Musings Archive

The Art of Arguing in Bad Faith

Posted May 19, 2024 By John C Wright

Much confusion surrounding modern public debate is dispelled once we realize that one side argues in bad faith.

This is not done by accident nor oversight. Bad faith in debate is a core dogma of the partisans currently dominating all world institutions, the groves of academia, the bullpens of the media, the halls of power and the boardrooms of industry.

To be sure, all sides of any argument may have partisans who disregard courtesy, logic, and honesty in their zeal. True enough. But one side in the modern public debate adheres to a philosophy that condemns bad faith arguments as illegitimate.

Only one has standards, which, alas, they occasionally betray. The other side has hypocrisy. By definition, a standard only applied to enemies, and never to oneself, is not a standard, hence cannot be betrayed.

The other side promotes bad faith arguments as their special province, justified by necessity and history, et cetera and ad nauseum. Factual correctness is optional. Political correctness justifies all.

Which side? Surely this too clear to bear repeating.

They have called themselves Leftists or Progressives, or even, ironically enough, Liberals, but they change their names frequently.

Such name changes are done for rhetorical reasons, as propagandistic rebranding, and is another example of debate in bad faith.

For the purposes of this column, let them be called Woke, despite that this term, like all their terms for themselves, is misleading or downright deceptive. Awake is the one thing they are not.

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Men as Livestock

Posted May 17, 2024 By John C Wright

The managerial bureaucracy and civil service currently sets the agenda for major politicians, for the UN and the EU and the WEF, and all national and international organizations attempting to install a New World Order.

This New World Order regards men as fungible, interchangeable, merely resources to be used for given purposes. We are livestock to them.

If the population is aging in one nation, and new and younger workers are needed to pay for their pensions, merely importing a goodly number of units of people is regarded as prudent by the New World Order bureaucrats.

The fact that the migrants have different language, religion, worldview, different values, virtues, vices and cultural identity than do the native born is irrelevant to the bureaucrats.

To them, human life is numbers in a ledger.

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Tolerance and Intolerance

Posted May 7, 2024 By John C Wright

We hear much ado about tolerance and intolerance these days, as if the first were an unalloyed good, regardless of degree or context, and the second an unalloyed evil.

In fact, treating tolerance as an unalloyed good, since it allows alike harmless as well as harmful differences of thought, word and deed to coexist in society, encourages the harmful, and destines the harmless to dismissal, perhaps destruction, is itself an unalloyed evil. There is no good side to it.

The main effort of the Cult of Toleration is to legalize sexual immorality, then to normalize, then to celebrate it, then to mandate it.

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Reminder: The Woke Will Never Wake

Posted April 30, 2024 By John C Wright

Will the Woke ever wake up?

No. Leftwing philosophy is designed with one end in mind: never to wake up.

Leftwing philosophy has several components: political correctness, multiculturalism, subjectivism, wokeness, feminism, critical gender theory, collectivism, theosophist mysticism.

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Occult Theosophy of the United Nations

Posted April 28, 2024 By John C Wright

Please take the time to listen to this lecture. It is perhaps the most important you will encounter this year.

Language warning. Mr Lindsay indulges in some justifiably coarse gutter language during the some low points of the lecture.

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To the Propagandists, All is Propaganda

Posted April 16, 2024 By John C Wright

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.

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From the Vault: Interview with Nerd HQ

Posted April 5, 2024 By John C Wright

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.

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Part Three: Badness of the Woke

Posted March 25, 2024 By John C Wright

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 

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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.

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Part Two: Baldness of the Woke

Posted March 21, 2024 By John C Wright

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.

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Part One: Boldness of the Woke

Posted March 20, 2024 By John C Wright

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?

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Never Again

Posted March 7, 2024 By John C Wright

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.

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Pascal and Marcus Aurelius

Posted February 24, 2024 By John C Wright

Two great figures of times past, Pascale and Marcus Aurelius, pagan and Christian, address the wager of the unknowable in nearly equal terms.

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Extinctionism is Moloch Worship

Posted February 23, 2024 By John C Wright

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.

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Extinctionism

Posted February 20, 2024 By John C Wright

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.

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Tucker Talks to Putin

Posted February 12, 2024 By John C Wright

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.
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