers and race hustlers, and everyone who depends on handouts from the public till, or pay-offs from class-action suits. They favor expansions of the federal government to fund their various programs, and class actions suits to force guns and cigarettes into oblivion. They are pragmatists, concerned with questions of Right Conduct, which they regard as synonymous with charity and order (which they equate with handgun disarmament and race quotas). Authoritarians are found here of the Welfare-State kind.

The yeomen of the Right are the Militarists. They favor a strong military and an aggressive foreign policy. They are anticommunist and patriotic. They do not share the internationalist feelings of the Capitalists. They are pragmatists, concerned with questions of Right Conduct, which they regard as synonymous with honor and order. Authoritarians are found here of the Law-and-Order kind.

The base of the Left are the Workers. These include many constituencies, such as southern Black Baptists, who do not share the social values of the Social Libertines, but they do share a suspicion of the Capitalists, in whom they see a mutual enemy. Their primary concern is economics: they want the government to regulate the market and protect the workingman. These are common Joes.

The base of the Right are the Social Conservatives, the Chaste, who want to protect their families from the rising tide of filth and moral decay in which our current society is drowning. These are idealists, concerned with ideas rather than pragmatics. They want to see perversion shamed rather than lauded. The Social Conservatives have more in common with the Workers than they do with the Capitalists, whom they also mistrust as driving the morals of society into Philistinism, but the presence of the Marxist and socialist element in the Left elite drives the Conservatives to the Right. They want the government to regulate the speech and protect the manners of society. They regard abortion as child-murder. These are common Joes.

This model of “six factions in two parties” has one advantage in predicting the outcome of political contests: as a rule of thumb, if there is an issue or candidate that energizes all three factions in one party, but not all three factions in the other party, that party will prevail in a political contest.

Read the remainder of this entry »

Robert Mitchell remarks, in re a conversation about the Malthusian limits on human population growth:

My comment: I did not even mention space colonization in my little essay on Cornucopianism, only because that makes the whole problem of the limits of Malthus moot, even ridiculous, for any society rich enough to send people and gear out of Earth’s gravity well, and clever enough to exploit the endless — literally endless — natural resources of the Final Frontier.

Blow the moon into chunks of rock, give Earth a ring like Saturn, and hollow out the resulting asteroids, spin them for gravity, and just add air, soil, and water and VOILA! You and your family can live in cramped misery equal to the privates the crew of a submarine enjoy, with the additional knowledge that riot, war, or engineering failure could cause a power outage. Power outages on Earth mean you find candles and talk with your neighbors while sitting on the porch. Power outages aboard the O’Neill colony means you keep checking a medical readout clamped to your baby’s ear to check on oxygen content in the bloodstream. 

But I am a bit of a sceptic (despite my love of science fiction) of space colonization in the near future. The technical and economic hurtles to be cleared just look too steep to me. Why build a base on the moon, when it is cheaper to build in Antarctica? And why build in Antarctica, when vast acres in Patagonia, or even Chile, are unoccupied? Would not it be easier to move to New Mexico, and try to find (or gene-engineer) a form of cactus that can be grown and consumed in a cost-effective fashion? 

I can imagine technologies that could change the cost-benefit ratio of space colonization, but I cannot imagine them being found in the near term.

Antigravity, for example, would be a nice way to lower the cost of moving mass from surface to orbit, but then again so would a flying unicorn that shoots floaty rainbows from her magic horn.

In the near future we will have to make due with space elevators or skyhooks or groundbased launching lasers or railguns or something. Chemical rockets ain’t the wagontrain to the planets we were hoping they’d be.

Each time I make progress at being humble, something comes along to inflate my self-opinion.

Yesterday I visited a gaming store with my rollicking children, and fell into a conversation with a nice young clerk named Dave. Shamelessly, I tried to interest him in my wife’s book PROSPERO LOST, but with true matronly modesty, the wife insisted I tell the youth my name, and that I also wrote books. I wrote her name and book info on a napkin for him, and also added my name. He stared at it a moment, and said, "John C. Wright — I have heard of that name–"

Thinking he had heard of me from posts on the Democratic Underground.com, naturally I placed my hand surreptitiously yet casually on the hilt of my sword-cane and loosened the blade in its scabbard while continuing to smile and marking the distance to the exit. Read the remainder of this entry »

A must-read for those of you interested in the lost art of being a man: 

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/mwalsh/2010/01/03/the-way-you-wear-your-hat-listen-up-hollywood-its-important

Please check back soon!