The inevitability of segregation

Even the biggest champions of postracial fantasy are beginning to recognize the failure of desegregation:

To the extent that the word “desegregation” remains in our vocabulary, it describes an antique principle, not a current priority. Today, we are more likely to talk of diversity—but diversification and desegregation are not the same undertaking. To speak of diversity, in light of this country’s history of racial recidivism, is to focus on bringing ethnic variety to largely white institutions, rather than dismantling the structures that made them so white to begin with.

And so, sixty years after Brown, it is clear that the notion of segregation as a discrete phenomenon, an evil that could be flipped, like a switch, from on to off, by judicial edict, was deeply naïve. The intervening decades have shown, in large measure, the limits of what political efforts directed at desegregation alone could achieve, and the crumbling of both elements of “separate but equal” has left us at an ambivalent juncture. To the extent that desegregation becomes, once again, a pressing concern—and even that may be too grand a hope—it will have to involve the tax code, the minimum wage, and other efforts to redress income inequality. For the tragedy of this moment is not that black students still go to overwhelmingly black schools, long after segregation was banished by law, but that they do so for so many of the same reasons as in the days before Brown.

One hopes it won’t take another 60 years for them to figure out that diversity is inevitably doomed to failure too. The reason segregation is inevitable is because diversity+proximity=war. And the fact that it is inevitable is based on sound and impeccable logic.

All these diverse groups came from somewhere, right? And, for the most part, they once belonged to the same population group, right? So, the process of separation and eventual segregation occurred naturally and spontaneously through a combination of factors such as free association, sexual selection, and tribal mobility.

The current diversity and multiculturalism fad is nothing more than a short-term artificial artifact of wealth, peace, cheap international travel, and anti-national governments. Take away just one of those four supports and the entire edifice collapses in violence and bloodshed.

To talk about being pro-segregation or anti-segregation is a category error. It’s no different than claiming to be pro-biology or anti-gravity. It’s a normal human dynamic, and as such, it can be resisted with effort, but only for a short time from the historical perspective.

The darkness comprehendeth it not

Damien Walter, the Guardian contributor who wrote the hit piece about Larry Correia’s blog post without linking to it, and who has never professionally published a novel, reviews “Opera Vita Aeterna” and it says considerably more about the reviewer than the work reviewed.

I have judged the work not the man, and found it to be an incoherent rant disguised as an unconvincing non-story.

Because I am cruel by nature, I found this amusing. Because I am human, I found it tragic as well. Consider the perspective from which he reads:

I was 30 and, by any measure, deeply unhappy. I’d been pushing down a
lot of horrible emotions from a damaging childhood, grief from many
losses, and had trapped myself in a life I didn’t fit in to from a
desperate need to fit somewhere, anywhere. I had no kind of spiritual
practice at all. I was a standard issue atheist, and any encounter I had
with religion was edged with inherited and unexamined scorn.
Consequentially, I really had no tools to process the pain I was
feeling. Today, my argument with the radical atheist rhetoric of people
like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett – both of whom I had read
heavily at university – is that it leaves the bulk of its believers
utterly amputated from their own emotional reality. It certainly had me.
I was miserable, and in trying to escape from the causes of the misery
I’d driven myself, repeatedly, to the borders of emotional collapse
where I had, at long last, collapsed.

Unfortunately, his behavior makes it readily apparent that he has not yet found his way out of his emotional mire. As I pointed out in my tweet to him in response: “Given your deep unhappiness, Damien, it’s not surprising that you found a story about PHILIA incoherent and unconvincing.”

“Opera Vita Aeterna” is a story about love. The love of a friend, the love of knowledge, and the love of God. It should surprise absolutely no one that damaged and deeply unhappy people, who are by their own admission “utterly amputated from their own emotional reality”, cannot relate to it. They cannot even recognize it as a coherent story.

Of course they find it incoherent and unconvincing! Of course they find it a non-story! For they are lost in misery, their hearts are empty, and they cannot see by the light that comes from within. Regardless of what he may think of the literary quality of the story, I hope that one day Damien will at least be able to comprehend what the story is about.

Castalia House Goes Live!

One of our long-term goals for Castalia House is to make it the premier intellectual driving force in SF/F. That means more than simply publishing intelligent entertaining books by the likes of John C. Wright, Tom Kratman, and Rolf Nelson, and more than the publication of various educational curricula on subjects ranging from Astrophysics to Military History, but also reviewing the current state of the literary sub-genres.

