John C. Wright's Journal

This is a post from three years back, reposted here for those of you who came in late. I will tell of my recent adventures in Red China sometime later this week, time permitting, faithful readers.

The fine fellows at Meme Therapy have posted a discussion about which Science Fiction starship one should own? The general consensus there is the TARDIS, as this vehicle travels both in time and space, is user friendly, and grants the Gift of the Time Lords, allowing one to speak all languages. However, this assumes that vehicle is ment to be used for sight-seeing or other Lawful Good purposes.

But we all know the real purpose behind man’s yearning for star-drive, do we not? The Lensman corps was specifically designed in response to this real purpose: the real purpose of starships is to commit outrages on distant worlds and be away faster than the speed of light before the crime is detected. PIRACY! Being a pirate is passing brave, to be sure, but being a Space Pirate is the ne plus ultra of human ambition. It is like being a pirate, but with rayguns.

Let us agree, without further discussion, that the Death Star is the best SF star-vehicle for piracy. It has mass and presence, and when it is seen rising like a dark moon above the horizon of the capitol city of some hapless victim world, all will quail when the radios of the world clamor: THIS IS CAPTAIN BLOODSTAR of BOSKONE. PLACE ALL YOUR GOLD AND VALUABLES INTO ORBIT AT ONCE! Hapless redcoats will run every which way while TIE-fighters manned by scurvy Tortuga mongrels fly low over burning buildings, taking pot-shots at the panicked crowds.

But what act of piracy to commit? Looting treasure? Nawr, maties. Ar. That is not big enough. You want to kidnap a Space Princess and hale her back to your hidden lair on Skull Asteroid for a quick Pirate Wedding. Law won’t touch you if your married to Royalty! And not just any old Space Princess! We want a thionite-sniffers dream, a seven sector callout!

The question then merely becomes, which one? Which Space Princess do you want to carry off?

Many pictures of Space Princesses below the cut

• Sean Michael posted on January 16, 2012
  Dear Mr. Wright: This is very, very, very late, I know! But one starship I thought of was Sir Dominic…

Armed only with a pen, this day I faced a mound of paperwork 15 forms high: passport copy, certificate of abandonment, application for visa, medical forms, certified copies of translations of copied certificates of Chinese permissions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I wrote my wife’s name at least 20 times, Lady Jane Jenny Lenny Lane Jagi Nemenstratus Cthulhu Lamprighter Lampwright Lamplighter Nyarlathotep-Smythe Wright, Countess of Polinac — fortunately, I had my own name legally changed to X, so it was relatively easier to write my name 20 times. According to Chinese law and tradition, I had to write all the forms using a brush made from the hair of a wild camel I caught myself. The adoption agency made this part easier by having the camel tipsy with rice wine before I clubbed it to death with the ceremonial jade-carved ox-headed truncheon known as ‘Nine Thunders’.

Okay so it was not that bad. But it was a lot of papers to fill out. Naturally, I would have faced an ogre atop a mountain of glass to win my daughter back home but in the modern age, the only trial of manhood required is facing the many pages of bureaucracy without complaint — a feat which, until I sat to type out this complaint, I had accomplished. d’oh!

On an unrelated note, my Chinese guide was sincerely puzzled when he overheard the Americans adopting children (we are here as a group) complaining about socializing the medicine in the US. Most of the adoptive parents are Christian Conservatives (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess why), and most understand the basic idea that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch — redistributing a scarce good or service does not make it somehow less scarce; all it does is give an arbitrary authority control of the decisions on how to prioritize, ration, and economize. As if the newspapers had been overhearing our talk, I was pointed to an article from the Sunday Times of London. The headline: “Daughter saves mother, 80, left by doctors to starve.” You may see the story here.

May my daughter prove as loving and loyal.

We made it successfully to China. My first glimpse of my new daughter was at the orphanage. She was sitting in a little room to one side of the main room, leaning to peer around the door and smiling. So far, she has shown none of the anxiety or sorrow one might expect. I suppose having two parents who only speak half a dozen words in common with you is better than having no parents at all.

We spent the next afternoon shopping. Mother and daughter skipped through the shops, hand in hand, while daddy (that’s me) trudged after, carrying packages. Daughter bought two huge bags full of candy and soup and goodies for her 19 closest friends at the orphanage.

We met the ‘auntie’ who has been raising Pingping these last five years, and talked with her through a translator, our guide. She warned us that the girl was bossy and argumentative. The wife and I exchanged a silent glance, and nodded. She’ll fit right in our family.

