Gene Wolfe's Politics

David Stockhoff · 01 Apr 2009, 11:08 · from 2009-April.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: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Wed, 01 Apr 2009 07:08:42 -0400
Subject: (urth) Gene Wolfe's Politics
In-Reply-To: <mailman.1321.1238555237.12296.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
References: <mailman.1321.1238555237.12296.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <49D34B3A.6010709 at verizon.net>

I knew you would blatantly, simplemindedly, and yet disingenuously misinterpret. I was pointing out the "and everything pertaining thereunto." Vast black budgets, aggressive state secrecy, waste, corruption, influence-peddling, revolving doors, oligarchy, torture, pointless and illegal war. That's the main purpose of government? Even I don't think you believe that.

The ONLY purpose of government, obviously, is to spend taxes as the people (and their corporate overlords) see fit. Period. This alone has nearly infinite meanings. It means "regulate interstate commerce," for example. (Boring, I know.)

Your positioning of the military as the "main" purpose of government illustrates your infantile, pseudomasculine, and gun-obsessed worldview. Even Wolfe would see right through it.

------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:37:23 -0400 (EDT)
From: brunians at brunians.org
Subject: Re: (urth) Gene Wolfe's Politics
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <14905.67.142.130.28.1238535443.squirrel at brunians.org>
Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1

If you would have peace, prepare for war.

What do you think the main purpose of government is, David, if not to
maintain the military?

---
avast! Antivirus: Outbound message clean.
Virus Database (VPS): 090331-0, 03/31/2009
Tested on: 4/1/2009 7:08:44 AM
avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2009 ALWIL Software.
http://www.avast.com

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