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Morlock Eruption

Posted May 6, 2016 By John C Wright

Kukuruyo who was nominated for a Hugo Award, is being libeled and harassed by the Morlocks.

Kukuruyo draws commissions (http://kukuruyo.com/contact) for $30+. If any of you need drawings of toon characters, it would be a nice way to show support for one of our own.

Here is the backstory:

“No one is targeting artists because of their politics”. That’s a line that I’ve heard a lot from the social justice circles every time an artist is censored, or is attacked so much that they self-censor. It’s a line I’ve read several times in the last week directed at me, when I have commented in social media about some new attack upon myself. I think my experiences over this last week are a clear example on how, yes, artists are being targeted because of their politics, everytime those politics diverge from the progressive ideology.

I’ve always been an artist who does adult content. My hentai creations have been placed on the internet for more than a decade, and I’ve never had any problems because of it. Yeah, sometimes I got a drawing banned from deviantart, but they were very sporadic things, and usually deserved; one every 2-3 years at most. No one ever wrote anything about what a horrible person I was for doing erotic fanarts and such.
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John will be discussing Iron Chamber of Memories with Declan Finn of Catholic Geek Radio in…about half an hour. (7pm EST)

For more info:

 

http://apiusman.blogspot.com/

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Review of Chapter 25-30 of SON OF THE BLACK SWORD

Posted April 2, 2016 By John C Wright

Larry Correia is a cunning devil. There is a plot twist in every one of these chapters.

I still have not read all the way to the end of this book, because it is so good, I don’t want to reach the end. But the middle chapters here are really, really good.

Note to would be writers: if you want to make a minor character memorable, notice how to raise the stakes on the poor slob and put more of his life in the kitty so that the next turn of the card saves or dooms him. Consider two ways of portraying the same character: a man who has lost his job vs. a man with an adoring wife and new baby who lost his job. Consider a man who has lost his job, lost his clan honor, and he will never be hired again, and is unfairly and falsely accused by the Inquisition of being a traitor WHO ALSO has an adoring wife and new baby. And he thinks of a plan to find the missing cursed swordblade of the superhuman traitor who he befriended, sort of, when he was a jail warden….

Do you see how it is done? Do you see how to make what could have been a cardboard disposable character into a realist three-dimensional man, warts and all, whom the readers can cheer for and sympathize with?

Maybe you cannot see how it is done. Many a writer does not.

Mr. Correia does.

 

 

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Musical Interlude, now with Space Pirates

Posted February 26, 2016 By John C Wright

Love song from Orbit to Earth:

This is Elizaveta – Space Pirate’s Love Song.

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Empire of the Ignoranamuses

Posted February 24, 2016 By John C Wright

A truly horrifying look at higher education at topflight schools.

http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2016/02/res-idiotica/

Patrick J. Deneen writes:

My students are know-nothings.  They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent.  But their minds are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation.  They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten it origins and aims, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference about itself.

It’s difficult to gain admissions to the schools where I’ve taught – Princeton, Georgetown, and now Notre Dame.  Students at these institutions have done what has been demanded of them:  they are superb test-takers, they know exactly what is needed to get an A in every class (meaning that they rarely allow themselves to become passionate and invested in any one subject), they build superb resumes.   They are respectful and cordial to their elders, though with their peers (as snatches of passing conversation reveal), easygoing if crude.  They respect diversity (without having the slightest clue what diversity is) and they are experts in the arts of non-judgmentalism (at least publically).  They are the cream of their generation, the masters of the universe, a generation-in-waiting who will run America and the world.

But ask them some basic questions about the civilization they will be inheriting, and be prepared for averted eyes and somewhat panicked looks.  Who fought in the Peloponnesian war?  What was at stake at the Battle of Salamis?  Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach?  How did Socrates die?  Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey.  The Canterbury Tales?  Paradise Lost? The Inferno

Who was Saul of Tarsus?  What were the 95 theses, who wrote them, and what was their effect?  Why does the Magna Carta matter?  How and where did Thomas Becket die?  What happened to Charles I?  Who was Guy Fawkes, and why is there a day named after him?  What happened at Yorktown in 1781?  What did Lincoln say in his Second Inaugural?  His first Inaugural?  How about his third Inaugural? Who can tell me one or two of the arguments that are made in Federalist 10? Who has read Federalist 10?  What are the Federalist Papers

Some students, due most often to serendipitous class choices or a quirky old-fashioned teacher, might know a few of these answers.  But most students will not know many of them, or vast numbers like them, because they have not been educated to know them.  At best they possess accidental knowledge, but otherwise are masters of systematic ignorance.  They are not to be blamed for their pervasive ignorance of western and American history, civilization, politics, art and literature.  It is the hallmark of their education.  They have learned exactly what we have asked of them – to be like mayflies, alive by happenstance in a fleeting present. 

Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement.

For the record, I went to a Catholic High School, a typical modern college where I learned exactly nothing for a year, and then to St. John’s College in Annapolis. After that I went to a three year trade school to read for law.  I have been educated to the level that once was the average norm for literate men.

Let’s see how well I do on the impromptu test:

  1. The Peloponnesian War was fought between Sparta and her allies versus Athens and her allies. Thucydides reports it to have been a war greater in extent and magnitude than any known in the Greek world up until that time.
  2. What was at stake at the Battle of Salamis was Athenian supremacy of the sea against the Persian conquerors.  In effect, what was at stake was Greek freedom and the entire Western world.
  3. Socrates taught Plato and Plato taught Aristotle. (Who taught Alexander the Great).
  4. Socrates died by drinking Hemlock at the command of the Athenian mass jury.
  5. Hand up. I’ve read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Lattimore and Fitzgerald translations. I am not enough of a scholar to read more than a few verses in Greek.
  6. Hand up for Canterbury Tales. Was not greatly impressed.
  7. Enthusiastic hand up for  Paradise Lost. I reread it periodically.
  8. Hand up for Inferno. However, I have read and reread Purgatorio and Paradisio.
  9. Saul of Taurus was a pharisee and Roman citizen, and the persecutor of the early Christians described in the book of the Acts of the Apostles. After his conversion on the Damascus road, he changed his name to Paul, was martyred in Rome, was later canonized as St. Paul. He is the single most influential writer in all of the West: His influence is comparable to what Confucius and Gautama Buddha exercised over the East.
  10. The 95 Thesis were the points of argument nailed by the heresiarch Martin Luther to the gates of the Wittenberg Church. Their effect was to produce Protestantism, the only truly successful and heresy in history, which shattered the Church and severed Christian nations with a mortal blow from which we have never recovered.
  11. The Magna Charter matters because it is the foundation for all Anglo-American law, establishing the basic principle of rule of law, and imposing limitations on the powers of the sovereign.
  12. Thomas Beckett died at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral, stabbed by four knights of the King, formerly his friend, who overheard him muse that he wished someone to rid him of this vexatious priest.  The disagreement between the King and Beckett was over the jurisdictional limits of clerical as opposed to secular courts trying clerics.
  13. Not sure. One of the kings named Charles was seized by the Parliament in an outrageous act of mutiny and, after a mock trial, put to death. But I have no head for numbers, so I don’t know if that was Charles I or Charles II.
  14. Guy Fawkes was a Catholic patriot who sought to blow up the Parliament building on November 5th, in order to bring down the heretical Protestant government. The plan miscarried, and he was caught and executed. There is a day named after him because he is burned in effigy around village bonfires, complete with fireworks, dancing, beer and rum.
  15. Yorktown 1781 was the surrender of Cornwallis to Washington, and the end of the Revolutionary War.
  16. Lincoln in his first inaugural prayed for peace between the North and South, and in his second asked the Union to stiffen its resolve to preserve the Republican form of government. There was no third inaugural, since he was assassinated by a Democrat stage-actor.  
  17. I cannot tell two, or any, of the arguments in Federalist 10, since I don’t remember which article that was.   I have no head for numbers.
  18. I have read the Federalist Papers more than once, so I read Federalist 10. I just don’t remember which one it is.
  19. The  Federalist Papers are a series of newspaper columns arguing to the people of the state of New York the reasons to adopt the proposed US Constitution. They were written by Jay, Madison, and Hamilton under the pen-name Publius. These papers are the single clearest and most powerful apology for a Republican form of government of limited powers and checks and balanced ever penned.

For any literate person living in America not to know these things is outrageous.

Patrick J. Deneen continues:

We have fallen into the bad and unquestioned habit of thinking that our educational system is broken, but it is working on all cylinders.  What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, historyless free agents, and educational goals composed of contentless processes and unexamined buzz-words like “critical thinking,” “diversity,” “ways of knowing,” “social justice,” and “cultural competence.” Our students are the achievement of a systemic commitment to producing individuals without a past for whom the future is a foreign country, cultureless ciphers who can live anywhere and perform any kind of work without inquiring about its purposes or ends, perfected tools for an economic system that prizes “flexibility” (geographic, interpersonal, ethical). In such a world, possessing a culture, a history, an inheritance, a commitment to a place and particular people, specific forms of gratitude and indebtedness (rather than a generalized and deracinated commitment to “social justice), a strong set of ethical and moral norms that assert definite limits to what one ought and ought not to do (aside from being “judgmental”) are hindrances and handicaps. 

