Archive for August, 2014

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Message from CatholicVote.org

Posted August 22, 2014 By John C Wright

Found this in my inbox, and had to share the news:

Dear CV Friend,

The Consecrated Host is back in the hands of Archbishop Coakley and the Catholic Church.

Deo Gratias!

Additionally, the Satanists have agreed to sign a statement saying that they will not use a Consecrated Host in a black mass – if it happens.

Talk about a great victory!

I work in politics. There are many important battles on Capitol Hill, in our federal courts, and at the ballot box.

But I’ll be totally honest: This victory is perhaps the most important one of them all!

The Satanists thought they had us against the ropes. It’s a public forum and we couldn’t stop them from performing their “ceremony.” They even went so far as to brag about having a Consecrated Host!

But that’s where they crossed the line.

Our friend, attorney Michael Caspino, sprung into action. Lifted by the prayers of Catholics all across the country – and with the support of Archbishop Coakley — Caspino fought back against the Satanists in court.

And we won. We won for Jesus.

The Satanists might still hold a black mass, but promised that they won’t do so with a Consecrated Host. So let’s continue praying to Saint Michael, in thanksgiving for his powerful intercession.

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A Thought-Experiment in Criticism

Posted August 21, 2014 By John C Wright

Read the following and tell me if there is anything flawed or odd or uncouth about the approach or attitude it portrays?

Tomorrow I will be attending GenCon, the biggest table-top gaming convention in the United States. Held in Indianapolis, Indiana, it is four fun-filled days in celebration of the art and hobby of role-playing. There is something for everyone there: games, films, seminars, workshops, dancing, music, and parties. It’s an annual event where people from all over the world come to let their hair down and their inner geek out. As a lifelong gamer, I am excited to go to GenCon.

As an Goy, I am apprehensive about going to GenCon.

For all that GenCon offers, it lacks in Non-Jewish gamers. Last year was my first GenCon, and as I explored the convention, I saw almost no one who looked like me. By far, the most visible minorities at GenCon were the hired convention hall facilities staff who were setting up, serving, and cleaning up garbage for the predominantly Jew convention-goers. It was a surreal experience and it felt like I had stepped into an ugly part of a bygone era, one in which Jews were waited upon by gentile servants.

Gaming has a race problem. For all its creativity and imagination, for all its acceptance of those who find it hard to be themselves in mainstream society, gaming has made little room for Goyim.

 

“The problem is that Jew people see racism as conscious hate, when racism is bigger than that…

Racism is an insidious cultural disease. It is so insidious that it doesn’t care if you are a Jew person who likes black people; it’s still going to find a way to infect how you deal with people who don’t look like you. Yes, racism looks like hate, but hate is just one manifestation. Privilege is another. Access is another. Ignorance is another. Apathy is another. And so on.”

–Scott Woods, author and poet.

 

I am the first in my family to be born in the United States. The child of immigrants, I struggled between cultures. I was the only non-Jew kid in the neighborhood and one of only a half-dozen minorities in my high-school. I was an outsider.

I found refuge in Dungeons & Dragons in my freshman year. I could escape who I was in those heroic characters and epic stories. I could be someone I was not. I could be strong. I could be fierce.

I could be Jew.

As an awkward teen, like other awkward teens, I wanted to be accepted. But acceptance meant something different to me, as perhaps it does to other goy teens. Acceptance meant being Jew.

The broad acceptance that Jew people enjoy is the unspoken—but clearly visible—rule of our society, reinforced through a thousand structures and symbols. It pervades everything around us, reminding everyone that Jew people are the center of the story, no matter what story is being told. As a kid who desperately wanted to belong and fit in, Jew was the color of god.

Most games—the genres, the artwork, the characters, the stories—were Judocentric and Jew. It was easy, perhaps even expected, to be Jew when playing a character.

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The International Lord of Hate v Smugwhiner von Sneer

Posted August 21, 2014 By John C Wright

Larry Correia, man among men, take the time to dismantle the filthy lies and maggoty madness of a subterranean dwarf, or Nibelung, named A. A. George, who, on behalf of my publisher Tor, and in the name of Tor, accuses all gamers in general and GenCon in particular of being racists.

