The Left v. Science Fiction.


Seriously...

...this won a Nebula????

It is a fine, arresting little bit of fluff, but it is not science fiction and it isn't a story.

I used to admire the Nebulas, but if this is a winner, cancel my admiration.

When did political correctness take over science fiction?

Sarah Hoyt points out the existential "Oikophobia" of the story.

And John Wright offers this:

//The word for when a person erects in his mind a false image of a group of people, and sees them only as that image, that false stereotype, and moreover it is a despicable stereotype, one that robs them not just of dignity, but of their very humanity… that word is bigot.

Something rotten, very rotten has happened to the Left just in my lifetime.

They used to be champions of free speech; and now they are its most vehement opponents.

They use to be able to give some sort of argument or logical reason for their position, even if an incorrect argument; now they have no argument, none of them, aside from wild and insincere accusations delivered in a mechanical fashion without any hope of being believed, phony as a three-dollar bill.

They used to be firmly on the side of the workingman; now they hate the workingman as a white racist oppressor.

They used to be in favor of free love and the sexual liberation; now they object to rocket scientists wearing shirts with cartoon women printed on them, they object to science fiction magazines showing a scantily clad warrior princess slaying a monster, and they call all sex rape, and demand strict segregation of women and men. On the same day as these protests, they appear in front of the Pope, writhing on the ground naked with crosses and crucifixes inserted into their vaginas. So the Puritan rules apply arbitrarily, without sense or order, to anyone or no one.

They used to be in favor of Blacks and other minorities; now their disgust for all the impoverished and dispossessed is plain to see. All they want is to keep the Blacks on the plantation, addicted to welfare, addicted to crack, their children aborted, their parents unwed.

They used to be in favor of the Jews, and other minorities; now they kneel to Islamic Jihad at every opportunity, vowing that those who slander the prophet of Islam will no be in the future, and ergo the Left now curse the Jews, and pray daily for the destruction of Israel, and a new Holocaust in the warhead of a Muslim nuke.

What? You say that his the not what the Left says? That they say they are creatures of purity, goodness, and sweetness, who live only to help others out of the depth of their hearts and the depth of your wallet? No, that was the old Left, back when the Left still had some scraps of sanity and intelligence.

They serve Sauron and have forgotten their own names.//

John C. Wright deals with the Bandar-log of the Left.

More of the Leftist thought police and their secondary boycotts against ungoodbadthink.

//The same hour Vox Day and I signed our contact, a small, shrill,  cowardly and mentally backward group of anonymous strangers and dank gargoyles wrote me incoherent and gargling notes expressing unsightly yet pathological hatred toward Vox Day for reasons that never were made clear.

(I am under the impression that he had offended their political cult dogmas by not allowing an arrogant leftwingy loudmouth named Jemisin to upbraid him in public, but manfully returned blow for blow. This is apparently an unforgivable sin, even though it pick no man’s pocket and breaks no man’s leg.)

But it is none of my business either way; I am not the father confessor of Vox Day, nor the father of N.K. Jemisin. I can neither hear his confession nor send her to her room without supper. The Morlocks knew this. The Morlocks were crowding my inbox merely to display their political credentials, that is, to pat themselves on the back for supporting Big Brother by dumping insincere ritualized hate on Emmanuel Goldstein.

I answered these uncouth Jacobin sans-culottes with the back of my hand, as any gentleman should do.

How is that a show of support for him? I just wanted the drooling and poop-flinging yahoos off my lawn.//

Why "the lunatics are busily destroying everything they touch, from the fine arts to the international balance of power."

Yay, us - the generation of the '70s

There is such an explanation. I make no claim to have discovered this theory. It was discovered by Alan Bloom, back in the 1980′s, in his book THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, which he wrote to explain why the generation of the 1970′s was suddenly and remarkably stupider than any previous decade of his students.

The theory was popularized recently by Evan Sayet in his book KINDER GARDEN OF EDEN. Roots of this theory go back further yet: you will find an early articulation by C.S. Lewis in his seminal THE ABOLITION OF MAN, written a generation prior. And no doubt he learned his ideas from G.K. Chesterton in his ORTHODOXY, who wrote a generation prior again, and first diagnosed the error involved in Freethinkers (as they were called then) doubting one’s own ability to think.