Understanding liberty to be the absence of constraint,  forms of cultural inheritance and concomitant gratitude were attacked as so many arbitrary limits on personal choice, and hence, matters of contingency that required systematic disassembly. 

My comment: The American Progressives wanted to have a government-run and government-funded education system to prevent the Catholic Church from educating the youth.

Suckers.

You did not trust the pastor to look after the sheep, so you hired the wolf to do it. The wolf bred the sheep for their docility and tastiness, and makes sure they are trained to be easy to swallow without fuss or bleating.

And now the same government is given charge, thanks to Obamacare, to your life-and-death medical decisions, and, thanks to sexual harassment laws, with the signs and gestures of courtesy and courtship to obtain between men and women.

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Twitter Suspends Truth

Posted February 22, 2016 By John C Wright

I do not use Twitter, so it is nothing to me that they have decreed themselves to be an arm of the Democrat Party, and vowed to use all their powers in an election year to belittle, harass, silence, and smother any conservative voices in the public arena.

But please keep in mind. The virulent strain of Political Correctness known as Social Justice Warfare, Fifth Wave Feminism, or Intersectionalism, also known as Morlockery, is hatred, pure and simple.

It is directionless, destructive, and omnivorous. They are not in favor of anything, they just hate you.

Why such creatures are tolerated among civilized men for even an instant is beyond understanding.

http://datechguyblog.com/2016/02/20/the-twitter-star-chamber-suspends-stacy-mccain/

Just posting a link. The words below are those of Datechguy from Da Tech Guy Blog.

Before there was Milo Yiannopoulos there was Robert Stacy McCain. A chain smoking, beer drinking, coffee guzzling hard nosed reporter who rather than simply going with the flow and repeating the conventional wisdom dared to go out into the field and actually see and report for himself.

And when he didn’t have a spot in the MSM to do it anymore on a regular basis he began his web site The Other McCain (named to differentiate himself from his distant cousin John in the Senate) and with funding provided by his readers (and sometimes without it going places on a wing and a prayer) he would travel the country from Alaska to New Hampshire from Nevada to New Orleans to cover stories that the MSM would not.

And when Bill Sparkman’s death became a national story and there were cries of “Send the Body to Glenn Beck” it was Stacy McCain who was the boots on the ground who actually went to Kentucky and investigated the story finding no evidence of murder and was vindicated when his death was revealed to be a suicide staged to appear like a murder.

He has managed to do all of this while raising a family of six which now includes two grandchildren who are his joy (although they have considerably slowed down his travels, after all family comes first).

Bottom line though not a rich man Robert Stacy McCain is an American Success story he has built a nationwide, dare I say worldwide following presenting his viewpoint and highlighting the public viewpoints of others who would rather keep their actual words and opinions under the radar because Robert Stacy McCain is loyal to his family, his God, his friends and the Truth.

I know this because I’m proud to say he is my friend.

Read the whole thing. It is appalling and amazing:

http://datechguyblog.com/2016/02/20/the-twitter-star-chamber-suspends-stacy-mccain/

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Musical Interlude

Posted February 15, 2016 By John C Wright

This is Luna Lee from Korea, who developed a modern form of the traditional Korean instrument called a gayageum.

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The Downfall of the West

Posted January 13, 2016 By John C Wright

The must-read column for today is here:

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/01/musings-on-immigration-part-i.html

This is one of the most insightful columns on the immigrant disaster in Europe I have yet seen, and it offers an explanation on two points otherwise inexplicable to me:

First, the appeal of Islam was made clear to me. I don’t know if this is the reason, but it certainly is reasonable, if you take my meaning:

Indeed, one explanation for the spread of radical Islam to the young is that it has an appeal to children who are otherwise tightly controlled by their parents. They find that they can embrace the religion and use it to shame their parents who are not practicing Muslims.

Second, I thought the inexplicable behavior of all European powers after the Second World War incomprehensible. The explanation offered here is again reasonable, fitting in with ordinary human motives and fears. (1) Europe had lost faith in herself and (2) Europe feared that, even if America won the Soviet-NATO atomic wars so often predicted in postwar science fiction, she would be obliterated. America could win, but Europe would be destroyed.