So, we’re pleased to announce that the Castalia House blog has gone live with its first three daily bloggers. We’ll be adding a few more presently, but these three alone will ensure that the Castalia blog becomes a daily destination for everyone interested in science fiction and fantasy.  From Anson, a book review:

REVIEW: The Martian by Andy Weir

The last few decades have seen a decline in the genre, as the good
material has surrendered its space in the bookstores, and foot by foot,
rack by rack, has been replaced by bi-curious tattooed lyncanthrope bike
chicks, Victorian ladies in steampunk goggles (Victorian only in
breeding and couture, sadly), endless Star Trek novelizations, and other
varieties of crap.

(The last 30 years have not been entirely dark – we’ve been blessed
with some of the best space opera ever from the pen of Ian Banks,
stunning Weird Fantasy from China Mieville, amazing stuff in multiple
genres from Neal Stephenson, and more…but bright spots aside, the hot
white hot center, the default worldview of science fiction has dimmed
and become less magical, more mundane, and – yes – simultaneously more
tacky, more banal, and more despair inducing.)

I was thrilled to come across a new novel recently that broke from
this downward trend. It’s not the perfect novel (but then again, what
is?)

And from Daniel Eness, The Secret to Science Fiction:

H. Beam Piper — a man so versed in science he could sketch out, on a napkin, an engineering model of Sputnik the day it was announced, and explain it to a table of science enthusiasts — quit near-future science fiction. He did it because the scientific advances of the 1950s were coming so quickly that much of the knowledge he used for his stories felt obsolete to him by the time the magazines went to print. He was fed up with his guesses going bad so quickly like so much produce. That was 60 years ago. Has the world slowed down since then?

Jeff Sutton’s Apollo at Go suffered the opposite fate: because the NASA missions were so heavily engineered, and Sutton an engineer doing work for NASA…his 1965 “science fiction” book about the first moon landing that would happen in real life four years later now reads more like alternate history, and only a slight alternate at that.

Also, in case you haven’t read it yet, THE LAST WITCHKING, which contains the Hugo-nominated novelette “Opera Vita Aeterna”, is a free download today from Amazon.

And finally, due to the inability to sell pre-formatted PDF files through either Amazon or Smashwords, (yes, we know Smashwords sells PDFs, but they have to be submitted in Word format), we found it necessary to create our own online store. So, if you would like to support us by purchasing epubs directly, you can now do so at the Castalia House Store. Not everything is available there now, due to the limitations of the Kindle Select program, but you can expect the selections there to grow over time.

The intrinsic unreliability of science

This 19x rise in retractions should suffice to put the lie to the ridiculous idea that published scientific papers are the best means of determining truth, let alone the only one:

In the first decade of the 21st century, retractions of papers published by medical journals went up 19 fold, although the number of manuscripts being published only increased 44 percent. The reasons behind this surge in evidence of scientific falsification were examined in a recent editorial in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology • Biology • Physics (the Red Journal), published in October 2013.

“One of the greatest, and sadly all too common, challenges facing a contemporary medical journal editor is the adjudication of ethical integrity issues,” Editor-in-Chief Anthony L. Zietman wrote. “I had originally presumed that this would be just an occasional role, but it transpires that these problems are quite widespread, ranging from unconscious and unwitting naivete to the conscious and willful betrayal of scientific trust.”

Studies suggest that a majority of papers are retracted due to deliberate falsification by researchers, rather than simple mistakes.

Science fetishists have long ignored the fundamental flaw in the system of modern science; it is only as reliable as the moral character of the scientists involved permits. Of course, this could be seen as a positive; more science fiction is being published than ever before!

