John C. Wright's Journal

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.

Read the remainder of this entry »

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.

Read the remainder of this entry »

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.

Read the remainder of this entry »

I have heard it the statement spoken with great conviction that when one ideology dominates an art, it is doomed to become mere propaganda.

The conviction is misplaced. It is mere cynicism.

To such a statement I take sharp, if respectful, exception. Like most pointed comments, it is true, but only to a point.

To the contrary, it all depends on the ideology or the philosophy.

Read the remainder of this entry »

Bellomy has a question about the phrase “Never Again”

“If it was designed to teach us about preventing future genocides, then why do we repeatedly learn more and more about the Jewish Holocaust in increasingly exacting detail and almost completely ignore the multiple other genocides that HAVE happened SINCE the Jewish Holocaust? After teaching us about the lead-up to the Jewish Holocaust (or really, the German-run Holocaust that included Jews among others) and the facts surrounding it, so we know what happened, shouldn’t we learn about other genocides and what steps we could have taken or should be taking to prevent those?”

I have an answer, but a cynical one.

The enemy of my enemy is sometimes my enemy, but sometimes one fights alongside him nonetheless, at least in the short term.

This phrase, promising to curtail further genocides, was born of one such temporary alliance, and outlasts it only as a ghost, a memory without form or matter.

Read the remainder of this entry »

The point bears repeating that the seemingly disconnected policies and movements of the Heresy of Postmodernity, also called Critical Everything Theory, is not political in nature, not rational, not economic.

Political issue can find political compromises. Rational issues can be addressed by reason. Economic issues can be solved by frugal industriousness.

But the Postmoderns cannot be negotiated-with, cannot be reasoned-with, cannot be bought. They do not want to live.

Read the remainder of this entry »

If you have not seen the interview, it is a remarkable thing to watch, not the least because the interviewer neither interrupts the subject being interviewed, nor argues in favor of the statist-corporate goodthink viewpoint, nor uses the opportunity to display fake virtue. Tucker lets Putin talk.

Putin, on his side, is fell and subtle in his answers, showing the most adroit political rhetoric I have seen in a generation. No lie is outright or direct. No gaslighting. But, like an able mob-lawyer, he is careful to shade the truth, downplaying or omitting whatever does not help his case. He delicately deflects any question it would be impolitic to answer directly.
Read the remainder of this entry »