The Second World War did immense physical and psychological damage to Europe.  Physically, the continent lay in ruins; France, Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway had been invaded and occupied, Germany had been crushed and then split in two, Britain had escaped occupation, but had exhausted itself trying to win the war.  Psychologically, the continent’s self-confidence had been destroyed.  Nationalism and militarism had been thoroughly discredited.  Worse, perhaps, Europe was no longer a power in the world.  Power had passed firmly to the USA and the USSR.

Emphasis mine. We Americans have never lived in, and can hardly imagine, living in a nation that is not dedicated to an ideal.

We have no idea what it is like to live in a land that stands for nothing, means nothing, and has no future. Small wonder Science Fiction is dominated by the Americans and, to a lesser extent, by the Japanese. In Britain, science fiction has long grown pale on the tall shadow of Michael Moorcock and his New Wave, that is, socially relevant, bitter, and unappealing futurism. The Michael Palin movie BRAZIL is of this same spirit, if not of the same camp.

The grim and boring Philip Pullman trilogy His Dark Materials has the same social message, even though it is fantasy, not science fiction: since there is no God, hope is for chumps, therefore stay in school and be kind to people in small things.

In Europe, there are no great things to do or to defend.

America stands for something: the bold and daring experiment in human liberty, for liberty is a condition to which Man is not by nature or temperament suited. Slavery is much more comfortable and better fitted to the passions and predispositions of the human race.

European nations in the Middle Ages stood for an equally bold experiment seen nowhere else on Earth: a secular order guided by but not ruled by a spiritual order, that is local kings with circumscribed powers ruling over classes. Slavery was abolished, and the gladiatorial games, and divorce. The classes were not equal, but each man had rights not to be overstepped. A serf was not equal to a noble, but he could not be evicted from his land, for example. And the Church was universal and international even at a time before nations properly so called existed.

Again, between the Reformation and the French Revolution another bold experiment was tried: the civil and the spiritual power would be held (in Protestant nations) or dominated (in Catholic) by the secular authority, whose role was sacred. Nations were to have their own language and culture. National pride as a concept was born.

The French Revolution with its universal aspirations, and likewise the Russian Revolution, were utter failures in the attempt to remove the spiritual element from civic life in Europe.

The ideal of sacred kingship was dead by the time of World War One, as were hopes for a peaceful secular world order based on mutual self interest.

National Socialism, a sort of hybrid form of the French and Russian ideas, attempted to place race and national fervor as a substitute religion, but by its nature Nazism cannot coexist peacefully with other nation-states for the same reason Islam cannot: it is a religion of conquest.

The bizarre and inhuman reaction of European leaders to the rape, groping, and harassment of their womenfolk at the hands of Islam, namely, to turn water hoses on the Europeans, and to cover up the crime and defend the barbarian, is incomprehensible, unless regarded as he behavior of men who are spiritually dead, broken, and without pride.

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The Unreality Principle

Posted December 8, 2015 By John C Wright
A reprint of a column from 2006. I thought it worth posting again, because Mark Levin read an column of mine using the phrase ‘the unreality principle’ on the air, but not an explanation of what it means. I give that explanation here. 
*  *  *  *

Do they want to live?

This is from Frontpage Mag, an interview with one Rima Greene. She is one of the (alas, far too few) Jews of the Left who recognize the growing anti-Semitism of the Left.

She had been a member in the 1970’s of a rural all-women community of socialist feminists, but was shocked upon her return from a trip to Israel to discover that her feminist and lesbian friends favored the Arabs over the Israelis, even though Israel is the only nation in that part of the world where women can be free, and homosexuality is legal.

She found herself reduced to the status of an unperson, because the god of the Progressives is a jealous god, and no man can be Jewish, and have loyalties or love for his home, and also serve the Cause.

Please read the whole thing. It is fascinating and heartbreaking all at once.

http://frontpagemag.com/2011/04/01/a-leftist-feminist%E2%80%99s-journey-out-of-the-political-faith/

When I was part of the Left, I thought “evil” and “enemy” were outdated concepts brought on by indoctrinated mental patterns. When I was at a peace camp in Portugal – a German peace community – I met the people who’d paraded through Israel with the banner: WE REFUSE TO BE ENEMIES. This is new age thinking, that you can refuse reality and just keep going on your merry way.  We as Jews are targeted. We as infidel Americans are targeted. We are the ultimate prize as the Big Satan — although Jewish blood is the best for the West’s contemporary adversaries.

