Archive for September, 2014

The Wright Perspective: The Utopias of SF – The Crazy Years

Posted September 17, 2014 By John C Wright

My latest is up at Every Joe: http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/09/17/lifestyle/utopias-science-fiction-best-world-raise-family/

Most imaginary worlds are interesting places to read about, but few are places one would like to live. We continue our look at the Utopias of Science Fiction with an eye to which perfect world is the best place to live and raise a family.

In our last episode, we saw two utopias where the laws of economics were just ignored. The writers, LeGuin and Holland, simply assumed that stores and shops and factories would somehow run, even without policemen to prevent theft, the militia to prevent riots, or slavedrivers and taskmasters to prevent malingering, goldbricking and featherbedding.

The writers of the next era, or at least some of them, attempted at least some explanation of how corruption of their nearly perfect societies would be prevented: L. Neil Smith outlaws Congress, a prime source of corruption, and Iain M. Banks outlaws human ownership of the means of production, by having artificial intelligences control and distribute all property, so that mankind need no more work for a living than a housecat needs hunt for rats to earn her keep. But unless the artificial intelligences are as incorruptible as archangels, this just shifts the problem one remove. In Ken MacLeod’s world, the suggestion seems to be that if troublemakers are given powerful military hardware to play with, and told to mug a gas giant filled with post-singularity superintelligences, everything will somehow work out.

43 Comments so far. Join the Conversation

Advert for ‘reliable workers’ banned as discrimination

Posted September 17, 2014 By John C Wright

‘Tis a sad day when news is indistinguishable from parody. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/7079231/Advert-for-reliable-workers-banned-as-discrimination-by-Jobcentre-Plus.html)

Nicole Mamo, 48, wanted to post an advert for a £5.80-an-hour domestic cleaner on her local Jobcentre Plus website.

The text of the advert ended by stating that any applicants for the post ”must be very reliable and hard-working”.

But when Ms Mamo called the Jobcentre Plus in Thetford, Norfolk, the following day she was told that her advert would not be displayed instore.

A Jobcentre Plus worker claimed that the word ”reliable” meant they could be sued for discriminating against unreliable workers.

My comment: Science fiction writers often show the folly of some trend in modern life by envisioning a darkly humorous future where that trend is carried to an absurd extreme. When real life exceeds the imagined absurdity, my life as a science fiction writer grows difficult.

I cannot imagine anything this stupid.

The comedian Evan Sayet came up with the best explanation for this madness I have yet encountered. He says that the Leftists are mentally arrested at age five, the age at which they were told it was not nice to be not nice to people, and were told not nice means discrimination. They were told, in other words, that to make discriminating judgements, to be able to distinguish between similar but distinct cases, the ability tell, as on Sesame Street which things are not like the other, is evil and the source of evil.

They were told to condemn all condemnation, and to judge harshly any man who used his judgment. They were told that fair play is unfair.

They were told that thinking is a hate crime.

Read the remainder of this entry »

16 Comments so far. Join the Conversation

Crossexamined by the Honey Badger Brigade

Posted September 17, 2014 By John C Wright

Here is the link of my interview with the fine ladies of the Honey Badgers, who are ardent anti-feminists hence pro-women. I was delighted to find such specimens still existed, but I was only able to speak from the depth of a cave, as you will detect from the audio quality.

http://honeybadgerbrigade.com/2014/09/16/badger-pod-nerdcast-10-the-social-justice-invasion-of-scififantasy/

 

25 Comments so far. Join the Conversation

Victory

Posted September 16, 2014 By John C Wright

A reader named VunderGuyasks how we Christians and our allies among all men of goodwill shall win the Culture Wars?

How do we especially take back Hollywood? How do we take back academia? How do we take back the publishing world?

Another reader, Brian Niemeier, speaking on another topic, nonetheless answered this question so well, that I here quote him in full:

PC’s ability to perpetuate itself is limited by what Mr. Wright calls the Unreality Principle. In everyday life, real world experience slowly but inevitably “rebuilds the compiler”. That’s why the Left must cling to their control over academia and the media. They use these mouthpieces to constantly barrage us with PC propaganda while the government coerces our conformity via hate crimes legislation and affirmative action.

