On Tuesday evening, the Alabama State Senate passed House Bill 314, the “Human Life Protection Act,” which bans all abortions except if the mother’s life is in danger. No exceptions are made for pregnancies caused by rape or incest.
Dear Culture of Death: Up yours.
Part of an ongoing conversation.
My position is this:
While you may dislike the moral of the story of The Incredibles, please do not misstate it. The idea was that men of real talent — superheroism is here used as a metaphor for accomplishments of other kinds — should not be asked to hide their talent in the name up uplifting mediocrity, so that no one wins the gold and everyone gets a participation trophy.
The whole point of the opening scene is that the Supers are driven into hiding not because they are dangerous, but because those who benefit from their actions are ungrateful or jealous. Syndrome is a living example of that jealousy.
He was not in favor of making everyone equal to a super. He could have done that by selling rocket boots and immobilizer rays. He wanted to kill off and cut down the supers, and then go do what they did and get the admiration they had won.
It was a moral about earned valor versus stolen valor. If someone reads the speeches by Satan in Milton’sParadise Lost, he might think Satan is the hero also, because the villain appeals to very deep and basic truths when creating his rhetoric.
To this, our own Sophia’s Favorite replies curtly:
So they can stuff a straw man to shore up their impossibly naive point. That doesn’t make it a good story.
At least a story where most superpowered people set up protection rackets would be true to human nature. A story where the only problem anyone has, with people running around who can turn you to pulp with their fingers, is envy, is moronic.
Well, except it is a good story, and you are misstating what the point and the moral is.
And the point that envy is not the same as equality is not only not naive, it is profound and timely. I suspect Brad Bird risks his career for daring to say something so politically incorrect in the current day and age. The point is not only profound and timely, but brave.
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Spoilers for the movie ENDGAME below the cut. Go see the flick first.
Today’s must-read Superversive SF article is from my lovely and talented wife, Mrs Wright, who writes under the name L Jagi Lamplighter
http://www.superversivesf.com/2019/05/13/message-is-the-new-comedy/
Recently, there was a quote going around about how late night shows no longer contained comedy, because comedians can’t get away with mocking anything anymore. Instead, they make political comments that agree with their audience’s bias and then pause for their audience’s reaction.
But instead of laughter, they get applause.
I was thinking about that while I was watching a new (to me) show. Friends had recommended it. The premise looked amusing. The show was funny. Lots of real comedy.
But occasionally, there would be some bit of Liberal doctrine tossed to the audience in exactly the way a story normally might use comedy.
In other words: It wasn’t part of the plot. It wasn’t part of the story. It wasn’t character development. It didn’t matter or affect the outcome. It was merely standing all by itself as if it were waiting for a high five in exactly the way that comedy gets a laugh.
Watching this, I thought: and that is what we mean when we say we don’t like message fiction.
Our own Sophia’s Favorite observes: “Don’t apply earth-logic to comic books. In reality the Avengers are a costumed lynch-mob half of whose members are walking WMDs …
“… comic books pretend it’s remotely reasonable for anyone to react to something like the Avengers or Justice League with anything other than alarm verging on panic. It’s one of the accepted “unrealisms” of the genre”
Allow me to propose a theory: the idea that a vigilante is a hero has its roots in the type of story that is the spiritual grandfather of the superhero story.
Superheroes are cowboys.
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Hey all,
Jagi, here. I have the honor of being the editor on this series. It is a really fun series to edit. Fun, dramatic, fast moving, hard hitting.
From Book 1: My name is Officer Thomas Nolan, and I am a saint.Tommy Nolan lives a quiet life. He walks his beat – showing mercy to the desperate. Locking away the dangerous. Going to church, sharing dinner with his wife and son. Everyone likes Tommy, even the men he puts behind bars.
Then one day a demon shows up and he can smell it. Tommy can smell evil –real evil. Now he’s New York City’s only hope against a horrifying serial killer that preys on the young and defenseless.
But smell alone isn’t enough to get a warrant. Can Tommy track down the killer and prove his guilt?
Dragon Award Nominated Author Declan Finn returns with his typical action-packed, Catholic influenced style, in this groundbreaking horror series about an honest, religious man given the powers of a saint to fight demons in the Big Apple.
How do you do forensics on a killer possessed by a demon?
Can Tommy catch the killer before he becomes a martyr? Or will the demon bring darkness beyond imagination to the whole of New York? Read Hell Spawn today and find out!
Please join us! Leave questions in the chat. The esteemed Max Kolbe and I will be discussing the unique role of the figure of Our Lady, the apparitions, appearances, myths and misinformation surrounding her.