We do not grasp the mental universe of our enemies. Their obsession with our blood, their obsession with butchering us. They are like an army of vampires. They actually want to suck our blood. Especially Jewish blood. We in the West have not a clue. They do not just want to kill us any old way. Poison gas will not do. They want to spill our blood.  I could never make this stuff up. That is what I was trying to sort out with the Daniel Pearl incident, but my friend tried to put a stop to my thinking by calling me a racist.

[…]

When I started really understanding that Israel is in continual danger because of a theological commitment to destroy us, and that includes me, as a target, my body got it, my creatural body that fights for its survival with everything it has. That is a missing piece on the Left. My old buddy from high school, a famous Jewish anti-Zionist academic, would rather die in a plane terror incident than have “racial profiling.” I said, “It could save your life.” He said, “I don’t care. It’s racist. I don’t care.” It was a kind of petulant: “I don’t care.” It’s like a three-year-old’s outlook.

[…]

On the Left, with the “universal” values supposedly which transcend the need of the Jewish people to survive, there’s an ideology that Jews are selfish for wanting to survive together, as a collective. It is raw naked anti-Semitism.

My comment: The central tenet of the cultic and hysterical mental disorder called Leftism is what I call ‘the unreality principle.’ This is the principle, baldly stated, that reality is bad and unreality is good, therefore unreality is real.

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Pat and the Fourth Estate

Posted December 6, 2015 By John C Wright

An excellent and insightful piece by Pat Buchanan:

http://www.unz.com/pbuchanan/why-liberal-media-hate-trump/

In the feudal era there were the “three estates” — the clergy, the nobility and the commons. The first and second were eradicated in Robespierre’s Revolution.

But in the 18th and 19th century, Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle identified what the latter called a “stupendous Fourth Estate.”

Wrote William Thackeray: “Of the Corporation of the Goosequill — of the Press … of the fourth estate. … There she is — the great engine — she never sleeps. She has her ambassadors in every quarter of the world — her courtiers upon every road. Her officers march along with armies, and her envoys walk into statesmen’s cabinets.”

The fourth estate, the press, the disciples of Voltaire, had replaced the clergy it had dethroned as the new arbiters of morality and rectitude.

Today the press decides what words are permissible and what thoughts are acceptable. The press conducts the inquisitions where heretics are blacklisted and excommunicated from the company of decent men, while others are forgiven if they recant their heresies.

Pat then explains the inexplicable popularity of Donald Trump; inexplicable, that is, to the blinking Morlocks of the mainstream press, eyes watering at the light outside their troglodyte holes, cluttering with human bones and stained with the offal of lies their hermetically sealed echo chambers have become…

His popularity is traceable to the fact that he rejects the moral authority of the media, breaks their commandments, and mocks their condemnations. His contempt for the norms of Political Correctness is daily on display.

And that large slice of America that detests a media whose public approval now rivals that of Congress, relishes this defiance. The last thing these folks want Trump to do is to apologize to the press.

And the media have played right into Trump’s hand.

They constantly denounce him as grossly insensitive for what he has said about women, Mexicans, Muslims, McCain and a reporter with a disability. Such crimes against decency, says the press, disqualify Trump as a candidate for president.

Yet, when they demand he apologize, Trump doubles down. And when they demand that Republicans repudiate him, the GOP base replies:

“Who are you to tell us whom we may nominate? You are not friends. You are not going to vote for us. And the names you call Trump — bigot, racist, xenophobe, sexist — are the names you call us, nothing but cuss words that a corrupt establishment uses on those it most detests.”

http://www.unz.com/pbuchanan/why-liberal-media-hate-trump/

http://www.unz.com/pbuchanan/why-liberal-media-hate-trump/

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Wiser Than God

Posted November 29, 2015 By John C Wright

My Thanksgiving EveryJoe article discusses the political, economic, and religious meaning of the holiday, and discusses why Political Correctness is set to obliterate Thanksgiving much more so than Christmas

WISER THAN GOD
When is the last time you saw a Pilgrim or an Indian?

My son brought home from school a project he had made in arts and crafts showing a smiling Mayflower Pilgrim with a buckle on his hat, and I realized, thunderstruck, that I had not seen any Thanksgiving decorations in the public square or shopping markets, schools or streets since the turn of the millennium. Instead, Christmas music begins to play on my local radio station immediately after the Eve of the Feast of All Souls.

