John C. Wright and gender relationships

[Spastic Plastic]

I see there's an "Incariol" guy on his blog trying to talk sense into Wright by insulting him. :)

[Mathis Waters]

What the hell happened to him? How did he go from writing the brilliant Golden Age trilogy to a raving madman? An explosion of insanity, indeed! Well put, whoever wrote that! :)

Talented authors are almost certainly crazier than the general population.

[RedEyedGhost]

Talented authors are almost certainly crazier than the general population.

But as he became crazier and crazier his books became shittier at the same rate, and that rate was exponential. I doubt the man will ever write anything worthwhile again (and The Golden Age Trilogy is the only thing of his that is worth a damn).

[Galactus]

Ah, sounds like Dave Sim, no?

EDIT: why is it that when authors go crazy they always seem to become raging misogynists?

[Serious Callers Only]

They didn't think deeply enough. Clearly the answer is to hate humanity as a whole.

[Serious Callers Only]

Like Salinger.

[Spastic Plastic]

Hahahaha, you guys should visit John C Wright's blog and read the comments. It's hilarious how "Incariol" keeps coming back all the time and insulting Wright and his scarily medieval worldview.

[Max the Mostly Mediocre]

It's hilarious how "Incariol" keeps coming back all the time and insulting Wright and his scarily medieval worldview.

Have those comments been deleted?

[SpaceCoyote]

I want to thank the posters on this thread for introducing me to John C. Wright, and forever redefining my understanding of 'crazy'. Goodkind, your picture is coming out of the dictionary.

This man is truly insane. Bat-shit insane.

[Spastic Plastic]

Have those comments been deleted?

As of now, they're still there. They're pretty funny.

[peterbound]

I want to beat up John C. Wright. Is that wrong?

What a fucking loon

[Ran]

TFJ,

Link? Each chapter has comments, and the ones I've perused, I don't see an Incariol.

peterbound,

Yes, it's wrong to want to hurt a person because you disagree with their opinions.

[David Selig]

^ It's on Wright's Livejournal page: http://johncwright.livejournal.com/362167.html

[peterbound]

TFJ,

Link? Each chapter has comments, and the ones I've perused, I don't see an Incariol.

peterbound,

Yes, it's wrong to want to hurt a person because you disagree with their opinions.

wow, didn't really expect a reply to that.

Alas, on this we will have to disagree. Not only do i find it very right to hurt someone based on differing opinions, but also very satisfying. :)

I'm joking of course. I don't want to get banned for disagreeing with you.

[peterbound]

^ It's on Wright's Livejournal page: http://johncwright.livejournal.com/362167.html

Good read. I don't know what's worse, the John C. Wright stuff, of the fact that he has people backing him up. Wild.

[Spastic Plastic]

Hahaha, this guy just won't stop trolling Wright's blog (and another one just joined in).

I kind of agree with Peterbound. Wright needs some sense knocked into his head by force.

[Nerdanel]

Well, John C. Wright has gone on a rambling multipart rant again. This one is a lot more boring than the previous one, but it still has its share of unintentional humor. The subject is why superhero movies are the best kind of movies being made and why "mainstream Hollywood movies" are "artsy, trivial, greasy, and bad". Apparently my mother is part of some nebulous "elite" since she has talked to me about the greatness of certain movies targeted by Wright by name. These include Rain Man, Dances with Wolves, and The English Patient. (As for myself, I think The Silence of the Lambs - also mentioned by Wright as objectively bad - is a great horror movie.) My mother also likes watching fluffy romantic comedies, so I think we can say she just prefers watching interpersonal relationships to watching explosions. It's a matter of taste, but Wright paints bold and broad with the brush of eeevil "dehumanism". I've never before been so tempted to stop lurking and post a reply.

(Also, it is interesting how superheroes are an American phenomenon and how popular European comics have a different focus. Superhero movies routinely are much bigger in America than overseas from it. Wright doesn't address this at all, if he is even aware of it.)

It also turns out Wright thinks elites should be either hereditary aristocrats or plutocrats. The following quote is entirely too long, but Wright is unable to be concise and the thing has to be read to be believed.

You may be wondering how our elite, or any elite, could rise to predominance in society they reject? Should not the elite be composed, as in the Old World, of those established ruling and land-owning families whose ancestors founded or conquered the social order, and hence are loyal to it? Or, in the New World, should not the elite be composed of self-made men whose genius and enterprise and good fortune enabled them to contribute so much to society, offering mankind oil and steel mills and rail line and electrification, that the reward of the free market elevated them to wealth? Would not either an elite of lineage or an elite of money be loyal to the social order?

The answer is that the modern Progressive elite are not the children of iron who whose fathers won land by hard military service and fawning on princes, but neither are they children of wealth whose fathers’ stubborn hands won gold from a hard world by fawning on customers: our elite are self-selected and self-anointed, and they know nothing of the iron of war nor the gold of commerce.