Thoughts on the Hugo nomination

  1. SF fandom has no grasp of how small it is. The repeated accusations of cheating by purchasing multiple memberships and ballot-stuffing demonstrate that the accusers haven’t even bothered to look at the Feedburner icon or click on the Sitemeter icon here. Last year it took only 38 votes to make it onto the Best Novelette ballot; the top vote-getting nominee had all of 89 votes. Meanwhile, the vast quantity of upset and offended goodthinkers visiting here via do-not-link to gawk at the evidence of my being “the antithesis of all that is good and decent” led to a gargantuan 6.9 percent increase in traffic here, which is to say, 758 additional Sitemeter visits out of nearly 12,000.
  2. It’s a lot harder to win a Hugo than to get nominated. To win, one needs about 400 votes under normal circumstances. But since the votes are ranked in order of preference and there is an active campaign to vote No Award above “Opera Vita Aeterna”, I’d need more than that. Translation: thanks very much for all the expressions of support, but don’t buy a membership to vote for me unless you’re also planning to get involved on the nomination end next year. If you want to express your support, I’d much rather you spend that money on Castalia House books by John, Tom, and Rolf. For $40 you can buy most of our English catalog… some of it directly from the store we are opening later today.
  3. Win or lose the awards, Sad Puppies has served its purpose. The purpose of Sad Puppies, as Larry repeatedly explained, was three-fold. First, to test if the award process was fraudulent or not. To the credit of the LonCon people, we have learned it was not. Second, to prove that the awards are a mere popularity contest, contra the insistence of those who have repeatedly asserted they are evidence of literary quality and the intrinsic superiority of the nominated works. We have shown that it is. And third, to prove that the SF/F Right is more popular in the genre than the gatekeepers have insisted. We have demonstrated that to be the case.
  4. People hate me a lot more than they hate Larry Correia. This is very troubling to the International Lord of Hate. I suspected as much, but I thought the ratio would be more like 65/35 than 90/10. That being said, I have little doubt that Larry will manage to level out that ratio somewhat by this time next year.
  5. SF progressives believe they are qualified to police race and ethnicity. Many of them can’t seem to wrap their heads around the fact that I am a Person of Color by every definition. It’s amusing that they think my labeling a lying African-American woman a “half-savage” proves my racism, but them calling a pair of Hispanic men all sorts of names, including “savage” and “uncivilized”, somehow proves they are not racist. 
  6. If they are unhappy now, they are really going to be unhappy in the future. I paid no attention to the nominations last year. The Dread Ilk barely paid any attention to the nominations this year. As we’ve previously seen to be the case, the progressives really don’t understand that their frantic attempts to belittle and disqualify us only makes us stronger, harder, and more numerous.
  7. Many Hugo voters have declared they will not read the novelette and it
    is already apparent that some of those who read “Opera Vita Aeterna”
    will not do so honestly. For example, one “reviewer” wrote: “I skip a little tedious adolescent Theology talk in Act Two, Plus a
    Silly Epilogue that I think VD thinks is Dramatic…. His point (I think) is that God Is Real. And So R Demons.
    The plot is pointless. The writing is dull and bad.”      But anyone
    who has read the story knows that the plot is far from pointless. And
    anyone who is sufficiently educated will recognize that the theology is
    not “adolescent”, it is paraphrased Thomas Aquinas from the Summa Theologica.
  8. I appreciate the nomination. It’s nice to receive the recognition and it is certainly useful in much the same way as my Mensa membership. But, having recently edited two books by a much superior writer who should, by any reasonable standard, already have several Hugo wins under his belt, it’s hard to view the process as anything but seriously flawed.
  9. The Wheel of Time is dreadful. It has always been dreadful, in sum and in part. I find it mildly amazing that people are more offended about my novelette being nominated than that gigantic insult to literature.
  10. The title of the novelette is no more Latin than “Vox Popoli”. It’s a blend of Italian and Latin.
  11. A man is defined by his enemies as well as by his friends. I feel extraordinarily fortunate indeed to have had this opportunity to observe the quality of both. It is not at all a bad thing to be personally disliked and viewed as “a contemptible piece of shit” by the likes of Mr. Scalzi and company. It is the approval of the wormtongues that a man should fear, not their hatred.

Opera Vita Aeterna

I’ve been informed that it is customary to make Hugo-nominated works freely available to the public during the voting stage, so here is “OPERA VITA AETERNA”, a nominee for the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Novelette. Click on the title link or on the cover image to download the free epub. If you prefer Kindle format, there is also a mobi version available for download.

There has been a fair amount of discussion of the novelette online, almost entirely by people who not only have not read it, but know absolutely nothing about it. I would suggest that anyone who is genuinely interested in excellence in SF/F literature simply read the work and judge it on its merits. And for those who are more interested in thought-policing the genre, they can simply do as some have suggested, “rank a nominated work below “No Award””, and thereby provide us with an accurate measure of the degree to which SF/F fandom is influenced by the politically correct Left.