One note of interest to my libertarian friends: when I saw a man on a bicycle park his bike in the middle of the road, heedless of traffic, our guide Simon merely smiled and said, “It’s a free country” and he went on to explain that there were no helmet laws here, or mandatory seatbelt laws. On the street where we stood, there was a 7-11, a McDonald’s, a Subway and a Starbuck’s. So capitalism seems to be alive and well in Red China, at least on that street, and there are fewer regulations about parking and biking than in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

One note of interest to my Catholic friends. I found a church where I could take Mass, and felt a sense of coming home when I stepped in the door and saw sacred images of the Virgin, Christ, and St. Joseph (to whom I have been addressing myself particularly in prayer these days, since he is sort of an adoptive father) — even on the far side of the world, I was among friends. Of course I understood not a word of the service. Of course I understood it perfectly.

Here in China, or at least in this parish, when we approach to take the host, the elderly people go first: it was a particularly oriental courtesy we in the West could learn.

I have off to China to pick up my daughter. I will be away from the Internets (thanks, Al Gore!) for the next three weeks, so if any new memes start up, such as "All yours bases are belong to us!" I will have to be left behind. But that is OK by me — I have never been attentive to the latest changes in fashion, and I for one am still thinking over whether to approve and participate in an innovations in Western civilization circa Fifth Century. I have only quite recently bought into this bizarre new Syriac cult Constantine and his soldiers put such stock in, for example. Don’t be hasty–that is my motto. Hoom. Hm.

Speaking of which: My stoic reserve, I admit, is slightly perturbed by the coming event. Like all deeply-rooted ents, I cordially dislike travel, particularly air travel, and adding a new member to the family is a difficult process, even when the angels are helping. If any of the faithful will offer prayers in support of my family and the unknown future we face, I would very much appreciated it.

A reader whom I admire (because he reminds me of me–so I suppose my admiration is a trifle narcissistic) makes this comment. ""Aesthetics is a trickier matter. I will admit that aesthetics is probably the weak link in my understanding of philosophy. All I’m willing to say is that if aesthetics is objective then it is still going to be a titanic undertaking to draw lines and establish boundaries there."

My comment: Ayn Rand is the only modern philosopher who tried, but her metaphysics was nominalism, and so she attempted to attach the beautiful and lovely to expressions of what she called highest values — capitalists love skyscrapers and do not (for example) feel sublime and awed at the sight of stars, etc. This theory does not explain all the facts, but my respect for Rand is great, because she made a bold attempt. Other modern philosophers are girlmen and craven cowards compared to her.

Myself, I hold with Plato and St. Thomas Aquinas that the Beautiful is an objective object of thought. We know a line is straight or crooked because we compare it with an ideal line in thought, and everyone who thinks of the ideal line thinks the same thing. We know an argument is logical or illogical because we compare the argument against ideal laws of logic in thought, and everyone uses the same ideals laws (even people who never studied logic, or who lived on earth before Aristotle use the same rules. This is how we know those laws were discovered, not manmade.)

Likewise, we know the beautiful when we compare it to an ideal of beauty. If there is no objective ideal of beauty, than not only is all taste merely a matter of taste, and all beauty in the eye of the beholder, BUT, it would be impossible for me to both think something is beautiful and to think that maybe my taste is bad and that I should learn to see what is good for what it is. In other words, if there is no such thing as true (objective) beauty ,then there is false beauty, and no such thing as correcting an wrong opinion about beauty, and there is no way to correct mistakes, to learn, to grow, or to develop good taste.

This jars against our experience. We all know there are things we think beautiful as adults that children do not find so, and we recall the change in our aesthetics as our judgment deepened. If there is no objective standard of aesthetics, than that change is merely change, and not growth. But since it feels like growth, and we remember it as growth, the facts on the ground testify to an objective standard. 

Continuing: 

Letter of 22 Sept

Q: Would it be correct to say that it would take *more* faith for you to believe you *didn’t* really experience something supernatural?

A: No. It would merely take less reason, but not more faith.

Faith is a word that is often abused, but it fundamentally means to trust someone whom you have good reason to trust, despite the temptation or fear which, during a moment of weakness, makes mistrust seem the better idea.

I say it would take less reason because, in order to explain all the events that happened to me using nothing but naturalistic causes, the explanation would have to be ad hoc, would have to assume facts not in evidence, would have indulge in speculations without warrant.

One dogmatic atheist it was my misfortune to meet told me that my subconscious mind created to triggered the heart attack in response to my ‘Pascal’s Wager’ type prayer I described earlier, and then my subconscious mind halted the heart attack on cue when my wife’s Church prayed over me, and then my subconscious mind offered me a series of dreams and hallucinations over the next few days, and the subconscious mind selected the content of those dreams and hallucinations in order to have them match or meet with Christian literature and doctrine.

One of the things that happened to me was that Christ told me that God does not judge any man, but that He, Christ will be my judge. This was surprising to me, since what little I remembered of my Bible stories showed that the Old Testament God was clearly full of wrath and judgment, or else what was that whole Deluge of Noah all about? I have debated with Christians not one or twice, but many and many times in my life, and none of them mentioned this odd division of labor.