Mr Correia in hiphigh boots wades through the dung-choked mire of race-baiting smugwhiningness so you don’t have to. Read and admire:

http://monsterhunternation.com/2014/08/19/no-tor-com-gencon-isnt-racist-a-fisking

The money quote is this. Mr George (I assume him male, because women tend not to be this aggressively stupid) is in italics, and the bold Mr Correia is in bold.

These are symbols, important symbols. If the color of all the leadership, of all the roles of power and recognition, the entire structure is white, and if this same leadership is tolerant of hate-speech, it gives a clear unspoken signal to the non-white community: You can join us here, but only if you leave your history, your people, and your emotions at the door.

Speaking of symbols, get off your cross. There is no “clear unspoken signal” to be extrapolated out of all that straw. Nobody other than your fevered imagination told you to abandon your history, your people, or your emotions, George.

You want to know why real instances of racism are often overlooked? Because the public is the villagers and you SJWs are the boy who cried wolf. When every unconscious action or event is somehow racist, after a while we tune you out. Real racists disappear into the tall grass of micro-aggressions and invisible privilege.

I’ve been told time and again by gamers, “I don’t see race” as if they were doing me a kindness. This is not enlightenment or progressiveness. It is ignorance. If you do not see race, you do not see me. You do not see my identity, my ethnicity, my history, my people. What you are telling me, when you say “I do not see race,” is that you see everything as the normal default of society: white. In the absence of race and ethnicity, it is only the majority that remains. I am erased.

I may be guilty of uttering the words “I don’t see race” at some point but perhaps I could better rephrase it to say “I don’t give a flying fuck about your race, because I care far more about your individual actions, personality, beliefs, choices, philosophy, and culture, and in this particular case we share the same culture of Gamer. And race is an artificially limiting concept primary used by statist control freaks to keep everyone in easily managed stereotype boxes. When I notice your race it is probably the same way I’d notice if somebody was tall, short, fat, thin, bald, beautiful or ugly. Now shut the fuck up about micro aggressions because you are harshing my mellow and roll the fucking dice.”

How about that? Better?

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Prayer as a Deadly Weapon

Posted August 21, 2014 By John C Wright

I am mentioned in a rather flattering connection by the first ever podcast of the 1P5 podcast. But the rest of the meditation by Mr Steve Skojec is so well worth hearing, that I will overcome my natural modesty to link to his podcast. It is well worth hearing.

https://soundcloud.com/onepeterfive/1p5-podcast-e01#t=26:55

or here it is from the onset

https://soundcloud.com/onepeterfive/1p5-podcast-e01

We cannot beat the fallen seraphim of hell without God.

 

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The Wright Perspective: Arguments for Everything and Nothing

Posted August 21, 2014 By John C Wright

My latest is up at Every Joe.

http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/08/20/politics/existence-of-god-rational-arguments/

So why do Progressives pretend there are no rational arguments for the existence of God?

The various arguments in favor of the existence of God and the truth of Christ do not find favor among secular, that is, antichristian philosophers of this generation. However, such arguments are not any more nor less sound and clear as arguments in favor of the existence of the law of cause and effect, the existence of an objective external universe, the existence of a universal standard of morality, the prudence and fairness of the death penalty, the gold standard or any other topic debated and settled by argument.

The fact that such arguments are rarely discussed is not a sign of the alleged enlightenment of this generation. It is not a sign that this generation is too savvy to waste time discussing abstract matters.

Rather, it is a sign that this generation suffers from severe educational retardation, and no longer regards the use of the faculty of reasoning as a proper method to distinguish true from false. Look on any modern talk show. Now they are shout shows.

The intellect of the intellectual class has diminished sharply within the last fifty years.

Next time you come across an argument for or against the existence of God, look and see what standard is being used. Before you pass judgment on the merits of the argument itself, look at the form of the argument, and see whether it is sound. Make sure you understand what the argument is trying to say before you decide whether you personally find it persuasive.

Is the Argument from First Cause, for example, any less reasonable than whatever argument you can provide to defend, for example, a belief in female suffrage, or a belief that quantum mechanics will one day be reconciled with relativity?

Whole books have been written about every nuance of these deep questions for centuries, but in the final analysis, there are four strong philosophical arguments for the existence of God.

Read more: http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/08/20/politics/existence-of-god-rational-arguments/

I am trying something rather subtle here, not to prove or disprove the case for or against, merely to argue that the case is not one unworthy of a hearing, that is, it is not to be dismissed out of hand, without pondering the arguments on both sides. I somehow doubt any readers of the Leftwing persuasion reading the piece will comprehend that point.