Human nature cannot be changed and always reasserts itself. The fire always burns no matter how often the PC Commissars insist that we can touch it without harm. If that weren’t the case, there would be no reason to oppose them. Read the remainder of this entry »

15 Comments so far. Join the Conversation

The Superversive Literary Movement Stakes its First Claim

Posted September 15, 2014 By John C Wright

Intercollegiate Review has published a column wherein I wrest the glory of Harry Potter out of the grasping, flabby-fingered, pallid, moist, wormlike, and malodorous hands of the Leftwingers.

I hope I will be forgiven if I think my opening line sounds like Chesterton:

In reality, the best way to find reality is through fairyland.

Fairy tales of any sort are more truthful about the eternal verities of the human condition than many a tale told in the realistic style. Stories about a bold champion of Camelot or the enchantress of Aeaea, or the great dragon beneath the Lonely Mountain, will tell you more of sin and salvation, love and loss and love found again, than a yarn about a cuckold in turn-of-the-century Dublin, or a decadent drunk living in West Egg, Long Island. This is because so-called realistic tales deal only with the surface features of life, what we see with our eyes, so to speak; fairy tales touch the mystery and wonder at the core of life.

Harry Potter is the most successful book of all time next to Pilgrim’s Progress and the Sear’s Catalogue. And so, naturally, there is a certain cult, known in his world as Deatheaters, and in our world as Political Correctness, that seeks repulsively to claim that success as their own.

A recent article in i09 reports that Anthony Gierzynski, a political scientist at the University of Vermont, found that Harry Potter fans are more open to diversity and are more politically tolerant than nonfans. The fans are also less likely to support the use of deadly force or torture, more politically active, and more likely to have had a negative view of the Bush administration.

From this the conclusion is put forth (in a leap of logic that would make the cow jumping over the moon blush with shame) that Harry Potter draws children toward the political Left.

What an utter load of rubbish.

I have inspected neither Gierzynski’s data nor his methods, but I know blast-ended skrewt dung when I smell it.

http://www.intercollegiatereview.com/index.php/2014/09/15/the-superversive-world-of-harry-potter/

This column brings the term ‘superversive’ (a neologism coined by Tom Simon) for which the Superversive Literary Movement, of which I am a founding member, is named.

Read the whole thing, click through the link several times a day, and write fourteen letters a piece to the editor of the Intercollegiate Review larding me with unlikely praise, and leave comments there.

Then build a ninety-one mile tall statue of me out of an admixture of gold, orichalcum, admantium and unobtainium, atop the magnetic north pole of Ellesmere Island, called by the Eskimo wizards Umingmak Nuna; and send seventy-one of the fairest virgins in the land to dance and sing to the sound of harp, viol, flute, cornet, pipe, psaltery, organ, dulcimer, timbrel, and sackbut, in adoration of me at the foot of the colossus; while captive kings, weeping while still crowned and robed in ermine above their helms and harnesses, are forced to fight with net and trident, or dirk or brutal hatchet, in the circus of gladiators against each other or against wild beasts becostumed in the heraldric animals of their fallen kingdoms, so that the Czar of Russia may be torn by bears, and the Queen of England gored by the unicorn and eaten by lions, while the hapless leader of America, nailed to a broken bell, will have his liver torn out by a trained bald eagle; and meanwhile masked and hooded priests serving nameless chthonic goddesses sacrifice to my glory a hecatomb of arctic whales, giant squid, and leviathans of the sea in a grisly aquatic ceremony!

Well, okay, never mind the giant statue, or the circus, or the sacrifices. Just read the article. I and don’t need seventy-one singing and dancing virgins. Only send seven fair virgins by my house to help my wife do the house cleaning, and we only need one or two to play the dulcimer and sackbut.

You have no idea how hard it is to find a really fair virgin who can play the sackbut these days.

23 Comments so far. Join the Conversation

 

A message from the beautiful and talented Mrs Wright:
Hey folks.

