John C. Wright's Blog, page 9

It is a sad commentary on our times that one can no longer tell the difference between satire and reality.

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/10/05/worlds-first-lesbian-bishop-calls-church-remove-crosses-install-muslim-prayer-space/

Protestant Bishop, I should mention, of the Church of Sweden. Married, or rather ‘married’ to one of her own sex.

I wonder what Jeremiah would say about this?

 For both prophet and priest are profane; yea, in my house have I found their wickedness, saith the Lord.

 Wherefore their way shall be unto them as slippery ways in the darkness: they shall be driven on, and fall therein: for I will bring evil upon them, even the year of their visitation, saith the Lord.

 

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

It seems the time has come again. Here is  a reprint of a post from 2011, explaining the famous Space Princess equation, and also explaining the difference between science and science fiction flavored daydreams.

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A reader whom I will, for the sake of anonymity, refer to merely as ‘Curmudgeon’ (albeit his real name is Homer Snodgrass of 12 Manitowish Avenue, Mammoth Falls, Wisconsin, 54545, and his social security number is 1205-119-8577, and the PIN number of his bank card is 4560) holds the opinion that too many modern persons of the youthful persuasion (he refers to them as “kids!” or “punks!”) are devoted to science fictional ideas as a thinly disguised substitute for spiritual longings.

‘Curmudgeon’ reads and promotes what he calls the ‘It Ain’t Gunna Happen’ School of science fiction. This school is remarkably similar to the Mundane Movement of Really Boring Self-Righteous Left-Leaning Science Fiction, being mostly a list of things that ain’t gunna happen.

Here is a summary of his manifesto:

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Hey folks, Mrs. John C. Wright, here.

So in the last few months, a handful of extraordinarily generous folks among you readers have tried to give us a regular monthly donation through Paypal.

For some reason, not a single one of these has worked. We just get “payment skipped” notices.

I am trying to contact Paypal about this, but if anyone reading this happens to be one of the kind folks involved, if you could write Paypal, too, that might help.

Currently, this website is receiving too much traffic for its current server. We have several options, but the best option would cost money on a monthly basis (which is what brought me to trying to straighten out whatever is up with Paypal…as if that were actually working, it would basically cover the possible website upgrade–making that option possible.)

Otherwise, all is well. John is hard at work on Green Knight’s Squire, which is terrific (at least in the mind of myself and two or our sons.) His new job is going well, too.

Hope you are all happy and healthy!

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Wow!

From a Rueter’s Article: http://www.rt.com/usa/316785-nasa-water-mars-confirmed/

For the first time, NASA has confirmed the existence of liquid water on the surface of Mars, according to new research announced Monday. The finding stems from data and analysis by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has verified that dark, seasonal streaks that have appeared on Mars’ surface come from briny water flows.

MRO found evidence of narrow channels containing water cut into cliff walls through Mars’ equatorial band, though the source and chemistry of the water is yet unknown. The streaks, or recurring slope lineae, appear during warmer, summer months on the Red Planet. They disappear when the temperature drops.

Scientists had previously run into difficulties analyzing the streaks, which measure less than 16 feet, or 5 meters, wide. The orbiting MRO’s instruments were able to process trace measurements, and scientists successfully observed the findings thanks to a computer program that can focus in on individual pixels. MRO’s data was then compared with high-resolution images of the slopes. Scientists found a match between their locations and the presence of hydrated salts.

Some scientists express reservations, since the findings may have another interpretation, but it is still fascinating.

We tend to forget how much we don’t know. Liquid water on another planet means life as we know it may be possible there.

So far, the evidence of life beyond Earth has been exactly zero, zip, nothing, nada, a situation we science fiction fans find intolerable.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

A reprint of three columns, which I reprint here in one place in order to offer timely advice about titles:

The esteemed Mike Flynn (who has never written a book entitled Wreck of the Country of the River of the Blind Stars) has written an article entitled “Entitlement”, and yours truly as well as real science fiction authors such as Nancy Kress and Michael Swanwick were interviewed and asked to contribute.

You can see the results here:

On LiveJournal

Part I. http://m-francis.livejournal.com/204595.html

Part II. http://m-francis.livejournal.com/205007.html

On Blogspot (the blog less traveled)

Part I. http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2011/07/entitlement-part-i.html

Part II. http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2011/07/entitlement-part-ii.html

Mike Flynn is also proffering the following contests:

Contests



Our favorite titles.

Okay, dear readers, if there are any. Your assignment is to share book or story titles that you found effective, memorable, or resonant, regardless of the quality of the story itself. That is, titles that lured you to buy the book or read the story, or which have stuck with you afterward. What about the title enticed you? What made it work. You don’t have to restrict yourself to SF titles, either.

Old wine in new bottles.

Pick a book or story you liked, and suggest an alternate title for it.

The best “Old Wine in New Bottles” entry mentioned in the article itself, was from a writer who complained of a certain over-meddling editor: He would have re-titled The Bible to War God of the Desert.