From the Amazon reviews of THE LAST WITCHKING:

  • The masterpiece of the trio, though, is Opera Vita Aeterna. At its core
    is the dialogue between an aging monk and a long-lived elven sorcerer in
    unwitting search of his own salvation. Day again employs both allegory
    and tremendous subtlety as the more experienced and intelligent elf is
    perplexed and impressed by the power of eternal truth. Aeterna is both
    clever and touching and might be the best story Day has produced to
    date. 
  • Opera Vita Aeterna: This is a brilliant, five-star story, and the
    best in the book, in my opinion. For me to rate a story as brilliant,
    it must be beautifully written, have complex characters, and leave me
    with a note of lingering intangibility. The elf Bessarias is on a quest
    for God, whom he doesn’t necessarily find. Through his searching,
    though, he leaves an important legacy behind him. There lies the
    intangibility–no personal, cathartic moment, but, instead, a glimpse of
    something far greater.
  • Opera Vita Aeterna is a deeply catholic work of the height of beauty,
    the power of events long after the events are forgotten, and the
    complexity and density of the Christian model of hope. Its most elegant
    turn is its ability to transform a deft and intriguing story about a
    strange sorcerer’s encounter with a rural cloister into a meditation on
    the nature of eternity. It is rare to describe a story as both
    restrained and florid, but its details are so rich and believable and
    its voice is so even. Read it, then read it again after reading Summa
    Elvetica.
  • All too brief, it balances the darkness of this book’s title story with a
    reminder that though darkness may engulf the world and seem to triumph,
    within the light there is a power that endures, which darkness cannot
    comprehend. All together, The Last Witchking is a significant offering by Vox, one I am still digesting and will read again.

The testimony of John C. Wright

It has been one of the great privileges of my life to make the professional acquaintance of John C. Wright, whom I firmly believe to be the greatest living SF writer. But Mr. Wright is more more than a mere teller of tales like AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND and THE GOLDEN AGE, he is also a formidable fidei defensor. Six years ago today, he was baptized into the Church in the name of Jesus Christ. This is his testimony, as it was recounted on Free Republic and then Strange Notions. It seems appropriate to post it here today.

My conversion was in two parts: a natural part and a supernatural part. Here is the natural part: first, over a period of two years my hatred toward Christianity eroded due to my philosophical inquiries.

Rest assured, I take the logical process of philosophy very seriously, and I am impatient with anyone who is not a rigorous and trained thinker. Reason is the tool men use to determine if their statements about reality are valid: there is no other. Those who do not or cannot reason are little better than slaves, because their lives are controlled by the ideas of other men, ideas they have not examined.

To my surprise and alarm, I found that, step by step, logic drove me to conclusions no modern philosophy shared, but only this ancient and (as I saw it then) corrupt and superstitious foolery called the Church. Each time I followed the argument fearlessly where it lead, it kept leading me, one remorseless rational step at a time, to a position the Church had been maintaining for more than a thousand years. That haunted me.

Second, I began to notice how shallow, either simply optimistic or simply pessimistic, other philosophies and views of life were.

The public conduct of my fellow atheists was so lacking in sobriety and gravity that I began to wonder why, if we atheists had a hammerlock on truth, so much of what we said was pointless or naive. I remember listening to a fellow atheist telling me how wonderful the world would be once religion was swept into the dustbin of history, and I realized the chap knew nothing about history. If atheism solved all human woe, then the Soviet Union would have been an empire of joy and dancing bunnies, instead of the land of corpses.

I would listen to my fellow atheists, and they would sound as innocent of any notion of what real human life was like as the Man from Mars who has never met human beings or even heard clear rumors of them. Then I would read something written by Christian men of letters, Tolkien, Lewis, or G.K. Chesterton, and see a solid understanding of the joys and woes of human life. They were mature men.