I plan to start a new Wednesday Blog Feature:

Lighting the Lamp

A blog of the Superversive Literary Movement

because fiction should not be less glorious than life

This feature will include, but not be limited to:

 

  • Inspirational stories — to help us remember what we are writing for.
  • Stories of perseverance in sorrow – to remind us of the indomitable human spirit
  • Reviews of books, movies, etc that are inspiring, heroic, or merely good fun
  • Musings on literature, life, and other related topics — ranging widely

Anyone who would like to guest blog on some even vaguely related topic,
let me know:

http://arhyalon.livejournal.com/360031.html?mode=reply#add_comment
or:
At gmail Username: arhyalon

 

Be the first to comment

Rightwing Political Correctness?

Posted September 12, 2014 By John C Wright

A reader named Mr Tucker complains of the obvious incompetence and blatant dishonesty of Politicians of the Right, and asks a perfectly reasonable question of me:

You truly did bring the matter into focus by plainly stating – in an ‘Occam’s razor’-ish manner – that the cognitive discontinuity was an end unto itself, not necessarily a means to a separate end other than power of some pathological sort. In this light, all the patterns seemed to make much more sense.

So I started, for the first time in years, watching and reading the political news.

Now, you call this phenomenon “political correctness,” and that is as good a tag as any, I suppose. But you also, invariably, associate it with leftist, progressive, democratic party, hedonist, counterculture phenomena and proponents. Meanwhile, you seem to imply, and often state flatly, that the so-called ‘right’ or ‘conservative’ political will is more or less genuine, and at odds with the PC world view and behavior pattern.

What I have encountered belies that completely.

He then asks:

So why, then, do you associate ‘progressiveism’ with PC, and ‘conservativism’ with NOT PC, when it seems clear to me that EVERYONE in the realm of American politics is full of bull hockey?

The question is a good one and the answer is simple: Political Correctness does not mean ‘bull hockey’.

Political Correctness is a specific political philosophy with a particular origin story and a particular goal. It is a defined thing, that is what it is and is not its opposite.

Political Correctness does not refer to dishonesty, but to the particular type of philosophical dishonesty as first preached by the Frankfurt School of Marxism, which has since formed the foundation of modern Progressivism.

Allow me to quote from others, who can describe the phenomenon more succinctly than I.

Read the remainder of this entry »

107 Comments so far. Join the Conversation

Your Book of Gold

Posted September 12, 2014 By John C Wright

A guy with the vunderbar name of VunderGuy takes a frustrated pen in hand and writes:

Even great authors like you, Vox Day, and Larry are relatively obscure, so what’s a chump like me to do to have an impact, ESPECIALLY as a writer?

All Saint Veronica did was wipe the face of Christ with a cloth as He was being led off to crucifixion, a single moment of compassion and pity. And she was granted sainthood for the act.

If you only write one book in your whole life, and only sell 600 copies or less, nonetheless, I assure you, I solemnly assure you, that this book will be someone’s absolutely favorite book of all time, and it will come to him on some dark day and give him sunlight, and open his eyes and fill his heart and make him see things in life even you never suspected, and will be his most precious tale, and it will live in his heart like the Book of Gold.

Read the remainder of this entry »

31 Comments so far. Join the Conversation

Marxist Feminism’s Ruined Lives

Posted September 12, 2014 By John C Wright

This is from the pen of Mallory Millet, sister of Kate Millet, author of SEXUAL POLITICS.

—————————————

“When women go wrong men go right after them.”
– Mae West

“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”  Winston Churchill wrote this over a century ago.

During my junior year in high school, the nuns asked about our plans for after we graduated. When I said I was going to attend State University, I noticed their disappointment.  I asked my favorite nun, “Why?” She answered, “That means you’ll leave four years later a communist and an atheist!”

What a giggle we girls had over that. “How ridiculously unsophisticated these nuns are,” we thought. Then I went to the university and four years later walked out a communist and an atheist, just as my sister Katie had six years before me.

Sometime later, I was a young divorcee with a small child. At the urging of my sister, I relocated to NYC after spending years married to an American executive stationed in Southeast Asia. The marriage over, I was making a new life for my daughter and me.  Katie said, “Come to New York.  We’re making revolution! Some of us are starting the National Organization of Women and you can be part of it.”

