Gene Wolfe Fans Talk Politics (Again)

Adam Thornton · 19 May 2009, 21:48 · 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: adam at io.com (Adam Thornton)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 16:48:22 -0500
Subject: (urth) Gene Wolfe Fans Talk Politics (Again)
In-Reply-To: <1401.67.142.130.18.1242768973.squirrel at brunians.org>
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><10067.67.142.130.18.1242765830.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<1f7617370905191348w255b5f18ic401923d2afbf8d5 at mail.gmail.com>
	<A4856B7AE169481895905D4F0A93C320@eMachinePC>
	<80BACAF9-E5FD-4DF0-8A62-A1091E66E3D4 at io.com>
	<15887.67.142.130.18.1242767952.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<2B016B21-C372-4918-9B46-4860CE2E5DAE at io.com>
	<1401.67.142.130.18.1242768973.squirrel at brunians.org>
Message-ID: <113560E2-E507-413C-A901-BB9F39294E35 at io.com>

On May 19, 2009, at 4:36 PM, brunians at brunians.org wrote:

> I said this in a recent post. I will expand upon it.
>
> Taxation, the extortion of money from the citizens, is permissible for
> things that are necessary.

Ah.  So "extortion" can, in your world, be a good thing, or at least a  
necessary evil.

This was confusing to me.

I prefer to consider taxation neither theft nor extortion, but rather  
more like dues: something I must pay in order to retain a member in  
good standing of a club whose benefits I enjoy.  I can at any point  
choose to leave that club; if at that I insist on sticking around  
somewhere I'm still reaping its benefits, then I may find myself  
liable to experience unpleasant consequences, like being thrown in the  
pokey.

Adam

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