Thanksgiving is nearly a perfect holiday, since by rights it combines the awesome and uplifting act of humiliating oneself to God in thanks for the bounties and blessings poured onto this nation by Providence, with the tradition of gathering the family and clan together in a feast of sumptuous proportions, a feast meant to remind us of the wealth the hard work of our fathers created for us, and to remind us of the hard-won liberty and wise laws protecting our rights to enjoy that wealth and worship that God.

Thanksgiving sums up the three greatest blessings of America. Our political system is a voluntary mutual compact of limited and equal government enshrining individual rights; our economic system is a free market protecting individual property; and our religious heritage is one of the liberty of the individual conscience, a principle found in only faith in the world.

The 3 Cs of America are Constitutionalism, Capitalism, and Christianity. At Thanksgiving, we give thanks for all three at once.

Or we once did.

The first foreshadowing of the Constitutional form of government on this continent was the Mayflower Compact. How is it remembered and honored?

I looked up two textbooks to see. The first was Triumph of the American Nation, published in 1986. If you read this textbook, this is the Mayflower Compact you remember. It is a purely political document with no mention of the central purpose of the pilgrimage (ellipses in the original):

We whose names are underwritten, …having undertaken … a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do … solemnly and in the presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.

Keep in mind this was a deliberately pro-American textbook written in the days when Political Correctness was just getting started.

By way of contrast, my son’s textbook McDougal Littell The Americans, published in 2003, mentions the Mayflower Compact only in a sidebar, where it is described in two paragraphs, one of which says the Compact was written in response to the Pilgrim fear that the non-Pilgrims aboard the vessel would challenge their authority.

The textbook quotes but a dozen words from the charter, in this sentence:

The Mayflower Compact stated that the purpose of their government in America would be to frame “just and equal laws…for the general good of the colony.” Laws approved by the majority would be binding on Pilgrim and non-Pilgrim alike.

So if you read this more modern textbook, you remember the Mayflower Compact as something born of the fear of the Pilgrim’s losing their authority over the non-Pilgrims, and using the document to set the minority under their control. So it is not even a political document any more, merely a political sleight of hand.

Political Correctness is a new religion as well as being a new political and economic system. It is alien to the American character in every way, but most especially because there is no room, in a worldview where everyone is a helpless victim or a ruthless oppressor, for the emotion of gratitude.

There will be no further giving thanks for anyone to anything once Political Correctness completes the spread of its choking darkness over our land, kills all hope, halts all industries, destroys all wealth, shatters all laws, burns all churches, reduces all art to rubbish, all men to eunuch and all words to jabberwocky.

There is no room in postmodern history showing peaceful cooperation between races, no room for decorations showing Pilgrims and Indians together. There is no room for gratitude toward an Indian for saving our ancestors, hence us.

We are not allowed to call them Indians, nor to show admiration for them, wear Halloween costumes or put up decorations depicting them, or name our ball teams after them.

We are not allowed to express any emotion toward these native peoples on whose generosity in the early days – (the Indian wars were much later) – the survival of our ancestors depended, except that contempt mingled with pity which the sole emotion Political Correctness allows toward the weak. Hatred is the only emotion allowed toward everyone else.

There is no room for Thanksgiving in the PC reaches of desolation occupying the land once called America.

Read the whole thing: http://www.everyjoe.com/2015/11/25/lifestyle/thanksgiving-ruined-by-politically-correct-culture/#ixzz3suHqPd99

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Happy Thanksgiving to all our friends and fans!

Posted November 26, 2015 By John C Wright

Hello, Folks. Jagi, here, shanghaiing John’s blog once again.
This time, I just wanted to say thank you to all of you for your incredible generosity and for making our summer a miracle instead of time of poverty.

God bless you all!

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The Four C’s

Posted November 20, 2015 By John C Wright

I am as agog and aghast as all honest onlookers, psychopathologists, and men of good will at the inability of the Progressives to perceive even the slightest thistledown-weight of danger from the blood-sopped cave-dwelling death-cultists of Mohammed, who have been at war with Christianity since the days of Mohammed, and whose Holy Book, the Al Koran, commands in no uncertain terms that all infidels be converted at swordpoint or slain or enslaved.

The behavior of the Ishmaelites has not changed since the Bronze Age by an iota. Adopting Mohammedanism did not improve their character: they are the same Edomite and sons of Agog seen in the Bible, the deadly and unrelenting enemy of the Chosen People.