I hadn’t seen her for years.  Although she had tormented me when we were youngsters, those memories were faint after my Asian traumas and the break-up of my marriage.  I foolishly mistook her for sanctuary in a storm. With so much time and distance between us, I had forgotten her emotional instability.

And so began my period as an unwitting witness to history. I stayed with Kate and her lovable Japanese husband, Fumio, in a dilapidated loft on The Bowery as she finished her first book, a PhD thesis for Columbia University, “Sexual Politics.”

It was 1969. Kate invited me to join her for a gathering at the home of her friend, Lila Karp. They called the assemblage a “consciousness-raising-group,” a typical communist exercise, something practiced in Maoist China.  We gathered at a large table as the chairperson opened the meeting with a back-and-forth recitation, like a Litany, a type of prayer done in Catholic Church. But now it was Marxism, the Church of the Left, mimicking religious practice:

“Why are we here today?” she asked.
“To make revolution,” they answered.
“What kind of revolution?” she replied.
“The Cultural Revolution,” they chanted.
“And how do we make Cultural Revolution?” she demanded.
“By destroying the American family!” they answered.
“How do we destroy the family?” she came back.
“By destroying the American Patriarch,” they cried exuberantly.
“And how do we destroy the American Patriarch?” she replied.
“By taking away his power!”
“How do we do that?”
“By destroying monogamy!” they shouted.
“How can we destroy monogamy?”

Their answer left me dumbstruck, breathless, disbelieving my ears.  Was I on planet earth?  Who were these people?

“By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution and homosexuality!” they resounded.

They proceeded with a long discussion on how to advance these goals by establishing The National Organization of Women.  It was clear they desired nothing less than the utter deconstruction of Western society. The upshot was that the only way to do this was “to invade every American institution.  Every one must be permeated with ‘The Revolution’”: The media, the educational system, universities, high schools, K-12, school boards, etc.; then, the judiciary, the legislatures, the executive branches and even the library system.

It fell on my ears as a ludicrous scheme, as if they were a band of highly imaginative children planning a Brinks robbery; a lark trumped up on a snowy night amongst a group of spoiled brats over booze and hashish.

To me, this sounded silly.  I was enduring culture shock after having been cut-off from my homeland, living in Third-World countries for years with not one trip back to the United States. I was one of those people who, upon returning to American soil, fell out of the plane blubbering with ecstasy at being home in the USA. I knelt on the ground covering it with kisses.  I had learned just exactly how delicious was the land of my birth and didn’t care what anyone thought because they just hadn’t seen what I had or been where I had been.  I had seen factory workers and sex-slaves chained to walls.

How could they know?  Asia is beyond our ken and, as they say, utterly inscrutable, and a kind of hell I never intended to revisit.  I lived there, not junketed, not visited like sweet little tourists — I’d conducted households and tried to raise a child. I had outgrown the communism of my university days and was clumsily groping my way back to God.

How could twelve American women who were the most respectable types imaginable — clean and privileged graduates of esteemed institutions: Columbia, Radcliffe, Smith, Wellesley, Vassar; the uncle of one was Secretary of War under Franklin Roosevelt — plot such a thing?  Most had advanced degrees and appeared cogent, bright, reasonable and good. How did these people rationally believe they could succeed with such vicious grandiosity?  And why?

Read the rest: http://www.truthrevolt.org/commentary/millett-marxist-feminisms-ruined-lives

 

7 Comments so far. Join the Conversation

Saint James Matamoros, Open the Eyes of the Blind

Posted September 11, 2014 By John C Wright

This is a reprint of material essays previously appearing in this space on this date, for the benefit of any readers who missed them the first time, and in memory of those who died this day:

I have three questions: What is this war? Who is the enemy? How shall it be fought?

WHAT IS THIS WAR?

This war is a Jihad. This war is the first in history that is entirely a psychological and propaganda war with little or no military component to it. The losses of Coalition troopers in Iraq so far have not equally one hour of losses storming Normandy Beach: painful as they are to the families and loved ones, from a historical point of view, they are utterly insignificant.

