Quid Sit?

A friend tipped me to John C. Wright’s blog, found here. Three reasons to add him to the blogroll and the bookshelf:

1. He writes pretty darned good Sci-Fi/Fantasy. I’d read The Golden Age books before I knew anything of his innate awesomeness.
2. He once declared, “If Vulcans had a church, they’d be Catholics.” Having spent the summer around process theology, I cannot tell you how true this statement is.
3. He continues to write things like this, in response to a review of one of his stories:

No comment about the story says anything about the story-writer: the reviewer here breaks the fourth wall and makes a personal comment about my ability to “get it” because that is the automatic reflex of her particular philosophy, which suffers from one weakness that crops up in every follower of it I have ever met, bar none, no matter their background or education.

Leftists all argue by Ad Hominem. Philosophy, for them, is not a search for truth, but a martial aid to augment a limp and failing self-esteem.

Leftist have to make comments uplifting themselves and putting down the opposition, because their philosophy does not allow for anything else. It is not as if they can say that there is an objective standard that they fulfill better than other men, and base their pride on that. It is not as if they can say the objective rules of logic support their conclusions.

Nope. Moderns are the children of Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, and other frauds and charlatans posing as thinkers. What the bigs frauds do is pretend everything evolves, or everything is historical necessity, or everything is willpower, or everything is subconscious impulses. All these theories are vague enough to fit any situation — what Karl Popper called ‘un-disprovable’ — but more importantly, all allowed for ad Hominem dismissal of criticism by calling character of the critic into question: as Marx did by dismissing economists as merely spokesmen for economic interests, as Hegel did by dismissing ancient writers as being undeveloped (as if truth depended on when you spoke it), as Freud did with Jung, and so on and on.

The little frauds follow the big frauds. They assume all disagreement is based on ignorance or malice, and not on differences of axioms, exposure to different experience, or the judicious people placing different weight on the testimony of contradictory witnesses.

What makes it ironic is that these modern intellectuals more often than not do not know who invented the ideas they are reciting, or have not read the original works.

Pretty much sums up why I left the vapid wasteland of leftist groupthink in a college dorm.