The elite are people who flock to journalism and entertainment and politics and the academy, and they share one outstanding characteristic:

Even though their intellectual accomplishments are relatively modest, they take their ability to disregard morality as a sign of lofty and superior intelligence, as if disobedience were a difficult quadratic equation.

As a corollary, they assume that loyalty to morality can only be due to an absence of intelligence rather than the presence of experience, common sense, honor, grit, manhood, spiritual insight or upright character.

But wait! Aren't the plutocrats and their heirs nevertheless the resident American elite? ("Elite" is not the same as "intelligentsia".) Paris Hilton is a prominent example of that class of people.

By the way, John C. Wright has previously denied that he has an authoritarian personality. It's because he used to be a devout follower of Ayn Rand and Randroids by their own definition are the only individualist ones. Finding religion didn't help much as far as sanity goes:

To my fellow Christians I can tell you the secret that comedies have the power to bring joy because we know in our souls that one day our prince will come, and the long exile in this land of death shall end, and the bridegroom shall wed his mystical bride the Church, and heaven and earth shall wed.

I'd say this assertion on the source of humor is... unconvincing, to put it mildly. It is followed by some strange ideas about gender roles in stories:

There are feminists who object to tales where knights and princes disguised as curls or shepherd boys rescue princesses chained to rocks from the leviathan in the sea, and carry her off on his white charger, or, better yet, carry her aloft in his winged shoes to a royal wedding. The feminist called such tales, where the princess is merely the prize to be won, examples of male chauvinism. Blind vipers! Were only their eyes opened, they would call this female chauvinism, because this is a type or a shadow of the rescue of all the soul of the Church by our beloved Bridegroom. He saves us not to win us as a prize; he saves us because he prizes us, and knows us worthy to be won. Compared to Him, we are all women, our souls are female, they receive like soil receiving a seed the inspiration and infusion from which new life shall grow in us. Speak no more of Man’s search for God. Speak instead of God perusing and wooing Man, and carrying off our souls like Psyche in the arms of Eros.

I wonder if Wright has any idea how gay he is sounding there, fantasizing about being carried away in the strong arms of the Macho Jesus.

Later on Wright tells that he was against abortion even before he converted into Catholicism. This was his secular argument:

Again, I recall a private conversation where I pointed out that abortion was against the Darwinian imperative to reproduce the species. Any race, tribe, or clan that had a genetic weakness favoring abortion of its own young would in a few generations be out produced by any race, tribe, or clan lacking that weakness, and their greater numbers would give them a greater talent pool to draw upon. My argument was that any moral code which failed to promote survival was in the long run self destructive, because it was a moral code that would eventually edit itself out of history.

Dare we say the R word?

What is the ground the Morlocks have chosen to defend? In metaphysics they defend radical materialism; in ontology, nominalism; in politics, collectivism and grievance-mongering race-identity; in economics, socialism, Fabianism, Keynesianism; in ethics, aborticide, suicide, euthanasia, including that form of mass-suicide called multiculturalism; in aesthetics, subjectivism and hatred of the beautiful; and in all things, nihilism, nihilism, nihilism. The only virtue of their creed is to tolerate the intolerable, to promote the morally, intellectually and sexually perverse; and their only form of rhetoric is self-flattery; their only argument is ad hominem.

(Emphasis mine.) Okay, here is the R word: racism. It keeps shining through, for all how Wright supposedly has a black Teabagger friend, as he claimed in an earlier post.

[LugaJetboyGirl]

I wonder if Wright has any idea how gay he is sounding there, fantasizing about being carried away in the strong arms of the Macho Jesus.

I find this interesting. There's a long tradition of female Christians being viewed and viewing themselves in an almost erotic relationship with Jesus. It was big in the Middle Ages and is big in modern rhetoric as well. Nuns and and virgins are 'married' to Jesus, he is their bridegroom, and they are overcome by ecstasy when thinking about him. He is described as a lover. Some of the things those females saints said about him were positively scandalous.

So I find it funny that this Wright person (who I have never heard of until 3 minutes ago) has co-opted a motif that is especially associated with Christian women and taken it a step further into 'biblical' land, what with the seed impregnating our soil...ahem...soul.

[Artas]

This bit is good, too:

"I’m very surprised he hasn’t banned you yet"

I allow the comments as contributory evidence that my screed above is not much of an exaggeration.

People might be less skeptical of my claim that that many on the Left suffer an intellectual vacuum, which renders them incapable of any argument aside from irrelevant ad hominem and insult, if we did not have a boring string of insults voluntarily appended to the article, demonstrating the mental vacuity.

There are only two ways to silence an idea: refute the idea or humiliate the person speaking it. If the person speaking it is too humble to refute the insult or too arrogant to notice it, the effort is wasted, and meanwhile the idea is unanswered, unrefuted, and untouched.

P.S. What's this whole Democrat/Democratic Party thing about?

[Spastic Plastic]

Well, when that Incariol guy was trolling Wright, I remember how he got Wright to finally say "it's called the Democratic Party". Funny stuff.

I see how Wright's explosion of insanity still isn't over.