The Devil in a Forest

brunians at brunians.org · 19 May 2009, 20:51 · 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: brunians at brunians.org (brunians at brunians.org)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 16:51:48 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: (urth) The Devil in a Forest
In-Reply-To: <879267.44436.qm at web50710.mail.re2.yahoo.com>
References: <879267.44436.qm at web50710.mail.re2.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <1555.67.142.130.18.1242766308.squirrel at brunians.org>

Good in this context means 'well (or competently) done'.



.

> --- On Mon, 5/18/09, brunians at brunians.org <brunians at brunians.org> wrote:
>> > 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.
>>
>> Really good propaganda will have people denying that it is
>> propaganda.
>
> It depends on what you mean by "good".  I suppose you could
> say that a really "good" thief or murderer doesn't get
> caught, but I think the quotation marks are appropriate.
>
> Some propaganda helps bring about many deaths.  The
> kind that people are describing in /The Devil in a Forest/
> (which I haven't read) is presumably far less harmful, but
> I still prefer political arguments with the cards on the
> table.
>
>> I find it very interesting that many of the people who
>> disagree with
>> Wolfe's politics argue that it is not there.
>
> While a number of others know it's there but disagree
> with it.
>
>> Socialism is, when it comes
>> down to it, a process of pretending that the World is
>> different from the way it actually is.
>
> There are lots of -isms and -ities in that category.
>
> Jerry Friedman
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>

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