The answer was far more material than Mr. Flynn needed, but then again, when I sit down to write a short story, I end up with a three volume novel, so ending up with more material than needed is something of an endemic problem for authors in the Big Time (a title by Fritz Leiber).

THE MIKE FLYNN / JOHN C. WRIGHT interview.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Part of an ongoing conversation. A reader asks:

“So, why would SJW’s want to only disapproves of persons rather than acts? May I suggest that it is because of their “desperate need to feel good about themselves”?”

Also, there is a certain amount of mere mental laziness involved. They want to look smart without the trouble and bother of thinking, and want to look morally superior without the trouble and bother of being good. If you are a stupid person trying to silence a smart person, or a wicked person trying to silence a good one, you just yell whatever is the laziest, funniest, more sneeringly shallow insult you can think right off the top of your head, and then change the subject.

Today on the radio, I heard an old lady calling in to support aborticide. The topic was whether it is worth a government shut down to stop using my hard earned tax money to pay evil men to kill innocent babies. The caller called all conservatives (and, by extension, yours truly) hypocrites, because we had never adopted any children.

(Even though I have, adopted a daughter abandoned by her parents due to the Leftist one-child policy brought on by goofy Leftist panic over nonexistent overpopulation fears).

Now, when one compares the sin and felony of infanticide to the mild logical inconsistency of hypocrisy, even granting the woman’s talking point was correct (it was not), the sheer silliness of raising my hypocrisy as a shield against the accusation that you are stealing my money to pay for a child murderer to do murder, therefore I may not object to the theft is breathtaking.

But the caller did not expect the objection to be answered, and would not listen to any objection had it been raised. The point is to utter an accusation: To call the person you are about to rob a demon, so that he does not defend himself, and no onlooker runs to his defense. It does not matter what the accusation is. The accusation is merely white noise, jabberwocky, babbling nonsense. It is a battlecry, a scream.

That is why the reactions of the Left to accusations are so off the wall and so off topic. To them, conservatives leveling accusations based in facts and truth sound like battlecries, not like words.

Political Correctness takes away from man the human power of speech. Leftist can no longer speak nor understand words.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

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.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

A reader with the iatric yet riotous name of Docrampage has asked me to pass along the following announcement. The words below are his:

Like maggots diffusing from the bowels of a rotted and reeking corpse, a nameless writer’s group has spontaneously emerged, blind and mewling, from the comments section of this very site, it’s purpose: to encourage and advise one another in our writing. I, for example, have received extensive and strenuous advice about the appropriateness of my metaphors and the complexity of my sentences–advice that I am sure was well-meant if a bit misguided.

Inspired by John C. Wright, our goal is to write speculative fiction that entertains the reader and does not contribute to the coarsening of society. If you are serious about writing or would like to get serious about writing, and could use some encouragement and advice, you should think about joining us. To join up or ask questions, email me at [email protected]. Put “author” in the subject line.

We shall not be forever nameless! Join soon if you want in on the naming decision!

For now, we are keeping the group small and private so there is no public web page.

Just to be clear, I am not in this group nor part of it, I am merely the mascot or inspiration, and rather flattered to be so.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

When speaking of the relationship between Pope Francis and the modern media, it is important to realize and to recall that the modern media is a force for evil which, if the devils in Hell are not controlling with all their superhuman malice and intelligence to do as much harm as possible to the soul and spirit and mind of the human race, then those devils should retire and turn over control of their legions of imps to the human media moguls who are successfully doing their job for them.

Let me draw your attention to this article by Michael Marinaccio (Hat top to Catholic Geeks) about the six times that you’ve been flat out lied to about Pope Francis. (https://medium.com/the-politic/6-time...)

I thought it would be fitting to put together a short list of instances where the Holy Father has been completely taken out of context or mis-reported (flat-out lied about) by the national media and press corps.

He goes on to list the six most obvious (the media assertions that the Holy Father is pro-sodomy, anticapitalism, pro uncelibate priests, pro-infanticide, pro-divorce, pro-green).

By no coincidence, all these projected beliefs of the Leftist media repeat the creed and the idolatry of the postmodern postrational posthuman Leftists. They are pro-sodomy because of lust, anticapitalist because of envy, pro-uncelibacy because of lust, pro-infanticide because of lust, pro-divorce because of lust, and pro-green because they are are anticapitalist because of envy. Lust serves Asmodius, infanticide serves Moloch, envy serves Leviathan.

The Pope, as all Popes and bishops before him since the time out of mind, repeats the Christian teachings on mercy, eschewing greed, and being proper stewards of the Earth. The Catholic social teaching has been explicit for a century, and implicit from eternity.

If Francis gives greater emphasis to what seem to American conservatives to what are typically Leftwing topics, this is  a call to stir you out of your self regard, and to realize that the socialists stole and perverted the concepts of altruism and service to the poor, not to mention stewardship of the environment. The Dark Lord does not create, he only corrupts.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

My beautiful and talented wife has interviewed the Nathan McClellan about his latest. It sounds fascinating, and I want to play.

http://www.ljagilamplighter.com/2015/09/17/new-kickstarter-card-game-heros-journey/

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.