But to the Progressives, these troglodytes are the victims, not the aggressors, and their actions are the fault of Western powers: the fault, in short, of  Western economic and political, racial and religious institutions: Capitalism, Constitutional conservatism, Caucasians and Christians.

Examples are countless. Read the remainder of this entry »

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Postnihilism

Posted November 5, 2015 By John C Wright

 

Is there an additional step or stage further down the Morlock can descend?

I suggest that there is not. Nihilism is the philosophical belief that no universal truth exists, and thus philosophy as such is in vain. This is the philosophy to which one adheres, knowingly or unknowingly, once one has abandoned truth and reason, embraced the darkening of the intellect by becoming addicted to the self-righteousness of Narcissus, and devoted oneself to sadistic hatred of self-imposed enemies.

Nihilism is a halt-state: once one believes the philosophy that says all philosophy is in vain, one cannot use philosophy to reason oneself out of this position.

If the Morlock cannot change, what happens next?

Next he destroys himself. This is usually done indirectly rather than directly, but notice the enthusiasm which which Morlocks uphold and celebrate everything that is either foreign to them, hostile to them, or mutually exclusive to them. Islamic terrorism is an obvious example, but by no means the only. Even the support of such gentle institutions as schools that discourage learning, art that destroys beauty, and governments that cannot govern has its roots in this self destructive attitude which is the visible sign of nihilism in action.

Morlocks are, as a race, suicidal. They are allured, almost as if under an erotic allure, to images and symbols of death, destruction and decay, to things that are against nature, or that are sterile, vain, futile, and ugly. Go into a modern art museum or watch a gay pride parade to see visible displays of an invisible self loathing.

The flaw is spiritual rather than psychological. While theories about undeveloped amygdala, or the rabbit strategy of welcoming predators into an overpopulated meadow may have some merit, when you see a man who wishes to destroy himself and his homeland, look to the formation of his conscience for the answer to this dark and ugly riddle.

You see a man whose own values, whose own sense of right and wrong, has condemned him to death. Something in his conscience tells him he is unworthy of life.

Now, look next at what he believes, what he tells himself is true.

If he is a hard core Leftist, he believes he was produced by blind natural forces, out of nowhere, and for no reason, blown together by the wind like a sandheap for an hour, to die and blow away again, and never to again live or laugh or love for all the countless eons of eternity.

He thinks he is a meat robot, a thing without free will, without even the dignity of an animal. At least animals are not fools fooling themselves into believing in the illusion of free will. He is the weakest and saddest of beasts.

He also, if he is a hardcore Leftist, he believes that these same blind winds created an injustice so deeply ingrained into society that there is no reasoning with the powers that be, no way of peaceful reformation. Evolution works by the Darwinian law of the jungle, survival of the strong. This is true of social evolution as well (or so his perverse worldview tells him).

If the evils of society cannot be mended by sweet reason, violent overthrow (not merely of part of society, but of the whole rotten structure from top to bottom) is the only alternative.

Hence, for the hardcore Leftist, any love or loyalty to his homeland is a betrayal of his highest sense of goodness and righteousness, because then he is supporting the evils of mankind.

For him, any love of peace or desire for law and order slows the progress of social evolution for the same reason keeping the weak alive to reproduce slows racial evolution.

(Perhaps the Leftist hatred of America keeping the bloodbaths of fascists and communists contained has its roots in this same uneasy sense that violence is needed for progress: by maintaining civilization, the United States during the Cold War and after kept the weak old order alive, and did not allow world war to kill off the unfit so permit the superman to arise. )

Suppose instead of a hardcore leftist, you are merely a flabby moderate leftist.

You have all the same beliefs as the hardcore leftist, but are too weak and silly to call for the violent overthrow of the evil society blind evolution has produced. You lack the integrity to think through your philosophy and come to the harsh but logical conclusions.

You are too sentimental to sacrifice the weak and sick to the great progressive god of Darwin. But sustaining the sick and weak causes racial and social degeneration according to this sick worldview: and so again the conscience of the moderate leftist condemns him for his lack of fidelity. He is a disgrace to the forces of evil.

And so Leftism, the religion that replaced Christianity in Europe since the Great War of 1914, requires a man to believe that he is worthless, less than a beast, less than a dog, but the beneficiary of an evil world-system which must be destroyed, but which he lacks the strength and will to destroy.

Small wonder they want to die. It is a worldview perfectly designed to rob a man of all gratitude and hope, and without gratitude, there is nothing in life but resentment, envy, fear, and disgust.

