LorumIpsumCallum

The problems with this attack on Tolkien are numerous. But one thing that is critical is that it is perhaps one of the two or three most important books defining Western civilization in the last two centuries or more. Maybe the most. At a time when we are in an all-hands-on-deck struggle to salvage, shore up, and rehabilitate European civilization, and defend it from rapidly looming collapse, it is sheer idiocy to attack one of the most important literary pillars defining it. Moreover, it not only helps shore up European civilization, but projects it at its best. As distant as one may ever get from Oxford, those that had read it saw in it a civilizational force that helped them understand the great struggle they faced too against the evils they stand down, from Iran to Mt. Lebanon and Bashan. The West was what it always should be: an inspiration to stand and fight for morality and home. I can’t comment on its Christian nature, but it is a foundation in my view of European civilization and literary survival. For the woke Reich to attack it is numbskulled but unfortunately increasingly expected.

If suicide is “death with dignity” then how exactly is it more dignified to be put down like a dog in some sterile room after filling out paper work than to simply do it yourself completely on your own terms without dragging any accomplices into it and asking permission ahead of time? Again, I absolutely categorically unequivocally reject the idea that any form of suicide is dignified. I am anti-suicide in any iteration whatever. I’m just pointing out that even if you accept the extraordinary premise that suicide can be more dignified than a natural death, it still wouldn’t follow that euthanasia should be legalized. Societies across the world, even back in ancient times, have believed (wrongly) in committing suicide to preserve dignity and honor. But in all of those cases — seppuku in Japan, for example — the thing that supposedly made it honorable and dignified was that you were doing it by your own hand, often in a way that was deliberately MORE painful than a natural death would have been. Ours is the first society in history to suggest that being euthanized clinically in the exact way that stray dogs are put down — and by someone else’s hand, not your own — is the dignified way to go out. It’s totally incoherent. It fails even by its own logic.

Star Trek: Enterprise actor John Billingsley on why the show was cancelled after 4 seasons: "There was so many reasons. Star Trek fatigue. There’d been a lot of overlap, Deep Space Nine had overlap with Next Gen and Voyager had overlapped with Deep Space and here we were, not quite overlapping, but right on the heels of Voyager. I think there was some fatigue, to a certain extent. While people came and watched that first episode [of Enterprise] as opposed to the current iterations of Star Trek, I don’t think at the time it was an audience that was just chomping at the bit for more. I think they were kind of almost looking for a reason to say, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna let this go for a while.’" Do you think his assessment is accurate?