I notice with a supercilious arch of my eyebrow that no comments have been posted as yet on this column, which deals with a serious topic, whereas I got a zillion comments on a column which made the rather trite and tried observation the Political Correctness types care more about political correctness, that is, what will help their party, cult, movement and worldview, than about correct correctness, that is, matters of fact.

Immediately in the comments section of that column, the first Leftist insisted earnestly that it was an uproven assertion, nay, a slander, for my column to say that Leftists do not believe in objective truth; and the next comment by a Leftist equally loud in insisting earnestly insisted that it was an unproven assertion, nay, an absurdity, for my column to say that objective truth exists. Neither bothered to argue with the other, or explained how the logical conundrum was to be resolved.

I assume the arguments for and against the existence of a divine and necessary being are so well known to the well read, rational, and calm readers of the internet that the column provokes no controversy.

Or perhaps the subject was too deep, and hence of no interest to the readership. Either that, or I am off my game and it was boring.

Not to worry. I will write something in a lighter vein next week.

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Space Princess Art Pause (6 of 6)

Posted August 20, 2014 By John C Wright

Unfortunately, no one can be told what The Computer is. You’ll have to see it for yourself. Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I’m talking about? Do you want to know what it is? The Computer is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. That you are a slave. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.

Well, I am taking a vacation from the computer for a week, and to entertain my reader in the meanwhile, here is some cover art for science fiction magazines. This week’s episode, the final, is the finale, which gives us the opportunity to look at the best magazine covers of all time, by which I mean the Astounding Stories covers from the Campbellian Golden Age. There should be a fair number of short stories a well read SF reader will recognize from this collection of classics.

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Space Princess Art Pause (5 of 6)

Posted August 19, 2014 By John C Wright

The Computer can neither harm a human being, nor, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. This means that if Bayta Darrell on Planet Terminus, the farthest star in the galaxy from the center, gets a splinter, the Humanoids of Planet Wing IV must all explode from shame. However, robots can kill and murderize orcs and elves like D&D murder hobos. Good Times!

I will be away from the computer because obviously these things are dangerous. In my meanwhile, enjoy today’s episode of Space Princess Art Pause, including selections from Startling Stories.

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Space Princess Art Pause (4 of 6)

Posted August 18, 2014 By John C Wright

The Computer is Your Friend. But I will be away from the Computer hunting mutants and members of secret societies for a week of vacation. Therefore to to amuse and divert my devoted reader, allow me to present these gems from the unfairly overlooked pulp roots of our beloved genre.

Today’s episode concentrates on Planet Stories, which, in my humble opinion, had the most well drawn covers (but not necessarily the best — that honor goes to Astounding Stories).

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Space Princess Art Pause (3 of 6)

Posted August 17, 2014 By John C Wright

I will be away from Our Master, Colossus/World Control, for a week of vacation, to to amuse and divert my devoted reader, allow me to present these gems from the unfairly overlooked pulp roots of our beloved genre.

This is episode three, which features a lot of dames with guns, or with knives, axes, whips, cutlasses, bagpipes, magic bolts, and, in one case, I think she is shooting the monster with her face.
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Space Princess Art Pause (2 of 6)

Posted August 16, 2014 By John C Wright

I will be away from Our Master, Skynet, for a week of vacation, to to amuse and divert my devoted reader, allow me to present these gems from the unfairly overlooked pulp roots of our beloved genre.

This is episode two, which features a lot of thugs, toughs, and neerdowells grabbing dames. Perhaps we will see dames with guns in a later episode valiantly defending themselves.
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Space Princess Art Pause (1 of 6)

Posted August 15, 2014 By John C Wright

I will be away from Our Master, the Computer, for a week of vacation, to to amuse and divert my devoted reader (hi, Nick!) allow me to present these gems from the unfairly overlooked pulp roots of our beloved genre. This is episode one

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Definition of Fascism

Posted August 14, 2014 By John C Wright

A reader with the vunderful name of Vunder Guy writes and asks:

Speaking of, what is the actual definition of fascism (just plain old fascism without the racial hatred) and communism, and what makes them both different from each other?

Other folk (including Paul Johnson and Tom Simon) have already answered this question with clarity and detail, but nonetheless I’d like to share my summation.