YouTube
Lost on the Last Continent, Episode 83 The Seventh Men Strike, is now posted.
Episode 83 The Seventh Men Strike
In this exciting episode, unexpected allies unforeseen arrive in the last moment of defeat and reverse the fortunes of war! Why are the mighty beasts of battle trampling the golden men of Elelin? Who has summoned wind and whirlwind to vex and scatter the levitation vessels of the Watchers?
Part of an ongoing conversation:
My original assertion was this “Modern science is a tower without a foundation. It rests on nothing. When asked about the assumptions and axioms that must be true or else nothing in science is true, modern popularizers of scienceeither stammer or change the subject or speak nonsense. They have no answer. (Here I mean the heresiarch Carl Sagan in particular, but take any atheist popularizer as you like)”
Justin Johnson replies:
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This review is in two parts. A spoiler-free review is above the cut, and the spoilers are below.
I saw AVENGER’S ENDGAME. I recommend this film in the strongest possible terms. It is, if I may, a marvel of a movie. I praise, laud, and magnify this movie with an infatuated delirium.
I am awestruck.
For better or worse, it is entertaining if sadistic to write about bad movies, because the endless groaning, griping, and nitpicking is endlessly amusing. But there is little to say about a good movie, because when all parts are in proportion, and the film elevates the audience into a clearer insight into the human condition, and it does it job so well, like the work done my angels, it is often unseen: you need repeated re-viewings to absorb the nuances or to see all the frenetic action.
There is even less to say about a great movie, because the discreet reviewer urgently wants not to spoil any surprises or plot twists, or ruin any jokes by any forewarning. Even to say whether the heroes win or lose is too much information in a film like this.
This movie was more than great, so I am left with almost nothing to say to those who have not yet seen it.
It is a privilege for which enough thanks cannot be tendered that a lifelong fan of science fiction, fantasy, and superhero comics like me just so happens to live in generation when the entertainment industry expended unparalleled effort, fortune, and genius to bring to the big screen SFF and genre works that will never be matched again.
Specifically, I mean the years between George Lucus’ STAR WARS (1977), Bruce Timm’s venture into the DC Animated Universe (1992-2004) up until AVENGERS ENDGAME (2019).
ENDGAME is a fitting finish and finale to Hollywood’s fling with genre fiction.
I say it is the finish not because Hollywood plans not to make more superhero and science fiction films in years to come. They certainly have such plans.
My sad but certain prediction is that more SFF films and MCU films will be made, but they will be rotten.
We have seen the corruption and downfall of DOCTOR WHO, STAR TREK, and STAR WARS. Political Correctness has replaced story telling. The rot spread to once-beloved children’s cartoons as long ago as LEGEND OF KORRA. The print industry of DC and Marvel is so firmly in the hands of the virtue-signalling loons that no one need be tempted to spend even a dime on their work.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe, up until CAPTAIN MARVEL, resisted the pressure from the forces of Political Correctness. But like the first snowflake of late autumn, in this film there is the cold hint of the coming darkness. It is not even a scene, merely one line here, one shot there. But even the first, smallest symptom of an incurable plague is dispositive. Future MCU films will be unwatchable garbage.
But not this movie. One line here, one shot there, is not enough to detract from the exultation of wonder, the joys and sorrows, the happy endings and tragic sacrifices that is the culmination of so many years of big-budget record-breaking blockbuster film-making.
I am awestruck because never has there been such a sustained and uninterrupted effort of interconnecting so many movies over so many years into one coherent triumph of story telling.
Can I recommend this film to everyone? Certainly not.
I know there are those who regard superhero tales as shallow, on the ground that the invulnerable super-people can neither suffer nor grow. Such opinions are incomprehensible given everything done since Alexander Suskind’s SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE, and can only be the product of a soul unable to form a sympathy with persons from a world more wierd and fantastic than our own.
There are folk with a terminal case of “the muggles.” They must pass this film by.
There are those who never saw or cannot recall the events of the previous score and a half films set in this shared background. They will be baffled and lost by the large cast of characters.
Certainly the film is not to be seen by anyone who has not seen the first half of this story INFINITY WARS. You do not walk into Shakespeare’s HAMLET halfway through Act III and expect to follow what it going on, or start reading Tolkien’s trilogy with RETURN OF THE KING.
Everyone else should do see it. Multiple times.
The only spoiler I will deliberately say is no spoiler at all, but a head’s-up. There is no after-credits scene or Easter eggs waiting once the end music starts. There is no set up for any further projects hidden in an afterword.
