This is from Mr. Grin’s essay, THE BANKRUPT NIHILISM OF OUR FALLEN FANTASISTS, which first brought him to my attention and won my admiration:
Soiling the building blocks and well-known tropes of our treasured modern myths is no different than other artists taking a crucifix and dipping it in urine, covering it in ants, or smearing it with feces. In the end, it’s just another small, pathetic chapter in the decades-long slide of Western civilization into suicidal self-loathing. It’s a well-worn road: bored middle-class creatives (almost all of them college-educated liberals) living lives devoid of any greater purpose inevitably reach out for anything deemed sacred by the conservatives populating any artistic field. They co-opt the language, the plots, the characters, the cliches, the marketing, and proceed to deconstruct it all like a mad doctor performing an autopsy. Then, using cynicism, profanity, scatology, dark humor, and nihilism, they put it back together into a Frankenstein’s monster designed to shock, outrage, offend, and dishearten.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2011/02/12/the-bankrupt-nihilism-of-our-fallen-fantasists/
Here is my previous column on this essay: http://www.scifiwright.com/2011/02/postmodern-blasphemies-against-myth/
For the record, Mr. Abercrombie is a fantasy author who was chastised by Mr. Grin. What I said about Mr. Abercrombie is this:
The examples mentioned (by Joe Abercrombie, Matthew Woodring Stover, Steven Erikson) I have not had the pleasure (or otherwise) of reading, and can make no comment whether the essayist is being fair or unfair in his assessment.
What Mr. Abercrombie, in turn, after reading these words, assuming he read them about me is this:
SF writer John C. Wright seizes the overwrought football of Leo’s argument and runs it into the end-zone of insanity on his blog:
Okaaay. I’m stepping away now.
This was specifically in reply to this paragraph, which he quotes:
It is my judgment, shared of many ancients, that there are certain proper emotional reactions and relatins one ought to have, and improper ones one ought not. A child raised to curse and despise his parents, trample the crucifix, burn the flag, abhor kittens and Christmas scenes and motherhood but adore torture porn and satanism and deformity, that child’s tastes are objectively perverse and false-to-facts. He has been trained to spew his mother’s milk and drink venom. Fair to him is foul, and foul is fair. In the same way that to say A is not-A is an offense against logic, to hate the lovely and love the hateful is an offense against aesthetics, a disconnection from reality.
Obviously one might object to the statement on the grounds that aesthetic judgments are radically subjective, but any honest man making such an objection is aware that he is in the disproportionate minority insofar as all human history and all philosophical writings on the matter. To call the norm insane requires a degree of overweening pride: to call the man who defends the norm insane is not merely dishonest, it is an informal logical error, ad hominem. It is, to say the least, unconvincing.
At the time, I did not know enough to know why Mr. Abercrombie would bother making so rude yet unconvincing a statement about me, when I had taken the trouble specifically not to endorse Mr. Grin’s criticism of him. Apparently believing in an objective aesthetic order of the universe, to him, was so unorthodox an opinion that it could only be created by a neurological defect.
At the time, I assumed a person only lies when he expects to be believed by some gullible victim, but I could not imagine anyone gullible enough to believe him.
I note now, clicking through the link, that he edited away the word insanity, and the sentence now reads ‘strangeness’. But, again, anyone raised outside of the sterile bubble of farleftwing echo-chamber, that is, anyone who was exposed to the give and take of ideas outside his own cult orthodoxy (that is, anyone with an honest education) would know that my remarks are not strange in any real sense of that word.
So, here, one useless falsehood was replaced by another. What is the point of this verbal behavior?
Looking back with older and wiser eyes, I now understand this otherwise incomprehensible behavior. Mr. Vox Day in his seminal work SJWs Always Lie begins by defining SJW behavior with the following Three Laws of SJW.
1. SJWs Always Lie
2. SJWs Always Double Down
3. SJWs Always Project
As to why and where SJW cultism and nihilism overlap is a longer discussion, but the short answer is that dunking Western Civilization in urine, defiling anything fair to the eye or sacred to the heart, is the prime business of the SJWs. They do not side with perversion and grostequerie because they love perverts and grotesques, but because they hate the decent, wholesome, fair, and true.
* * *
Logic being one of those things they see as supporting Western civilization and Christian religion, they eschew it with an almost perfect, hermetic quarantine, never allowing it to touch even the fringes of their thought.
Logic requires one to address the issues.
Illogical requires one only to sneer and shout and scoff, and to direct all your comments against the person, never against the ideas.
SJWs live in a mental universe that is barren of ideas to a degree that is eerie or even Lovecraftian. It is stark unreality.
Lacking all ideas, all they have is persons.
If a person of which they approve does an act of which they disapprove, as, for example, President Clinton abusing or assaulting women, the SJW will ordinarily approve of the act in order to approve of the person; if a person of whom they do not approve, say, a Lacrosse team of wealthy young white males, fails to do an act of which they disapprove, say, serial rape, they invent the act in order to express their disapproval.
In this fashion, no words in their world ever need have any denotation, only connotations. Words have no meaning, only emotion, and, as I said above, it is usually an emotion disconnected from normal emotional associations. No judgment need ever be made about an act, or a work of art, or a column, or anything. One only disapproves of persons, and any person of whom one disapproves can be slandered and libeled with any accusation, no matter how absurd or stupid, malice can invent.
I suspect that it is not an absence of thought that prompts this behavior, but the direct opposite of thought: such accusations are mental noise meant to jam the gears of the reasoning process.
My reason for this suspicion is that SJWs only act this way on certain topic, whatever touches their particular psychological wounds or sore spots: on every other topic, they can think clearly and act normally.