The first thing to realize is the the word has been etiolated by the Left to refer to anything they dislike, including, but not limited to, populist military dictatorships, constitutional monarchies, absolute monarchies, plutocracies, limited-government-style constitutional republics, English-style class systems, and various other forms of government which are mutually exclusive. Hence, when used by a Leftist, the word means ‘enemy’ and overlooks that fascism is merely one brand of Leftist secular doctrines of socialist utopian thinking.

Originally the word had a very specific meaning. It was coined by Mussolini, a socialist, to describe how his heresy of socialism differed from orthodox Marxist socialism.

The word itself comes from the fasci which is the Roman symbol of a magistrate called a Lictor, that is, the authority of the state to punish dissent and nonconformity. The fasci is a bundle of rods surrounding an ax. You can see it in the architectural decorations of statehouses and courts of law. The bundle of rods represents the truism that any one stick can be broken in isolation, but when gathered together, cannot be broken. If put into words, it is a symbol of the motto that unity is strength.

The two main differences of doctrine are, first, that Mussolini socialism operates factories and large businesses as public utilities, where the owners are allowed to keep their businesses in name only, but in fact are reduced to mere managers under direct state control, or quartermasters. This is distinct from Marxism in that it does not consider businessmen and workingmen to be two separate species of mankind, as Marxism does, locked in a Darwinian struggle to the death for racial survival.

The second difference and related to the first is that Mussolini considered the nation, that is, a racial and cultural group sharing a language, to be the fundamental collective to which the individual was to be subordinated, and the state to be the apotheosis of the collective Will. This is distinguished from Marxism who selected the rather more abstract (and irrational) group of persons engaged in categories of economic activity to be the fundamental collective.

The short answer is that a Fascist is a Nationalist Socialist whereas a Marxist is an International Socialist.

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The Wright Perspective: Anti-Ideas and Newspeak

Posted August 13, 2014 By John C Wright

My latest is up at Every Joe:

http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/08/13/politics/leftist-anti-ideas-newspeak/

The previous columns have proposed that civilization believes in truth, virtue, beauty, reason and romance, in liberty and salvation, whereas the Morlocks destroying civilization say that opinions are arbitrary, values are personal, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, reason is untrustworthy, and monogamy is oppression but sexual perversion is laudable if not sacred.

The connection between these various ideas is not hard to trace: in order to make something as ugly and unreasonable and vicious as sexual perversion seem laudable, the concepts of beauty and reason and virtue must be desecrated in thought and speech, which cannot be done unless the concept of truth is also desecrated.

Criticism can be allowed only where there is freedom, including freedom of speech, and criticism of sin is possible only when men know and see a vision of salvation, a sense that life is worth living. In order to elude criticism, the liberty of thought and the vision of salvation must be replaced with the concrete gray drabness of a nihilistic world, in which nothing is possible and nothing is worth attempting.

Obviously metaphysical truths so basic to the human soul cannot be literally and honestly removed: no one could live a daily life if he could not tell true from false or right from wrong. The metaphysical truths can only be mocked with jeers and sneers on those occasions when they are needed as arbiters to condemn the perversions, sexual or intellectual or otherwise, of the Morlocks.

The Morlocks do not themselves set up any new concepts in their place. They use the same concepts civilized men use to judge true and false, right and wrong. New metaphysical truths cannot be invented any more than a new primary color can be envisioned.

What they have instead are what I call anti-ideas. An anti-idea is a meaningless verbal formula chanted by rote like charms whenever an idea is encountered in the hope of eluding or evading that idea, or silencing by peer pressure any foe uncool enough voice it. The formulae are carefully selected for maximum emotional impact and minimum intellectual content. The best formula is a single word or turn of phrase, like ‘social justice’ or ‘sexist’ which not only is not defined, it cannot be defined. These are, strictly speaking, not words but word-noises meant like the cries of beasts to express pure emotion, screams and battle cries and grunts of pleasure and so on.

The role of anti-ideas is to jam the gears of thought.

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The Crazy Years and their Empty Moral Vocabulary

Posted August 13, 2014 By John C Wright

Below is a reprint of an article of mine from 2010. It pains me to read the line where I spoke of the sovietization of the health care system as an event that had not yet come to pass.

 

In Robert Heinlein’s famed ‘Future History’ he constructed an elaborate timeline of thing to come, to provide a structure for his short stories.