Only propaganda victories are significant. The enemy does not seek land or gain. They seek hegemony in the Middle East, culminating in the destruction of Israel, and an increase in their power and influence in the West, culminating in an unwillingness or even an inability of Western powers to halt the spread of Sharia law. To achieve this, they must make us afraid, and must make us seem weak and vapid. Our goal is the opposite: to so terrify the practitioners of Jihad that they are ashamed to practice their evil and bloodthirsty religion in public, much less to spread it. Our goal is to halt and to reverse the spread of Sharia law, by any means, peaceful or violent.

Those who practice a non-violent or non-Sharia version of Islam make no more difference to the outcome of the war than the peaceloving Germans who supported Hitler or the freedom loving Chinese who supported Mao: to be precise, no difference at all. We need not seek their approval nor avoid offending them. We may safely disregard any mention of them at all until and unless they make a difference, and they purge the Jihadist from their midst and actively hound them to shame and to death.

On a military level, we have taken no damage: the loss of trains in London or Madrid or a skyscraper in Manhattan does not decrease our war fighting capability in any way.

On the spiritual and psychological level, as far as the Left is concerned, the war is already concluded. Psychologically, the Left regard fighting this war as absurd, impossible, unimaginable and unjust — fighting is simply unimaginable to them, or if they imagine it, they picture our side as the purveyors of genocide. Liberals do not thing logically; they think in vivid pictures and simplistic black and white images and short, uncomplicated slogans,. In this case, the word “war” produces in their minds the image  of the sullen and smoking chimneys above Auschwitz, dark with human ash.

The Left never meant to fight on behalf of Western civilization in any case; most know so little about it that they cannot imagine it being threatened; or they are ashamed of it; or they are too high minded to fight for any cause, no matter how noble; or too stupid to see any threat, no matter how plain.

Those of you aligned with the political and cultural Left who have some reservations about the eventual predominance of Sharia law, those of you loyal to Western ideals, you have been betrayed by your leaders and mentors.

WHO IS THE ENEMY?

The enemy is Islam.

Islam is a political party with religious trappings; it is a system of laws which, because it controls all aspects of life, also controls the religious rites and beliefs of its adherents.

It is a theocracy, not a denomination able or willing to live under a scheme of religious liberty.

In the West, the consensus of history came to the agreement that the wars between the Christian denominations was too violent to maintain peace and civil order, and that therefore the state would be amputated of its power to interfere in Church affairs. Matters of religious conviction and conscience, in civilized and Christian nations, were ruled to be beyond the orbit of state power.

This reasoning does not apply to totalitarian political movements that just so happen to have a theocratic legal theory demanding the conquest, conversion, or extermination of all rival faiths.

A theocracy is not a denomination.

Read the remainder of this entry »

54 Comments so far. Join the Conversation

The Wright Perspective: New Wave Utopias

Posted September 11, 2014 By John C Wright

My latest is up at Every Joe: http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/09/10/lifestyle/best-utopian-world-science-fiction-raising-family/

We continue our leisurely tour through the Utopian worlds proposed by science fiction with an eye to which one would be best for raising a family.

I should mention my reason for using childrearing rather than sightseeing or adventuring as the touchstone for selecting a society to join: when you rear children, you are obligated to give moral instruction and leadership, to guide their formation of virtues and priorities. Your society at large and your neighbors (real or, through the entertainment industry, electronic) either help or hinder the process. By the thought-experiment of choosing our neighbors in utopia, the values and virtues of the neighborhood, and, more to the point, of your own soul, are brought to light.

In last week’s episode we looked briefly at three Golden Age views of utopia, from A.E. van Vogt, from Ayn Rand, and from Robert Heinlein. Each seemed to be an exaggeration of the primary virtue with which the writer was concerned: for Van Vogt’s Null-A Venus, that virtue was sanity, the proper orientation of the mind to reality; for Ayn Rand’s Galt’s Gulch, it was self-reliance taken to a logical extreme, as if the quid-pro-quo of capitalism could also be used for personal relationships; for Robert Heinlein’s Covenant, it was something of the humble yet frontier spirit of ‘grit’ and gumption that made America, oddly combined with the smug Sexual Revolution vices of self indulgence and sexual perversion which so rapidly are unmaking America.

