Gene Wolfe Fans Talk Politics (Again)

David Stockhoff · 19 May 2009, 21:21 · 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: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 17:21:26 -0400
Subject: (urth) Gene Wolfe Fans Talk Politics (Again)
In-Reply-To: <mailman.69095.1242766065.12296.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
References: <mailman.69095.1242766065.12296.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <4A1322D6.8060003 at verizon.net>

The key term here is not "voluntary" and it's not "consensual." It's "consent"---as in "the consent of the governed." It's nothing like what you are thinking of.

Google that phrase. Some kinds of education must be self-motivated.

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

Message: 5
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 16:43:50 -0400 (EDT)
From: brunians at brunians.org
Subject: Re: (urth) Gene Wolfe Fans Talk Politics (Again)
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <10067.67.142.130.18.1242765830.squirrel at brunians.org>
Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1

Let me explain what I mean by consensual and non-consensual:

The government wants you to pay taxes, which they are going to spend on
whatever. You or I may approve of everything they spend it on, or we may
approve of some of it, or we may approve of none of it. No matter: we must
pay. If we do not, legal processes will be begun against us, and we may be
forced to pay fines, or sent to prison or even (if we are extremely
unlucky) killed.

What I would like you (or someone) to explain to me is how this process
can be described as consensual. It seems to me much more like extortion by
threat of violence.

I think that there are legitimate uses for tax money: you mention some of
them (I don't think I would include public education among them, I don't
think that the government should be involved too much in educating
people), which are important enough that people should be forced to pay
for them. I think that this practice should be kept to a strict minimum,
and I would never distort reality to the extent that I would describe it
as voluntary. It is an exercise of force.

Perhaps the word voluntary is better than consensual.

It is good and public spirited of you to pay your taxes voluntarily. But
it's not like you really have an option.

---
avast! Antivirus: Outbound message clean.
Virus Database (VPS): 090519-0, 05/19/2009
Tested on: 5/19/2009 5:21:28 PM
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