WARNING! Spoilers below the cut.
I saw this movie with no preconceptions whatsoever, not even the slightest hint of what was coming up, and no speculations but my own. My enjoyment would have been diminished sharply by any foreknowledge. I strongly suggest, nay, I beg, that no one who has not seen the film read below the cut.
This discussion is only for those who have seen the film.
NO PEEKING, PLEASE!!
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Upon hearing that Facebook and Twitter and Instragram banned Milo Yiannopoulos (my old boss), Louis Farrakhan were banned from Facebook and Instagram on Thursday, as were the accounts of InfoWars, Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson, Laura Loomer, and Paul Nehlen were also banned for being “dangerous”, President Trump immediately leaped to the defense of Alex Jones, showing that, unlike any other politician ever, he understood the point of the famous saying by Martin Neimoeller:
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The Trump Administration has taken long overdue steps to prevent nurses and doctors from being forced to aid and abet the various forms of murder and abomination the Left would otherwise make mandatory.
From Lifesite News:
The Trump administration has finalized another set of administrative protections for religious Americans’ conscience rights on a range of fronts, President Donald Trump announced Thursday morning during remarks to observe the National Day of Prayer.
“Every citizen has the absolute right to live according to the teachings of their faith and the convictions of their heart,” Trump said during a ceremony in the White House’s Rose Garden. “This is the bedrock of American life. To protect this heritage, my administration has strongly defended religious liberty…”
According to a press release from the Department of Health and Human Services, the final rule “ensures that HHS implements the full set of tools appropriate for enforcing” laws that exempt healthcare workers from “having to provide, participate in, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for, services such as abortion, sterilization, or assisted suicide.”
This thing we call physics or modern science, which is more properly called natural philosophy, does not and cannot exist, not as a coherent concept, outside of Christianity. That is the testimony of history.
If you do not believe the testimony of history, please inquire further. Please ask Jean Buridan de Bethune, Nicolas of Oresme, Albrecht of Saxony, Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Theodoric of Fribourg, William of Occam, Roger Bacon, Thierry of Chartres, Gerbert of Aurillac, William of Conches, John Peckham, Duns Scotus, Thomas Bradwardine, Walter Burley, William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, John Dumbleton, and Nicholas of Cusa.
For that matter, read Newton:
Newton saw his science as working to increase his own faith in God and helping others in their belief. Writing to a young clergyman, Richard Bentley, on this theme, Newton said:
“When I wrote my treatise about our system, I had my eye upon such principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a deity; and nothing can rejoice me more than to find it useful for that purpose.”
(10th December, 1692)
Newton goes on in the same letter to note elements in his cosmology which he feels are a “contrivance of a voluntary Agent” and “arguments for a Deity”. For Newton, his science was not incidental to his religion, rather it is an essential and motivating part of it.
If you do accept the testimony of history, the question is why this is the case.
Consider: by the modern secular worldview, man was evolved by an unitentional natural process, including his brain parts and the various faculties of his mind, including therefore his reasoning powers.
By the modern secular worldview, there is only the data of the empirical world to deal with, the metadata of metaphysical truth is rejected as either arbitrary, or speculative, or beyond human knowledge.
Modern science is a tower without a foundation. It rests on nothing. When asked about the assumptions and axioms that must be true or else nothing in science is true, modern popularizers of scienceeither stammer or change the subject or speak nonsense. They have no answer. (Here I mean the heresiarch Carl Sagan in particular, but take any atheist popularizer as you like)
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As an addendum to a recent discussion in this space, readers are strongly urged to take the time to read this fascinating bit of debunkery by an atheist, who, unlike most of his ilk, knows some history and gives credit to Christians for things they actually accomplished.
The writer here, one Tim O’Neill, takes to task his fellow atheist, a Mr. Seidensticker, for an article mocking mappa mundi and the depicted monsters decorating the corners, as an example of the antiscientific obscurantism prevailing whenever Christian ruled the West — a period of time that apparently has somewhat elastic borders, given the rhetorical need to assign all Christian accomplishments to non-Christians. Read the remainder of this entry »
Lost on the Last Continent, Episode 82 War in The Wind, is now posted.
In this exciting episode, the sky-ships of the corsairs, after long delay, enter the aerial fray, and fill the sky with death! But now the foe commits its reserves: prehistoric man-eating birds, lumbering ungulants, giant ground sloths, and brontosaurs big as living fortresses afoot! Grind Goldtooth orders retreat, giving up the city for lost — but Preston recovers his hope, and sees a last, desperate chance!
