Wolfe at Dragon*Con (This has to do with Politics)

James Wynn · 08 Sep 2009, 21:59 · from 2009-September.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: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2009 16:59:59 -0500
Subject: (urth) Wolfe at Dragon*Con (This has to do with Politics)
Message-ID: <8D2519035E2A4B5E91D7A0DB3AAF96AC@usa513ef87f031>

I just remembered this.

Somehow a questioner addressed Wolfe's politics.
This is what he said:

"The form of government I favor is Democracy, which means "Rule by the 
People".
America does not have a democracy. It has a Republic. That means that every 
so often we elect people to rule over us. And once we have, you can believe 
they *know* it.
We are endanger, I think, of becoming eventually ruled by the Supreme Court 
which would be the worst of all governments. That is essentially the sort of 
government the Spartans had. They elected Ephors to rule over them. "Ephor" 
means judges. The Spartans made the Nazis look like boy scouts."

<Then he described the yearly declaration of war against the Helots declared 
by the ephors. And described the plot against the Helots that helped in the 
war against Persia. (See Herodutos' "History" and Wolfe's "Soldier of 
Arete".)  He also went into the fact that Spartan women were freer than 
those of any other Greeks and explained why.>

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