As one might expect, after I recovered from the hospital, I sat down to read the Bible from cover to cover, including the several books in it I had never read. To my absolute astonishment I came across a passage in the Book of John which not only confirmed what Christ had said to me, but was almost word for word the same. The vision had told me something I had not known which appeared in a book I had not read. This indicates eitherthat my vision was giving me true information, or that I have weird mind-powers that allows me to know the words I am going to read before I read it.

I asked the dogmatic atheist how it was that my vision told me words in a book I had not yet read. He said the vision had not said anything, but that, when I read that passage in the book a month or so later, I only (without knowing it) retroactively re-wrote my memories to make it look to myself as if I had known something before I could have known it.

Boy, howdy, I thought it was cool beans that I now had magical mind-rewriting powers, like Gilderoy Lockheart from Harry Potter! I am sure I have some unpleasant memories I could re-edit to have better outcomes, assuming I somehow lost my reverence for truth and accuracy—I just wanted to know how to turn them on. But, alas, even though my dogmatic atheist friend somehow had enough mind-reading powers himself to sense that I had a subconscious mind, or like Sherlock Holmes crossed with Sigmund Freud, could tell, even without ever speaking to me, exactly what the buried and hidden sections of my mind were up to, he could not tell me how to do what he said I had done. Got that? My subconscious mind and its mind-powers tended to pop into existence when and only when the dogmatic atheist needed a convenient excuse to explain things away, but the mind-powers would always somehow vanish again when it would have been convenient for me. Hmmm …. And this guy was presenting himself as a paragon of rationality, when his excuses were as flimsy as those of a professional rainmaker standing beneath clear, dry skies.

I told him my wife remembered the sequence of events in the same order I did. Had I somehow rewritten her memories too?

Read the remainder of this entry »

Fifty questions on my conversion story.

Someone named Jesse, who could be anyone from Jesse Jackson the Racial Shakedown Artist to Jesse the Yodeling Cowgirl from Toy Story, asked me a few questions about my conversion story. Rather than repeat the whole conversion story in this space, I here repeat only his questions, given the original conversion story as a quote in his question where relevant.

(You may wonder why I am calling Jesse a ‘he’ when he might be a she. For those of you who studied English rather than Newspeak, let me remind you that the proper pronoun to use for a person who sex is unknown to you is ‘he.’ For those of you—and it is all of you—who were not taught this rule in grammar school, I am required to offer the explanation. I didn’t make the rules, I only respect them.)

Letter of 08 Sept

Q: (quote) “over a period of two years my hatred toward Christianity eroded due to my philosophical inquiries.”

Hatred strikes me as a strong word. Were you exaggerating, or is that how you really felt? How did you come to feel that way?

A: I was not exaggerating. What atheists feel toward Christian is a loathsome, crawling sensation of mingled contempt and fear and hate and bitter amusement. I came to feel that way out of frustration. I thought the matter was perfectlyplain: an omnipotent and omniscient God could not act, since to act presupposes an inability to get or to foresee one’s desires. A benevolent God could not allow for the Fall of Man. A just God could not punish the remote descendants of Adam for Adam’s crime. And so on and on. But arguing with Christians was like arguing with someone who believed in Santa Claus: no matter what you said, the belief persisted. And it was not just Christians: belief in some sort of god or gods reaches back to prehistory. It was absurd and irrational and nothing could seem to dent it. It was an obvious con game, a trick played by priests so that they would not have to do honest work for a living—telling old ladies lies about a mythic fairyland beyond the grave or over the rainbow. It made no sense and it would not go away, and even reasonable people seemed to buy into it.

The atheists who say they do not hate religion are lying.

Read the remainder of this entry »

New article up on the site of my beautiful and talented wife, who writes under the name L. Jagi Lamplighter:

http://arhyalon.livejournal.com/85601.html

Read the whole thing.

Only posting a link.
http://www.ironsky.net/
This is a follow up to my post here http://johncwright.livejournal.com/282772.html?nc=27

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxlLbKspcQQ
In case you were suffering from a distinct lack of Alexandr Nevsky today, here is a clip.
For the one of you who read my LAST GUARDIAN OF EVERNESS (Hi, Mom!), I had always envisioned the dream-armor of Galen Waylock to look something like the panoply of Alexandr Nevsky (conical helm, scale jerkin, etc.) seen here at 3.08

My dearest friend Partywhipple sends along this link.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,26135072-2,00.html

He makes this comment:

My comment: I love it when the real world turns out to be stranger than a Tim Powers novel. Someone put in a call to Elijah Snow of Planetary magazine–there is clearly much secret history here we know nothing of.

And of course I agree about destroying the moon. Suppose the first aliens we meet are not friendly vegetarians like the Vulcans, but are instead ferocious Kzin, or remorseless Klendathu, or sinister Eeich?

