What's So Great About Ushas?

Jeff Wilson · 16 Jul 2008, 13:33 · from 2008-July.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2008 08:33:01 -0500
Subject: (urth) What's So Great About Ushas?
In-Reply-To: <3e1fa2e90807151812n681e157bt6e77a38ecc01c933 at mail.gmail.com>
References: <BAY103-W1816BD1A424980BA227D44D78C0 at phx.gbl>
	<3e1fa2e90807151812n681e157bt6e77a38ecc01c933 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <487DF88D.2010403 at io.com>

Paul B wrote:
> After all, humans/aliens with advanced powers like time-travel are a 
> common enough SF idea.  Usually these advanced, intertemporal 
> interlopers don't get special moral privileges.

Except for stories where they war with humanity, my experience is the 
opposite; they are almost always used as a superior moral example in 
contrast to humanity's short-term and self-centered morality. This has 
fairly recently been taken to its ultimate extreme in the second year of 
the revived "Doctor Who" when The Doctor literally and explicitly

1) declares himself the ultimate moral authority of the universe.
2) faces and defeats the devil in spiritual, intellectual, and physical 
contests.
3) condemns the Cybermen and the Daleks to fire and brimstone.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net