I would look at the rigorous logic of St. Thomas Aquinas, the complexity and thoroughness of his reasoning, and compare that to the scattered and mentally incoherent sentimentality of some poseur like Nietzsche or Sartre. I can tell the difference between a rigorous argument and shrill psychological flatulence. I can see the difference between a dwarf and a giant.
My wife is a Christian and is extraordinary patient, logical, and philosophical. For years I would challenge and condemn her beliefs, battering the structure of her conclusions with every argument, analogy, and evidence I could bring to bear. I am a very argumentative man, and I am as fell and subtle as a serpent in debate. All my arts failed against her. At last I was forced to conclude that, like non-Euclidian geometry, her world-view logically followed from its axioms (although the axioms were radically mystical, and I rejected them with contempt). Her persistence compared favorably to the behavior of my fellow atheists, most of whom cannot utter any argument more mentally alert than a silly ad Hominem attack. Once again, I saw that I was confronting a mature and serious world-view, not merely a tissue of fables and superstitions.
Third, a friend of mine asked me what evidence, if any, would be sufficient to convince me that the supernatural existed. This question stumped me. My philosophy at the time excluded the contemplation of the supernatural axiomatically: by definition (my definition) even the word “super-natural” was a contradiction in terms. Logic then said that, if my conclusions were definitional, they were circular. I was assuming the conclusion of the subject matter in dispute.

Now, my philosophy at the time was as rigorous and exact as 35 years of study could make it (I started philosophy when I was seven). This meant there was no point for reasonable doubt in the foundational structure of my axioms, definitions, and common notions. This meant that, logically, even if God existed, and manifested Himself to me, my philosophy would force me to reject the evidence of my senses, and dismiss any manifestations as a coincidence, hallucination, or dream. Under this hypothetical, my philosophy would force me to an exactly wrong conclusion due to structural errors of assumption.

A philosopher (and I mean a serious and manly philosopher, not a sophomoric boy) does not use philosophy to flinch away from truth or hide from it. A philosophy composed of structural false-to-facts assumptions is insupportable.

A philosopher goes where the truth leads, and has no patience with mere emotion.

But it was impossible, logically impossible, that I should ever believe in such nonsense as to believe in the supernatural. It would be a miracle to get me to believe in miracles.

So I prayed. “Dear God, I know (because I can prove it with the certainty that a geometer can prove opposite angles are equal) that you do not exist. Nonetheless, as a scholar, I am forced to entertain the hypothetical possibility that I am mistaken. So just in case I am mistaken, please reveal yourself to me in some fashion that will prove your case. If you do not answer, I can safely assume that either you do not care whether I believe in you, or that you have no power to produce evidence to persuade me. The former argues you not beneficent, the latter not omnipotent: in either case unworthy of worship. If you do not exist, this prayer is merely words in the air, and I lose nothing but a bit of my dignity. Thanking you in advance for your kind cooperation in this matter, John Wright.”

I had a heart attack two days later. God obviously has a sense of humor as well as a sense of timing.

Now for the supernatural part.

My wife called someone from her Church, which is a denomination that practices healing through prayer. My wife read a passage from their writings, and the pain vanished. If this was a coincidence, then, by God, I could use more coincidences like that in my life.

Feeling fit, I nonetheless went to the hospital, so find out what had happened to me. The diagnosis was grave, and a quintuple bypass heart surgery was ordered. So I was in the hospital for a few days.

Those were the happiest days of my life. A sense of peace and confidence, a peace that passes all understanding, like a field of energy entered my body. I grew aware of a spiritual dimension of reality of which I had hitherto been unaware. It was like a man born blind suddenly receiving sight.

The Truth to which my lifetime as a philosopher had been devoted turned out to be a living thing. It turned and looked at me. Something from beyond the reach of time and space, more fundamental than reality, reached across the universe and broke into my soul and changed me. This was not a case of defense and prosecution laying out evidence for my reason to pick through: I was altered down to the root of my being.

It was like falling in love. If you have not been in love, I cannot explain it. If you have, you will raise a glass with me in toast.

Naturally, I was overjoyed. First, I discovered that the death sentence under which all life suffers no longer applied to me. The governor, so to speak, had phoned. Second, imagine how puffed up with pride you’d be to find out you were the son of Caesar, and all the empire would be yours. How much more, then, to find out you were the child of God?

I was also able to perform, for the first time in my life, the act which I had studied philosophy all my life to perform, which is, to put aside all fear of death. The Roman Stoics, whom I so admire, speak volumes about this philosophical fortitude. But their lessons could not teach me this virtue. The blessing of the Holy Spirit could and did impart it to me, as a gift. So the thing I’ve been seeking my whole life was now mine.

Then, just to make sure I was flooded with evidence, I received three visions like Scrooge being visited by three ghosts. I was not drugged or semiconscious, I was perfectly alert and in my right wits.

