I have heard it the statement spoken with great conviction that when one ideology dominates an art, it is doomed to become mere propaganda.
The conviction is misplaced. It is mere cynicism.
To such a statement I take sharp, if respectful, exception. Like most pointed comments, it is true, but only to a point.
To the contrary, it all depends on the ideology or the philosophy.
Read the remainder of this entry »
Join me for a stroll down memory lane: not a long stroll, merely to AD 2019, when yours truly was interviewed by NerdHQ regarding the Sad Puppies kerfuffle touching the Hugo Awards of a year or so prior. I reprint to amuse any readers who might not have seen it at the time, and as an sober reminder of how little things have changed since.
Q: What do you think is the primary artistic/cultural difference between the pro-Sad Puppies and anti-Sad Puppies camps? What is the primary political/ideological difference between the two groups?
JCW: The two camps are divided by a very clear and deep difference, which is neither artistic nor cultural. It has some political aspects, but the difference is more fundamental than any disagreement over laws and policies. There are ideological excuses given for motives, but the true motives run deeper, to the very core of the soul, and ideology is only a surface feature.
The divide is a religious war.
My compliments to Fourth Age, whose insightful commentary gave the inspiration and the thread of argument I copy, in my own way, below. To hear a more careful disquisition of this argument see here: Why They/Them Can’t Write Superheroes
*** *** ***
Conquered peoples see their calendars altered, their feast days changed, their banners burned, their monuments toppled. This also holds true for those conquered by subversion rather than conquest, and for humble monuments as well as great.
Humble monuments of the popular culture have fallen to dust: Blue Clues celebrates drag queens to toddlers. Dungeons and Dragons was made wheelchair-accessible. And Superman was overtaken by the Anti-Life Equation.
The woke are bold, bald-faced, and bad. Their boldness and baldness we discuss in other columns.
The question here is why their deceptions are so bad, this is, what make their story tales so poor, their propaganda so tin-eared, their advertisements so unconvincing.
Conquered peoples see their calendars altered, their feast days changed, their banners burned, their monuments toppled. This also holds true for those conquered by subversion rather than conquest, and for humble monuments as well as great.
Humble monuments of the popular culture have fallen to dust: Blue Clues celebrates drag queens to toddlers. Dungeons and Dragons was made wheelchair-accessible. And Superman was overtaken by the Anti-Life Equation.
The woke are bold, bald-faced liars, and bad at their task. Their boldness and badness we discuss in other columns. The question here is why their deceptions are so bald, this is, so undisguised.
Conquered peoples see their calendars altered, their feast days changed, their banners burned, their monuments toppled.
This also holds true for those conquered by subversion rather than conquest, by spiritual warfare rather than physical.
In our current day, it is 2024 C.E. (Common Era), and social media are wont to post homages to International Woman’s Day rather than Lady’s Day, or to Kwanzaa rather than Christmas, or to Pride Month rather than Lent. Vladimir Lenin established the first, and a Marxist activist named Karenga the second. Pride Month, not by coincidence, falls on days sacred to the demon-goddess Ishtar of Babylon, a bisexual hermaphrodite, patroness of the Temple Prostitutes of ancient Near Eastern religion.
Burning the American Flag is Free Speech, hence sacred, but defacing a Pride Flag is Hate Speech, hence blasphemy.
A season of toppling statues and monuments occupied the so-called Summer of Love, when the press enflamed riots, the politicians cheered, and the police stood aside.
Not just high and noble figures were pulled from pillars or torn from courthouses, not just images of Jefferson, Washington, Roosevelt and Columbus, but also the humbler figures of common entertainment, and cartoons for children old and young.
The question is not why it is being done. Conquered peoples continually dispirited and disheartened cannot combine against the effete elite despoiling them. The question is why is it being done so boldly, so baldly, and so badly?
Bellomy has a question about the phrase “Never Again”
“If it was designed to teach us about preventing future genocides, then why do we repeatedly learn more and more about the Jewish Holocaust in increasingly exacting detail and almost completely ignore the multiple other genocides that HAVE happened SINCE the Jewish Holocaust? After teaching us about the lead-up to the Jewish Holocaust (or really, the German-run Holocaust that included Jews among others) and the facts surrounding it, so we know what happened, shouldn’t we learn about other genocides and what steps we could have taken or should be taking to prevent those?”
I have an answer, but a cynical one.
The enemy of my enemy is sometimes my enemy, but sometimes one fights alongside him nonetheless, at least in the short term.
This phrase, promising to curtail further genocides, was born of one such temporary alliance, and outlasts it only as a ghost, a memory without form or matter.
Read the remainder of this entry »
Two great figures of times past, Pascale and Marcus Aurelius, pagan and Christian, address the wager of the unknowable in nearly equal terms.
The point bears repeating that the seemingly disconnected policies and movements of the Heresy of Postmodernity, also called Critical Everything Theory, is not political in nature, not rational, not economic.