The problem is that any virtue, if it becomes the sole virtue of a society, crowds out other virtues: there is no portrayal of artistic wildness in the sober Venus of van Vogt, no altruism in Ayn Rand’s Utopia of Greed, no chastity nor prudence in Heinlein’s vision of a tomorrow of orgies.

3 Comments so far. Join the Conversation

An Anecdote

Posted September 10, 2014 By John C Wright

Few things are duller than gamers talking about old games, but I will risk it here, because this anecdote so neatly encapsulates the problem of games with overpowered, or even superpowered characters.

Once upon a time, I fell in with a group of role players who worked for West End Games, the company that brings us both PARANOIA and STAR WARS RPG’s. They were a fine bunch of fellows, and we found we had an evening to kill, so I suggested that I moderate a roleplaying game of my own devising: a pick-up game, so to speak.

Over the years, I have adduced a relatively simple method to start a game at the drop of a hat without the cumbersome process of rolling up characters.

Typically, I tell players, “You can play any character from any book or story I have read or seen. Anyone. If you are from a movie I’ve seen or a comic I’ve read, I will know your background, powers, and limitations.”

The reason for my generous indifference to how strong your characters are, or what powers they have, is that I like to put players in a background where they are faced with a moral quandary, or a threat that can only be solved by tact or cunning or creative thinking.

For background, I have a multiverse setting which is a combination of Norse Myths, Zelazny’s Amber, Zelazny’s Roadmarks, Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion, miscegenated with LeGuin’s Earthsea, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, Gene Wolfe’s Urth, Highlander, Dr Who, HP Lovecraft.

Over the years, I have developed fairly sound guidelines as to how to handle crossovers (Kal-El of Krypton, for example, when in Amber is only as strong as Gerard) or how different ideas or systems of magic tend to work when outside their home element.

There were four players, three boys and one girl.
Read the remainder of this entry »

43 Comments so far. Join the Conversation

On Inspiration

Posted September 9, 2014 By John C Wright

I am asked a rather difficult question. It is not difficult because it is unclear, but, rather, it is difficult because so many modern assumptions about the nature of mind and body are unexamined, and, upon examination, are unsound.

A reader with the addictive yet intellectual name of Concept Junkie asks:

Are you suggesting the mechanisms of unconscious mental processes are not, or cannot be the source of these inspirations? Must such an inspiration (and yes, I suppose that term needs to be defined if we are going down this route) necessarily come from the action of an outside entity (such as an angel, or the Lord Himself)?

I’m just trying to understand what you have against the idea that we don’t have a perfect understanding or control of our thoughts and memories and that they can behave in a way in which they seem to have a life of their own, or that they somehow work without our direct and explicit supervision. It seems to me that such a flawed mastery and understanding of one’s own mental processes is wholly consistent with a fallen nature.

When I eat something, I have only a vague idea of how the food is digested, broken down, absorbed, and utilized by my body, but that doesn’t mean there is there is a “secret mind” in my gut turning Slim Jims and milkshakes into bone and muscle (and fat, lots of fat).

Similarly, there are some human minds that can perform feats of memory or skill that are far beyond the norm, and these symptoms often correlate with some form of dysfunction or even injury. If you read the story of the guy who had a brain injury and suddenly manifested an impressive level of musical ability that he had heretofore never displayed (and I’m afraid I don’t recall the details of the story), does that mean the man is now possessed of some foreign intelligence that is giving him this talent, or that whatever trauma caused the neural networks and other structures in the brain to reorganize allowed processes of which he is not consciously aware to work, or work better to allow him to perform these feats?

I’m just trying to understand how you see this kind of inspiration, the inspiration that allows someone to solve a problem when he “stops” thinking about it, or allows him wake up with a unique melody or story idea in his head or any of the other ways that our minds surprise us.

My remarks:

I am not suggesting the mechanisms of unconscious mental processes are not, or cannot be the source of these inspirations?

I am stating as a conclusion of a line of reasoning at the mechanism of unconscious mental processes, assuming such a thing exists at all, are not and cannot be the source of these inspirations.

This is for the same reason that I do not think a bunny or a dog could write a sonnet.
Read the remainder of this entry »

44 Comments so far. Join the Conversation

Hannah Wallen on Social Justice War Games

Posted September 8, 2014 By John C Wright

An analysis of Gamergate, described in terms of the economics of social ladder climbing.