It was not a dream. I have had dreams every night of my life. I know what a dream is. It was not a hallucination. I know someone who suffers from hallucinations, and I know the signs. Those signs were not present here.

Then, just to make even more sure that I was flooded with overwhelming evidence, I had a religious experience. This is separate from the visions, and took place several days after my release from the hospital, when my health was moderately well. I was not taking any pain-killers, by the way, because I found that prayer could banish pain in moments.

During this experience, I became aware of the origin of all thought, the underlying oneness of the universe, the nature of time: the paradox of determinism and free will was resolved for me. I saw and experienced part of the workings of a mind infinitely superior to mine, a mind able to count every atom in the universe, filled with paternal love and jovial good humor. The cosmos created by the thought of this mind was as intricate as a symphony, with themes and reflections repeating themselves forward and backward through time: prophecy is the awareness that a current theme is the foreshadowing of the same theme destined to emerge with greater clarity later. A prophet is one who is in tune, so to speak, with the music of the cosmos.

The illusionary nature of pain, and the logical impossibility of death, were part of the things I was shown.

Now, as far as these experiences go, they are not unique. They are not even unusual. More people have had religious experiences than have seen the far side of the moon. Dogmas disagree, but mystics are strangely (I am tempted to say mystically) in agreement.

The things I was shown have echoes both in pagan and Christian tradition, both Eastern and Western (although, with apologies to my pagan friends, I see that Christianity is the clearest expression of these themes, and also has a logical and ethical character other religions expressions lack).

Further, the world view implied by taking this vision seriously (1) gives supernatural sanction to conclusions only painfully reached by logic (2) supports and justifies a mature rather than simplistic world-view (3) fits in with the majority traditions not merely of the West, but also, in a limited way, with the East.

As a side issue, the solution of various philosophical conundrums, like the problem of the one and the many, mind-body duality, determinism and indeterminism, and so on, is an added benefit. If you are familiar with such things, I follow the panentheist idealism of Bishop Berkeley; and, no, Mr. Johnson does not refute him merely by kicking a stone.

From that time to this, I have had prayers answered and seen miracles: each individually could be explained away as a coincidence by a skeptic, but not taken as a whole. From that time to this, I continue to be aware of the Holy Spirit within me, like feeling a heartbeat. It is a primary impression coming not through the medium of the senses: an intuitive axiom, like the knowledge of one’s own self-being.

This, then, is the final answer to your question: it would not be rational for me to doubt something of which I am aware on a primary and fundamental level.

Occam’s razor cuts out hallucination or dream as a likely explanation for my experiences. In order to fit these experiences into an atheist framework, I would have to resort to endless ad hoc explanations: this lacks the elegance of geometers and parsimony of philosophers.

I would also have to assume all the great thinkers of history were fools. While I was perfectly content to support this belief back in my atheist days, this is a flattering conceit difficult to maintain seriously.

On a pragmatic level, I am somewhat more useful to my fellow man than before, and certainly more charitable. If it is a daydream, why wake me up? My neighbors will not thank you if I stop believing in the mystical brotherhood of man.

Besides, the atheist non-god is not going to send me to non-hell for my lapse of non-faith if it should turn out that I am mistaken.

Truth and the Resurrection

There are those who say that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth is merely a story. They will claim, falsely, that the Risen Lord is derived from an agricultural myth. They will assert, wrongly, that “Easter is originally the celebration of Ishtar, the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of fertility and sex.” They will declare, contra the historical evidence, that Jesus Christ never lived or was crucified on a cross by the Roman authorities.

It is strange, is it not, that they should tell so many palpable lies in the service of that which they say to be truth?

The Apostle Paul once said that if the story of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ is not true, then we Christians are the saddest and most pathetic of all men. Everything we do, everything we believe, everything for which we hope and strive, is a lie.

It is strange, is it not, that so many observable and long-lived truths should stand so firmly on such a flimsy foundation of falsehood?

From Plato to Zelazny, men of letters have written of the purer things, that in their perfection spawn lesser shadows and imitations that reflect but an aspect of the true essence. From where does truth come, if not the Truth? And did Jesus not say that he was the Way, the Truth, and the Life?

Those who are Aristotelian devotees of reality stand by the Lesser Truth that A is A, and that A is never Not-A. But the Lesser Truth descends from, and depends upon, the Greater Truth, which is this:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Yesterday the light shone in the darkness. Today the light shines in the darkness. Tomorrow the light will shine in the darkness. And the darkness will never, ever, overcome it.

