The Devil in a Forest

David Duffy · 19 May 2009, 04:52 · from 2009-May.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: David.Duffy at qimr.edu.au (David Duffy)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 14:52:42 +1000 (EST)
Subject: (urth) The Devil in a Forest
In-Reply-To: <5899990178F74F96B5591E3C25EA8D3B@eMachinePC>
References: <mailman.1.1242680926.23508.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net><4A11D356.1080203 at verizon.net>
	<5899990178F74F96B5591E3C25EA8D3B@eMachinePC>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0905191449410.22143 at orpheus.qimr.edu.au>

On Mon, 18 May 2009, James Wynn wrote:

> This is answer that socialist economics gives to libertarian/liberal 
> economics. The libertarian/liberal position is that governments do all sorts 
> of things that are not ethical...
>
> Wolfe is making the L/L argument.
>
> I'm grateful for this discussion, because when I read tDiaF I thought it was 
> just a quaint, but obvious, morality tale. Now, I realize that it isn't so 
> "on the nose" at all. It's actually a quite exquisite bit of propaganda 
> (unlike say "Atlas Shrugged"). Truly masterful propaganda is one where the 
> audience doesn't realize it's being propagandized.
>
In the same way, I think, that _Short Sun_ shows the shortcomings of the
libertarian/propertarian/frontier mentality, in the absence of some 
higher ethic at work behind it.

David Duffy.

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