Wherefore by their Fruits, Episode 06 The Humdudgeon, is now posted.
In which Princox is gives tongue to an unnecessary outcry, bewailing an affliction allegedly affecting all mankind, as the ravishing and ravenhaired damsel gives her diagnosis for this imaginary complaint.
A reader asks:
May I ask your opinion regarding something in Avengers: Endgame? Did you find Cap’s decision to stay in the past a little … irresponsible?
I mean, not in the sense that he left behind folks in the present or that he chose to retire but that his decision made a lot of changes to how Peggy’s life would have turned out.
His whole arc in the MCU up until that point was to live in the present and to let go of the past. I would have expected that he respected how Peggy’s life turned out and the choices she’s made too much to even consider altering anything.
Did that decision (which was very satisfying romantically) seem to you like something the character would have considered?
My answer is twofold: first, if this were not a time travel story, the decision of a man to woo and wed of course make a lot of changes to how his wife’s life will turn out. That is sort of the point.
It goes without saying that a bridegroom no duty, under normal circumstances, to avoid asking for her hand in marriage, if he honestly loves her, and she him, and they will cleave to each other for better or worse, richer or poorer, sickness and health, forsaking all others, till death do them part. Indeed, not only his passions and his reason but also his duty to the girl he loves requires he marry her and make a happy home.
This leads to the second question, which is, since this is a time travel story, does it change the duty and responsibilities of the heroin this circumstance? Does time travel change the logic of story telling, to make a tragic ending more apt than a happy ending?
To answer the specific question, we have to answer what duties and responsibilities apply to time travelers in general which differ from those that apply in normal life.
So let us answer the more general question first. At the same time, let me explain why, as an author, I hate the idea of time travel, even though I enjoy to read (and write) stories based on the idea.
The problem afflicting all time travel stories, which makes cause and effect paradoxical, is that time travel makes moral law is paradoxical.
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I am re-posting this column just in case a commenter wishes to post a comment regarding the topic here being addressed, rather than arguing whether the Bible is literal, Neanderthals are ancestral, logic is logical, or racism prevents racism.
One of my few rewards for writing is reading the insights or criticisms generously offered by others on the points being raised. I hope no one takes offense at my effrontery for passing around my beggar’s cap a second time, asking for spare change.
No one normally ought object to tangents, as normally tangents do not choke the discussion to death, as Epstein so obviously was.
Previous reminders of the self evident are here, and here, and here, and here.
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We who are conquered, fettered, and abused by the Empire of Lies, from time to time, needs must remind each other of the truths of creation.
Cosmos implies creation, that is, an ordered and fruitful reality.
The worldly man, the agnostic, the Gnostic, and the nihilist, and all the raging rebels against heaven that occupy the seats of the elite, all those modern and postmodern thinkers who tell us thought is vain, all the angry accusers opposed to everything free men know to be sane, normal, and decent, all these creatures of darkness, whether they know it all not, all work toward one end: to make the cosmos to be formless and void.
The accusers yearn to rewrite the Book of Genesis backward, and to undo, day by day, what the six days of creation wrought. The purpose of this essay is to draw out the analogy between the work of creation and the conceit, that is, the narrative pretense, of uncreation.
It is merely a narrative because, despite their envy of heaven, none can uncreate creation. The most they can do is to pretend, and pressure or punish those within their power who will not play along with pretense.
Every public institution, from academia to art to entertainment to media to social media, in tones of furious moral rigor and absolute certainty, promotes the twin dogmas that morality is myth and nothing is certain.
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Wherefore by their Fruits, Episode 05 The Tryst, is now posted.
In which Princox is smitten, or shams he is, and ventures to maund and angle his way into the good graces of a demure and comely pullet.
Previous reminders of the self evident are here, and here, and here, and here.
We who are conquered, fettered, and abused by the Empire of Lies, from time to time, needs must remind each other of the truths of creation.
Cosmos implies creation, that is, an ordered and fruitful reality.
The worldly man, the agnostic, the Gnostic, and the nihilist, and all the raging rebels against heaven that occupy the seats of the elite, all those modern and postmodern thinkers who tell us thought is vain, all the angry accusers opposed to everything free men know to be sane, normal, and decent, all these creatures of darkness, whether they know it all not, all work toward one end: to make the cosmos to be formless and void.