It is not a story, it is The Story, it is the oldest story, it is the true story from which all other stories flow. Light versus dark. And despite the darkness that surrounds us, that pervades us, that haunts us, the light of all mankind is winning.

That is why, all around the world this morning, there are millions of men and women who will greet each other with three simple words of hope and truth and triumph.

Christ is risen!

Hugo Awards: Best Novelette

Nominations for the 2014 Hugo Awards:

Best Novelette:

“Opera Vita Aeterna” by Vox Day
“The Exchange Officers” by Brad Torgersen
“The Lady Astronaut of Mars” by Mary Robinette Kowal
“The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” by Ted Chiang
“The Waiting Stars” by Aliette de Bodard

Congratulations to Larry Correia, who was nominated for Warbound, and to Brad Torgersen, who was not only nominated for “The Exchange Officers”, but also for “The Chaplain’s Legacy”. And, of course, to Toni Weisskopf.

The end of debate

Forget Aristotle’s distinction between dialectic and rhetoric. The devolution of formal debate means that it doesn’t even rise to the level of rhetoric any longer.

It used to be that if you went to a college-level debate tournament, the students you’d see would be bookish future lawyers from elite universities, most of them white. In matching navy blazers, they’d recite academic arguments for and against various government policies. It was tame, predictable, and, frankly, boring.

No more.

These days, an increasingly diverse group of participants has transformed debate competitions, mounting challenges to traditional form and content by incorporating personal experience, performance, and radical politics. These “alternative-style” debaters have achieved success, too, taking top honors at national collegiate tournaments over the past few years.

But this transformation has also sparked a difficult, often painful controversy for a community that prides itself on handling volatile topics. 

On March 24, 2014 at the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) Championships at Indiana University, two Towson University students, Ameena Ruffin and Korey Johnson, became the first African-American women to win a national college debate tournament, for which the resolution asked whether the U.S. president’s war powers should be restricted. Rather than address the resolution straight on, Ruffin and Johnson, along with other teams of African-Americans, attacked its premise. The more pressing issue, they argued, is how the U.S. government is at war with poor black communities.

In the final round, Ruffin and Johnson squared off against Rashid Campbell and George Lee from the University of Oklahoma, two highly accomplished African-American debaters with distinctive dreadlocks and dashikis. Over four hours, the two teams engaged in a heated discussion of concepts like “nigga authenticity” and performed hip-hop and spoken-word poetry in the traditional timed format. At one point during Lee’s rebuttal, the clock ran out but he refused to yield the floor. “Fuck the time!” he yelled. His partner Campbell, who won the top speaker award at the National Debate Tournament two weeks later, had been unfairly targeted by the police at the debate venue just days before, and cited this personal trauma as evidence for his case against the government’s treatment of poor African-Americans.

Further evidence in support of my time-to-civilization hypothesis. At this point, the debate competitions may as well bring in gorillas from the zoo and distribute the “debate” awards on the basis of which primate was able to throw the most fecal matter. That “alternative-style” of debate is no less dialectically legitimate than hip-hop, spoken-word poetry, and appeals to “nigga authenticity”.

If I were a college student these days, I would show up for a debate wearing a dress and smeared red lipstick, and no matter what the resolution was, start rapping very passionately about how the more pressing issue was how the U.S. government refused to let me marry a silverback gorilla. Then I’d turn it over to my partner, Baraka from the National Zoo, who would take a massive dump on the stage before chucking large handfuls of it at the other competitors, hooting and howling all the while.

If logic is white privilege, so too is civilization. I suppose we can look forward to this alternative style of  debate percolating into the legal system:

“Y’ownah, I object that my client ain’t guilty and shit!”

“You can’t object to that.”

“Shut yo mouth, you ain’t no AUTHENTICATED nigga. Uncah Tom!”

“Excuse me?”

“FREE MAH PEOPLE! NO JUSTISS NO PEACE!”

From sign language to the foundation of science fiction to formal debate, it’s all inexplicable magic to the half-savages. They can see the forms, they can even mimic them to a certain extent, but they simply do not understand the core functions and rationales underlying the observable actions. And they don’t have any chance whatsoever of sustaining a modern technological society. None.

This may be distasteful news to you. But no matter what they say, A is A. A will ALWAYS be A. A is NEVER Not-A. It never will be.