Suppose even now minds immeasurably superior to ours, but as mortal as our own, scrutinize our world as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water?

Ah! But they would no more dare to assault us, once they saw the evidence the Luna had been smashed into a belt of asteroids, than we would dare to attack lordly Saturn that so casually consumed two or more of its own children, once moons inhabited by rebellious slave-races: nor to attack those cold and disembodied Minds, whoever they were, that destroyed the nameless Fifth Planet which once sailed happily through space between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, now shattered into fragments! Then to deter intergalactic foes, we should destroy the sun.

Annihilating the Moon would also have the beneficial side effect of exterminating the Grand Lunar and all the socialist bugs of that cold sphere, as well as the abhorrent and cannibal quadruped race known as the Va-gas of Va-nah, and not to mention killing off those nameless inhabitors of the cold sphere of Sulva who are an accursed people, full of pride and lust. There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by deveilsh arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.

Sadly, the secret compacts between the White House (made during the administration of James Norcross, the Super-president), the U.N.C.L.E., the coven of dark warlocks headed by Alan Moore, not to mention the secret Lord of the Earth, Red Orc, together have signed with the Inhumans of the oxygen-bearing Blue Area of the Moon, forbid us from destroying Luna until after the Inhuman city of Attilan is removed (by means of a spindizzy engine) to a safe location on a second yet invisible moon of Earth, known as Basidium, the mushroom planet. Unfortunately an environmental impact statement is needed before the Great Refuge can be spirited from one sphere to another, and this process takes years or decades.

… The speech by Prime Minister Netanyahu before the United Nations would have made me one.

I contrast this moral clarity with what little I heard of Mr. Obama’s speech before that same body yesterday, ere I fled in disgust, holding my ears as I ran screaming, lest his words, like some verbal version of the image of Medusa, would turn me to stone, and freeze my face forever in a rictus of horror.

Mr. Obama, according to poling data, won 78% of the Jewish vote. That is extraordinary, considering how little this administration, the Democrat Party or the European elites from which this administration and the Democrat Party takes its cues, can bring itself to support Israel. The love and sympathy poured by the Left over every enemy of the Jewish race, from Stalin to Muslim Terrorists, give aid and comfort to deadly enemies who both deny and seek to replay the holocaust. Almost every instance of Jew-hatred I have seen in the last 20 years has issued from the Left, not from the Right, particularly from bodies like the U.N., which is notoriously and consistently antisemitic as well as being notoriously and consistently left-of-center in its policies and public statements.

Mr. Netanyahu, I salute you.

A reader (and forgive me, I cannot remember what your nom de cyber is) in a startlingly magnanimous act gave me a copy of Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot authored by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn from Austria. The terms of the bargain were that I would write a review in return.

First impressions: Mr. von Kuehnelt-Leddihn displays an impressive and deep grasp of history and politics, and, like others who have encountered him, I am almost awed by how well read and well traveled he is. If you want an American to realize he is provincial, have him read Kuehnelt-Leddihn.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn is an unabashed monarchist, a conservative in what might be called the European sense of the word: one who upholds the dignity and sacral character of the throne and the altar, the crown and the miter.

A point of view more foreign to my own cannot be imagined: on the flag of the commonwealth in which I live blaze the immortal words SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS, and the seal displays armed Liberty with a naked sword over a fallen king, his crown in the dust. My commonwealth, Virginia, also (perhaps unwisely) entered into an alliance or federation with other sovereign states surrounding, and much of our sovereignty, far beyond what was originally agreed, has been stolen away. They could not have won their liberty from the British Crown without us, and so we have been ill repaid. Nonetheless, I am the heir of the deeds and words of Virginians such as Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Zachary Taylor, John Marshall, Patrick Henry, George Wythe, John Paul Jones, and so on.

My point here is that the collectivist and communist are actually closer in position to me than a monarchist, because communism springs out of (or perverts, take your pick) Enlightenment political theories, Rousseau’s social contract, Locke’s theories of the innate rights of man, Adam Smith’s labor theory of value, and so on. Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s love of monarchic polities is based on an older, I will call it Catholic, world view, and this has been tempered (or made bitter) by the sad testamony of history, the insanities and enormities, the sheer mass of bloodshed, unleashed by democracies and populist movements worldwide.

Nonetheless, I found the book thought-provoking and compelling. Nay, further, I will say it is a’must-read’ for anyone who calls himself a conservative. The analysis of the thought and history of Leftism is peerless, insightful, and lucid.

Read the remainder of this entry »

Only posting a link. Well, I say that when I post long essays, but this time I am actually only posting a link.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090923-moon-water-discovery.html

And I will mention that H.G. Wells, with the same degree of scientific accuracy describe by GK Chesterton in his NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL, predicted the presence of water on the moon over a century ago, in his scientific romance FIRST MEN IN THE