When the Christian interlude ends.

John C. Wright pens a thoughtful and erudite piece, which presents a vision of Spartans flining their rejects into the Apothetae and and Morlocks dancing in the ruins and Aztecs whose slogan might have been "if you don't want human sacrifice, don't be one":

My eldest child was diagnosed, before his birth,with spina bifeda. Rather than raise an inferior genetic product, the doctor gently suggested we “examine our options”, which included the modern equivalent of the Spartan practice of flinging the inferior births into a chasm on Mount Taygetos, called Apothetae.

Of course, I am white, and of Germanic descent, so the doctor who tried to talk me into murdering my unborn son did not try as hard as he might, and Thank God my wife who was a Christian (at that time I was not) would not even heed nor consider such a thing.

To this day I regret and with revulsion and horror that I even contemplated such a thing even for a moment; I despise and I hate — no softer word will do — that I live in a nation of Morlocks who make such conversations as I had with my doctor, and such temptations, possible.

I feel as you would feel if you were living among barbaric, savage and sadistic Aztecs, all of whom thought mass human sacrifice by means of grisly torture atop dark and smoking pyramids was not only tolerable, but right and just.

As it turns out, the doctor’s advice to murder my child was based on a faulty diagnosis. He was, and is, perfectly healthy.

"I feel about neopagans the way I feel about children playing dress-up in their parent’s old clothes ...

....if their parents were Nazis, that is."

John C. Wright on the big Comic-Con that is Neo-paganism.

The neopagans believe in “live and let live” not because any real pagans ever believed that, but because Christendom, believing in the unique worth of the individual and the voluntary nature of obedience to God, believe in a private conscience beyond the reach of secular power, and made that belief popular.

And now the the neopagans, raised in a largely Christian society with Christian philosophical assumptions in their intellectual background, want the tasty pudding of the Christendom without eating the meat of the Church’s strictly rational theology, the potatoes of her spiritual discipline of its contemplative life, and the vegetables of its strict morality.

Neopaganism is Christianity without the starch. It is lax Christianity for a relaxed generation.

They sit at the shining feast table of the Christian intellectual universe, and, ravenous with spiritual starvation, dare not eat the substance, lest their eyes be opened, and so they feast on scented shadows, echoes, and dim reflections.

Humility, arrogance and atheism.

John C. Wright reflects on his atheist days:

Now, honestly, you cannot walk around thinking yourself intellectually superior to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and the founders of your republic or kingdom or nation without it being reflected in your demeanor and character.

This is not like being a Babe Ruth walking around thinking he is better at swatting homers than is Chuck Yeager, who admittedly is better at flying planes. This is not taking pride in your accomplishments while admitting that men in other fields are more accomplished in their fields.

This is assuming, merely on the grounds that the philosophers and prophets and sages and thinkers of old come to different conclusions than you, that the difference of conclusion is based on a defect of reason present in them and not in you.

For by the atheist philosophy, the difference of conclusions cannot be based on anything else: it cannot be fate, or a failure of inspiration, because atheists do not believe in fate or inspiration.

The atheist cannot say that atheism is one philosophy among many philosophies of equal merit: he cannot say that theism is like the Steady State Theory or the Geocentric Theory, a model of the universe held by respectable scientific opinion in its day, now discovered to be unsupported by the most recent evidence, on the simple ground that there is no new evidence. The same arguments which promoted atheism now were used to promote it among the ancient Greeks.

Atheism is a faith, undeterred by any evidence no matter how obvious, that you are smarter than men much smarter than you.

Good stuff. Read the whole thing and he comments.

"Bloodshed, Monsters, Honor, Savagery, True Love, Dying Cities, Flying Machines and Naked Folk Armed to the Teeth. What is not to like?"

Science Fiction author John C. Wright reflects on the eternal romance of life under the hurtling moons of Barsoom.