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Anniversary of Superversive 2

Posted October 27, 2015 By John C Wright

We celebrate the first year of the superversive literary movement with the second half of last week’s essay by that brilliant essayist, Tom Simon.

This essay I think is one of his best, and since I think he is perhaps the best essayist since essayist since Montaigne, that is saying quite a bit. Of course, I happen to be particularly interested in this topic, and his essay makes clear to me a personal puzzle touching why a writer I once respected and read avidly now bores and offends me.

http://www.ljagilamplighter.com/2015/10/27/superversive-blog-life-carbon-and-the-tao-part-two/

Here is a collection of his essays:

wdtd

A collection of Mr. Simons excellent essays on Tolkien and our craft.

And here is the first part:

http://www.ljagilamplighter.com/2015/10/15/superversive-literary-movement-anniversary-essay/

Let me quote a teaser:

Life, Carbon, and the Tao – Part Two

by

Tom Simon

What’s so special about the Tao?

Here I am using the term Tao the way C. S. Lewis used it in The Abolition of Man: meaning the basic principles of morality on which all civilized peoples have generally agreed. Here are some of the perennials: Don’t murder your neighbour, don’t steal from your neighbour, don’t mess around with your neighbour’s wife, don’t perjure yourself. Men have differed on the definition of neighbour, and some  of the wide variation in human cultures is accounted for by that  difference. Some peoples apply the Tao only to members of one’s own  tribe, or one’s own nation. Some try to apply it to every human being  without exception. And of course there are differences of detail, such  as whether a man should marry one wife or four. But every culture that  survives is based on the Tao, just as every life form is based on  carbon; and the reasons, at bottom, are similar.

What the Tao does is to establish a minimum basis for safe dealings  between human beings. If, every time you went into Starbucks, you had to  seriously question whether the barrista would sell you a cup of coffee  or shoot you on sight, I fancy that Starbucks, as a business, would not  have lasted long. Fortunately, both you and the barrista subscribe to  the Tao. Even if you don’t understand the reasons for the rules, you  obey the rules, at least most of the time, because that is the only  way that you can get along and do business together. Even to live  together in a community requires the Tao. My neighbours lock their  doors when they go out, it is true. But if I did not accept the Tao,  locks would do them no good; I would smash the doors with an axe and  help myself to their belongings. And if they did not accept the Tao,  they would have no grounds to complain. No human being can live as a  solo army, at war with the whole world. We are born weak and helpless,  and most of us are weak and helpless again before we die; and we all  have to sleep in between. The Tao literally keeps us alive when we  cannot defend ourselves.

The basis of the Tao, in one word, is reciprocity. “Do unto others  as you would have them do unto you.” Or if that is too strong for you,  take the formula of Confucius: “Never do to others what you would not  like them to do to you.” Over tens of thousands of years, in the  laboratory of daily life, in tribes and villages, cities and nations, we  have boiled down the art of reciprocity; we have codified the things  that none of us (when sane and healthy) wish done to us, and we agree  not to do them to others. In almost every culture, this code is  reinforced by the prevailing religion; but it is quite possible to  accept the Tao without any religion at all. It is the common moral  currency of humanity, and with the caveat noted above, it passes  everywhere. Societies that reject the  Tao  do not hang together; and  individuals who reject the  Tao  soon find themselves without any society.

When I turn from real life to fiction, I find a curious difference. In  the stories of the past — in nearly all fiction before, say, the late  nineteenth century, and all  popular  fiction until a much later date —  the  Tao  is taken for granted; only there is a class of people who do  not observe the  Tao.  These people are called  criminals,  or   outlaws,  or  villains.  In the older kind of fiction, the villain  upsets the  Tao  to take advantage of a weaker party, and the hero  restores the  Tao  by avenging the victim.

Consider the  Odyssey.  Odysseus was a sharp operator, maybe, but still  a hero; he restored the  Tao.  Old Polyphemus, the Cyclops, violated the   Tao  in a pretty straightforward way: he ate his house guests. The  Greeks set great store by the laws of  xenia,  or hospitality; and even  we degenerate moderns, when our friends invite us to dinner, do not  expect to  be  the dinner. Later, he restored the  Tao  in the matter of  adultery, dealing with his wife’s suitors in a brusque but exemplary  manner. (No, he could not have called the police. Odysseus was the King  of Ithaca; he  was  the police.)

It is only we moderns, for the most part, who try to write fiction  without the  Tao.

 

Read the rest:

http://www.ljagilamplighter.com/2015/10/27/superversive-blog-life-carbon-and-the-tao-part-two/

 

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