Political issue can find political compromises. Rational issues can be addressed by reason. Economic issues can be solved by frugal industriousness.
But the Postmoderns cannot be negotiated-with, cannot be reasoned-with, cannot be bought. They do not want to live.
Read the remainder of this entry »
An explanation of Extinctionism is in order. It is the worldview that supports the misery and death for all mankind, and seeks the end of the human race.
An explanation of the origin and purpose of this worldview will be a very brief essay. The matter is stark and simple, and can be said simply.
There is only one thing in life where the choice is ultimate and final and eternal: we are either for God or against.
Going against God, whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not, means going against the image and likeness of God, that is, Man.
Those against Man wish Man not to prosper, not to be happy, not to live at all.
Those against Man hate man. They hate human life. They hate what makes human life endure and flourish. They eventually side with whatever smothers laughter, encourages joy, grants peace, creates prosperity. They hate virginity, motherhood, and babies. They hate Jews. They hate the conscience. They hate virtue, truth, beauty. They hate themselves. They hate, hate, hate.
Read the remainder of this entry »
If you have not seen the interview, it is a remarkable thing to watch, not the least because the interviewer neither interrupts the subject being interviewed, nor argues in favor of the statist-corporate goodthink viewpoint, nor uses the opportunity to display fake virtue. Tucker lets Putin talk.
Putin, on his side, is fell and subtle in his answers, showing the most adroit political rhetoric I have seen in a generation. No lie is outright or direct. No gaslighting. But, like an able mob-lawyer, he is careful to shade the truth, downplaying or omitting whatever does not help his case. He delicately deflects any question it would be impolitic to answer directly.
Read the remainder of this entry »
In an earlier column I listed the synthetic religions proposed as speculation from science fiction writers from the Pulp Era onward.
Most the writers listed propose some sort of pagan pantheon or another, or worship of a mortal as goddess. Only one proposes using the God of the Christians as a synthetic religion, meant an an opium to lull the masses into a somnolent acquiescence of their own oppression.
Foolishness. No religion on earth is more likely to undermine and overturn society on every level, legal, social, scientific, personal, and improve it markedly, while never drawing the sword nor striking a blow.
Read the remainder of this entry »
Tradition, of itself, is inadequate to justify itself. A tradition can only be justified, or, if unsound, criticized, from its own roots.
Of late, more and more of our agnostic or atheist conservative brethren, seeing the confused if not diabolical current state of the world, and foreseeing it fate if current trends continue, confess that the secular philosophy of the classical liberalism of the Age of Reason seems woefully inadequate to mount as robust defense against the Seven-Headed Beast nihilist philosophers, dogmatic subjectivists, cultural vandals, puritanical sex-deviants, socialist plutocrats, totalitarian anarchists, and pro-jihad atheists, variously referred to as Progressives, Postmoderns, Pervertarians, Wokesters, Critical Race-Hustlers, Cultural Marxists, and Morlocks.
Public men of letters including such figures as psychiatrist Jordan Peterson, mathematician James Lindsay, and ancient Akkadian emperor Carl Benjamin, with a degree of reluctance more or less, have admitted with a degree of candor more or less that only the Christian tradition embedded into our laws and customs stand a chance of fighting the foe.
These men admit that Christian tradition alone is robust enough to fight the Antichrist. But they are secular men, and godless. They see the fruit but doubt the root. Such is their conundrum.
I rarely find statistics persuasive, since it is too easy to manipulate them to support either side of any argument, and rarely are the assumptions and definitions visible. What, for example, is included in “gun violence”? Does this include use of a firearm in a suicide?
However, when a statistic confirms what common sense already shows, I do not mind quoting them.
Gun violence in 6 out of the 8 largest Ohio cities dropped significantly after Ohio legalized permit-free carry of guns across the entire state in 2022:
Columbus: -12%
Cleveland: -6%
Toledo: -18%
Akron: -18%
Parma: -22%
Canton: -5%
As ever, I ban for anti-Semitic remarks.
In the spirit of fairness, I will ban for remarks repeating any Anti-Defamation-League-style anti-Japhetic remarks. (Anti-Japhetism, also called Anti-Whitism, is the hatred of Europeans in general and Christians in particular, and includes recklessly false accusations of Fascism, Supremacism, and Anti-Semitism.) I regret living in a time, and among a people, for whom such a warning is necessary.
The following is a copy of an article written under the pen name Sebastián Vivar Rodríguez appearing in the anti-Communist website Gentiuno [11 Nov 2004]. The original version of “Europe Died in Auschwitz” has been deleted from the website.
My comment is below the column.
*** *** ***
I walked down the streets in Barcelona and suddenly discovered a terrible truth: Europe died in Auschwitz. We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims. In Auschwitz we burned a group of people who represented culture, thought, creativity, talent.
We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because they produced great and wonderful people who made great contributions to the world, and thus changed the world.
Read the remainder of this entry »
