{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2763",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 2763,
    "subject": "Shottered scats",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2001-08-05T15:45:36+00:00",
    "last": "2001-08-05T15:45:36+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0030-0608@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Tony Ellis",
        "address": "littlesense at necronomicon.co.uk"
      },
      "date": "2001-08-05T15:45:36+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Shottered scats",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:\nBut if some time-traveller were to strangle Hitler in his\ncrib, I'm willing to bet the Holocaust would turn out not to have\nhappened, at least not in the form and to the extent it actually\ndid."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "If there's one thing recent conflicts in Africa and Bosnia have taught us,\nit's that there is no shortage of people who think that the one thing their\ncountry needs is a good ethnic cleansing.\n\nThe historical momentum which ensured that, when the Great Depression\nstruck, the unemployed, humiliated German masses would follow someone who\noffered them an international Jewish-Communist conspiracy to unite against,\nwas hundreds, thousands, of years old. There for the taking.\n\nIn 1929 Hitler just happened to be in the right place at the right time.\nThere was an emergency backup anti-Semite standing on a chair and shouting\nin every second beer hall in the Weimar Republic. Kill Adolf, and it would\nbe rather surprising if one of these other men -didn't- rise to power.\n\nQuoting you, quoting me, quoting Michael Straight:"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 3,
          "text": "All of human history and society would be very, very, very\ndifferent if men died immediately after having intercourse."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 2,
          "text": "Different, certainly. \"Very, very, very different\" is conjecture."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Ummmm... no. For example, the following things are absolutely\ntrue of such a world:"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "<snip>\n...Long list of changes...\n</snip>"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Possibly there would be some \"cancellation,\" but given the\nabsolute differences that _must_ follow from the premise, I\ncan't see history simply healing over."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Neither can I. Neither can Wolfe. That's why he shows us a world plainly\ndifferent to our own. Hospitals for the mentally ill are more enlightened.\nTechnology, in some respects, is more advanced. Nobody said anything about\nhistory \"simply healing over\", only of it managing to arrive at a similar\n1988 to our own -through different means-."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Michael Straight wrote:\nThis is actually a radically sceptical view of history: you're saying that\nwe can never know anything about the causes of events."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Not even I'm quite that sceptical, Michael :-). I'm merely saying that we\ncan't know -everything- about the causes of events. Would the Roman legion\nhave failed to conquer the ancient world without the innovations of Marius,\nor would some other old campaigner have come up with the same innovations\ntwo weeks later, because the time was right for them to be discovered?"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Alga wrote:\nThe new NYRSF presents, from one Henry Wessells, citing a biography of\nMervyn Peake by G. Peter Winnington, the fact that Peake (1911-1968)\nspent nine of his first eleven years in China: \"Parallels between the\nearly life of the Boy-Emperor and Titus Groan as recounted in the first\ntwo of Mervyn's novels are numerous and striking.\""
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Intriguingly, Wessells has singled out what is only a passing thought in\nWinnington's biography, dispensed with in one paragraph and never touched on\nagain. For what it's worth, I quite agree that the TV adaption wasn't nearly\nweird enough, but I think primarily it just wasn't -long- enough."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}