The accusers yearn to rewrite the Book of Genesis backward, and to undo, day by day, what the six days of creation wrought. The purpose of this essay is to draw out the analogy between the work of creation and the conceit, that is, the narrative pretense, of uncreation.
It is merely a narrative because, despite their envy of heaven, none can uncreate creation. The most they can do is to pretend, and pressure or punish those within their power who will not play along with pretense.
Every public institution, from academia to art to entertainment to media to social media, in tones of furious moral rigor and absolute certainty, promotes the twin dogmas that morality is myth and nothing is certain.
Read the remainder of this entry »
” Dems want to invest in Green global projects, I want to invest in Black American families …”
I have heard in recent days from the Left that Trump is a racist and from the Alt-Right that Trump is not racist enough.
Please look at this. Read the remainder of this entry »
As a follow up to my previous articles on gaslighting…
Wherefore by their Fruits, Episode 04 The Fescennine, is now posted.
In which Princox seeks out a nearby apiary, cantillates a jocular but scurrilous ditty to his doxy as he trudges, and is answered piquantly in verse.
Our own Zalog the Great has an announcement:
Frequent blog guest Tom Simon joined me to discuss Robert Southwell’s “Upon the Image of Death”. If you like Tom Simon, good poetry, or discussion of good poetry, please check it out.
A reader bold enough to use his own good and manly name, our own Mr. Gudeman, makes the following observation on the writings of Emmanuel Kant:
“He was, in fact, trying to save the modern science of Bacon and Descartes from the devastating epistemological critiques of Berkeley and Hume.”
In my humble opinion, the attempt was largely successful, but at the price of introducing confusions and errors that led to the madness and meaninglessness of modern and postmodern philosophy.
Kant, if I may be so bold, was a like a man trying to do theology without God.
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This is the fourth installment in a series whose previous columns are here and here and here.
We live in the Empire of Lies. Daily and hourly we are being “gaslighted” that is, told falsehoods so obviously and openly false, things anyone with eyes can see are false, but said with such startling assurance and authority, that the victim begins to doubt his eyes.
Obviously true truths are treated not merely as false, but also as absurd, disgusting, and contemptible. Common sense is now a hate crime.
None of these denunciations of the obvious are treated as cases where reasonable men can differ. None of them are treated as cases where each man has a right to his opinion.
If you dare to entertain any belief that defies the Empire of Lies, or even listen with an open mind to arguments on both sides, you are a deplorable and irredeemable piece of human garbage.
Anyone saying those whom the witch-hunters accuse are innocent until proven guilty is regarded as being himself a witch.
Any disagreement with the orthodoxy du jour is treated as infinitely vile and unspeakable — literally beyond discussion. To listen to both sides of the argument is impossible and unthinkable.
One of those obvious truths the gaslighters pretend is false is the obvious truth that objective moral standards are objective.
To say that it is wrong to affirm objectivity in morals is either merely a subjective statement of taste, like preferring pie to cake, or it is an objective statement of morals. Either way, the statement contradicts itself.
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This is from a conference on free speech. As best I can guess, the conference was held atop the Tower of Babel, just as the curse of the confusion of tongues struck.
“In his speech, Watts outlined problems that stem from free speech. He began by addressing the historical context of free speech as an idea within a culture.
“In particular, freedom of speech is conceptualized and found in documents as a universal human capacity and right requiring legislative and judicial protections, but this late-18th-century idealism obscures the manner in which freedom of speech is always already implicated in racism,” Watts said.
“The very idea of freedom, postulated in universalist terms in the 19th century, and serving as the ontological structure for the First Amendment, doesn’t allow the black,” Watts said. “This exclusion is not legal, nor paralegal; it is brokered by the psychic structure and pseudoscience responding to the biopower imperatives of racism.”
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This is the third column in a series begun here and here.
Reminders of the obvious are useful and necessary in world where all our major public institutions are engaged in a reckless policy of gaslighting the public, that is, of saying obviously false, absurdly illogical, and morally repugnant things with an assumed air of nonchalance, as if you, dear reader, were the madman for not conforming to the appearance of a consensus.
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The recent discussion in this space concerning chess variations prompts me to reprint this column from five years ago, describing my personal favorite chess variation: Baroque.
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