{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/3131",
    "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": 3131,
    "subject": "Critically rejecting the uncritical acceptance of criticism",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2002-04-08T20:36:11+00:00",
    "last": "2002-04-08T20:36:11+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0204-561@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes",
        "address": "ddanehy at siebel.com"
      },
      "date": "2002-04-08T20:36:11+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Critically rejecting the uncritical acceptance of criticism",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Marc (and, yes, somehow the latin form _does_ suggest itself) asks:"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Should we really question everything that comes from the second hand\naccount?  What about The Book of the Long Sun?  All of that could be\ntotally bogus.  But we have to believe something.  I think\nreliability should only be questioned to match an overwhelming theme\nor message."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to fit very well with the way Wolfe \ndoes things in general. He goes out of his way to show us, again and\nagain, that his narrators are in greater or lesser ways \"unreliable.\"\n\nThat said: Yes, I think that we are intended to recognize that tBotLS,\nwhile not \"totally bogus,\" is deeply informed by Horn's hero-worship \nof Silk. Horn is not consciously lying, but he is warping, wending the\ntext to serve his purposes. It is not the facts, but the truth as he\nsees it. I suspect that a careful reading of \"Short\" will inform the\nreading of \"Long\" to show some specific ways in which it _is_, shall \nwe say, bent by Horn's attitude toward Silk.\n\nThen, as Jerry F. pointed out, \"it's kind of begging the question to \nbelieve things that fit a theory and doubt things that conflict.\" One \nhas to simultaneously erect theories of what's going on based on what\naspects of the texts seem to be reliable (for example, the _general_ \noutline of the _external_ events of all the Lupiverse books seems \nlikely to be reliable), while building a model of what is reliable \nthat works with the theories of what's going on. In other words, you\nhave to work at the puzzle from both sides, not just the \"what's\nreliable\" side and not just the \"this is the theory that puts it all\ntogether\" side. You wind up building a house of cards, but if you do\nit right, an elephant can walk on it."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}