Short answer: the shrieking of the pseudo-feminists and pseudo-Marxists and pseudo-whinebabies is due to an attempt by the journalists and other social justice warriors, nerds high on the social ladder, to gain or retain their alleged social pecking order rank by demeaning the gamer nerds, accusing them of witchcraft, and throwing them to the witchhunters.

Here is the link.

http://honeybadgerbrigade.com/2014/09/07/gamergate-journalism-as-a-social-justice-war-game/

Her words:

The only people who are equipped to fight off that rushing tide of manipulation and control are those for whom potential social rejection doesn’t constitute a threat.

That, gamers, is why gamergate is not about any one of the damseling drama queens receiving the coverage in gaming media that is now spilling over into other news sources. It not about the media themselves, either, or the companies supporting the industry.

It’s about us.

We’re not under attack because we owe anyone anything we have refused to give, or because we’ve done anything we shouldn’t have done. We’re under attack because we’re one of the last shields that human individuality in western society has.

It’s absolutely vital that gamers continue to reject the shaming and demands being launched at us by elitist social engineers in journalism. We’re the line they can’t be allowed to cross, the last bastion of intellectual freedom. Out of everyone, we have the one factor that can stop them from owning the social landscape of the western world. Out of everyone, we have the power of immunity to their weapon of choice. We have the ability to turn that very same weapon around and use it against them by not only refusing to adopt their narrative, but making our rejection of it hurt them financially.

This is how we’re going to hold the line and begin pushing back. It’s going to be ridiculously ugly. The beast that is social justice elitism is not going to go peacefully, nor is it going to change its tactics. We’re going to see that  monstrous, flailing attempt to shame us into compliance continue. We’re going to see the accusations and whining, damseling and demonization all accelerate as the elites try to smash the resistance without understanding why it exists. And then hopefully we’ll see like-minded individuals joining the ranks of resistance as they realize they don’t have to be adopt the victim narrative to be part of a community. If we can achieve just that one thing by standing our ground and defending our territory, we can push that bullying force out, take our community back, and get back to gaming in peace.

 

Read the remainder of this entry »

97 Comments so far. Join the Conversation

More on my favorite topic: ME!!!

Posted September 8, 2014 By John C Wright

A reader on Vox Populi passed along a rather nice compliment and a rather tentative speculation. I wanted to boast about the compliment like a vain schoolgirl wearing too much makeup, and then set the speculation to rest:

My daughters played basketball and when they were winning they would not shave their legs or wash their game socks. I know disgusting. However, these girls believed that following those habits led to winning.

John Wright has been told by many people that his writing is amazing, wonderful, and awe inspiring. Readers have told him that his books have brought actual dreams and nightmares and others tell him that they cannot quit thinking about a particular story or character. Others compare it to a religious experience in that they can see the hand of God at work (even when he was an atheist). In every case John Wright has minimized his own contribution. He credits his ‘muses’ which is fine. But however he works his magic, he denies he is anything special.

Perhaps he’s like my daughters when they were on a winning streak (one lasted all season and the girls extended it to next years softball. ugh!), if he acknowledges the praise it’ll somehow effect his writing for the worst.

Just pure speculation Mr Wright. I am not saying you’re not telling the truth about the muses and all just saying that there might be a little ‘knock on wood’ in there too. I would never try to offend my favorite living author.

Now I am going back to my goat milk and honey cake plan to attract the magic writing elves on secret Catholic days.

The comment was found in a long dead thread, but, alas, we egotistical writers are attracted like flies to corpses when their names are mentioned.

My comment: Thanks. And Let me clear up one notion right here and now.

Please do not speculate that I have even the slightest superstitious impulse in me. The only people who are less superstitious than fanatical atheists (who do not believe in any supernatural powers) are fanatical Christians (who do not believe in any supernatural powers aside from the Omnipotent, and are strictly forbidden in any case to evoke them).

No, sir, take me at my word. I am being utterly honest with you. I know about my writing the one thing my readers do not know. I know how much is perspiration and how much is inspiration.

Read the remainder of this entry »

30 Comments so far. Join the Conversation