Gene Wolfe Fans Talk Politics (Again)

brunians at brunians.org · 19 May 2009, 20:58 · 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 16:58:40 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: (urth) Gene Wolfe Fans Talk Politics (Again)
In-Reply-To: <2D85DC7E1002442C9FFC385EBA1BB3A0@eMachinePC>
References: <mailman.68838.1242757770.12296.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net><4A1304A1.1000901 at verizon.net><13409.67.142.130.18.1242761222.squirrel at brunians.org><2BCC6FAA-905B-4A04-BFAE-817E0EDE9BD8 at io.com><D67BBCB673F4491BB8DC3A37289BD563@eMachinePC><002BF131-691F-4247-B56E-19C9D86BDA6D at io.com><50586EEE2CA14862AA7A038867E0B211@eMachinePC>
	<9ABFD473-EF4F-44FA-8C53-9A140080E64F at io.com>
	<2D85DC7E1002442C9FFC385EBA1BB3A0@eMachinePC>
Message-ID: <15038.67.142.130.18.1242766720.squirrel at brunians.org>

>> Basically: the difference between a mostly functional police force and
>> a full-on social-services safety-net state is one of degree, not  kind.
>> And I hold that both those states are preferable to Somalia.

> There are a remarkable number of false dichotomies in this short blurb.
> Welfare states engage in far more than police service. If you were to
> declare that large cities should only provide a police force, fire
> fighters, and road maintenance, you'd find yourself voting in lock-step
> with Josh. So put aside those as a justification.

> If you really believe that a "full-on social-services safety-net state" is
> important you should be happy to fund it to the same degree as your fellow
> citizens and laborers. I agree that such a system could not be compared to
> "robbing from the rich to give to the poor."

Indeed.

The Mormons have an excellent (and voluntary) social welfare system, which
they pay for themselves, by tithing. I have often thought that something
of the kind could be adapted for people who would like this kind of
security and don't want to necessarily be Mormon.




.

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