Looking forward from the year 1940, when the timeline was first formed, it was reasonable, even conservative guesswork to predict the moonlanding by the 1980’s, since the first powered flight by the Wright Brothers had been forty years earlier. Heinlein’s Luna City founded in 1990 a decade or so later, with colonies on Mars and Venus by 2000. Compare: a submersible ironclad was written up as a science romance by Jules Verne in 1869, based on the steam-powered ‘diving boat’ of Robert Fulton, developed in 1801. In 1954 the first atomic-powered submarines—all three boats were named Nautilus—put to sea. The gap between Verne’s dream and Rickover’s reality was eight decades, about the time separating Heinlein’s writing of “Menace from Earth” and its projected date.

Looking back from the year 2010, however the dates seem remarkably optimistic and compressed. We have not even mounted a manned expedition to Mars as yet, and no return manned trips to the Moon are on the drawing boards.

One prediction that was remarkably prescient, however, was the advent of “The Crazy Years” described as “Considerable technical advance during this period, accompanied by a gradual deterioration of mores, orientation, and social institutions, terminating in mass psychoses in the sixth decade, and the interregnum.”

He optimistically predicts a recovery from the Crazy Years, the opening of a new frontier in space, and a return to nineteenth-century economy. Full maturity of the human race is achieved by a science of social relations “based on the negative basic statements of semantics.” Those of you who are A.E. van Vogt fans will recognize our old friends, general semantics and Null-A logic cropping up here. Van Vogt, like Heinlein, told tales of a future time when the Non-Aristotlean logic or “Null-A” training would give rise to a race of supermen, fully integrated and fully mature human beings, free of barbarism and neuroses.

Here is the chart. Note the REMARKS column to the right. Read the remainder of this entry »

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Almost Unbearably Enlightening

Posted August 13, 2014 By John C Wright

I found this letter in my comments inbox I reprint it here in full because I think my Mom wrote it.

No, I am kidding. My Mom would not waste her time reading my articles. The reader signed himself G Stephen Tucker. I reprint it here because it flatters me until I blush like a schoolgirl, but, like a blushing schoolgirl, I actually do secretly think, deep down, I am as cute as Tartuffe and Grima Wormtongue say I am, and, besides, it took me hours to dye my eyes to match my gown, so there.

First of all, let me applaud you for speaking your mind bluntly. All too often, people (on either side of the political spectrum) speak in euphemisms or coded phrases, and do not simply lay their cards on the table. Especially when speaking of morality issues such as this, rarely do even the most conservative thinkers and writers have the honesty and integrity to come right out and say that such things should be illegal and punishable by incarceration, and that such things should carry a significant stigma. Such is the nature of politics, I suppose. If more people were as blunt and honest as you, the debate would no doubt be more transparent and straightforward.

Let me please add that I came to your blog because the topic of Robert Heinlein came up, and I decided to google search the term “crazy years” and found your piece which used this idea as an introduction. I believe that piece was also in response to another of your writings concerning homosexuality and the responses you received from folks you offended. That piece was, in essence, about semantics (hence your use of “the crazy years” as an intro) – and since I am a semanticist (BS, applied linguistics) I habitually perform semantic analyses on any writing about the meanings and usages of words. I found your language use – the words you chose, the syntax, and the overall structure of the piece – to be beyond incredibly fascinating. It was so full of multi-leveled recursive components that the semantic field it created reminded me of an M. C. Escher painting. The fact that the piece was actually written to explicate the phenomenon of semantic dissociation made it almost unbearably enlightening. It is as though the shouts and noise and nonsense and lies and insinuations and just plain bullshit of a decade or more of political diatribes I have heard and been unable to extract any meaningful content from was suddenly brought into focus, organized, clarified, and made perfectly comprehensible.

I have never chosen a side to be on in this conflict of ideas people call politics or culture wars. I always considered all sides, given their language usage, to be so devoid of any critical thinking ability or attachment to reality that choosing a side seemed in itself to be an act of desperation. Choosing a side seemed to be equivalent to deciding to no longer be sane.

And while I still am not willing to be so insane as to ACCEPT some party platform or believe in some abstract theory of “the way things should be,” or become a PROPONENT of some poorly informed ideal or agenda, you have made it clear to me that there is a political will which I must wholeheartedly REJECT, and a wickedly informed ideal and agenda that I must become an OPPONENT of, however I may do so with my limited power. Which admittedly ain’t much.

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