Wall of Nessus

Jeff Wilson · 15 Jun 2010, 08:47 · from 2010-June.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: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2010 03:47:43 -0500
Subject: (urth) Wall of Nessus
In-Reply-To: <475217.14200.qm at web50703.mail.re2.yahoo.com>
References: <000901cb080c$a24bd6a0$3dd14a0c@rclackey>	<AANLkTimNF_7phiZuvwCMYZObOBCVpmbPVbROd7kc1Hq4 at mail.gmail.com>	<006601cb0879$4ddd39c0$59cc4a0c@rclackey>	<AANLkTilLT4407kUNfZU4wY0V73RjJAk-UllkDYkyuiHT at mail.gmail.com>	<00b101cb0b91$16331100$bacf4a0c@rclackey>	<C04E9C844995425CA3A67B647E6007B8@jill>	<4C16302C.1070907 at gmail.com>
	<4C1647D4.3040005 at io.com>	<AANLkTimvjEwAgmG5PVB7l4KtCz1WnJWLH5Lyl2wQfoJU at mail.gmail.com>	<4C16F552.8070600 at io.com>
	<475217.14200.qm at web50703.mail.re2.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <4C173E2F.1010008 at io.com>

On 6/14/2010 11:39 PM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
> A great image, but if you're going to overhunt waterfowl, shooting them when they're flying low or walking or swimming is a lot easier.
>
> I'm no expert, but I think that in our universe, aristocrats have been in the forefront of conservation of the species they like to hunt.  It's the species that the poor can kill for food or money, or the ones people see as threats (e.g., to livestock), that get hunted to extinction.

That's at odds with Wolfe's worldiews and other stories from the period, 
like "Beautyland". He considered/considers non-Christian societies to be 
tainted and given to cruelty, and we know exultant debutantes like their 
kicks vicious. They already have to keep the flyers tethered way up 
there, what fun to throw some bread out the hatch until you've got lots 
of the buggers waiting to be zapped.

Then again , there are some number of hungry folk who come into 
possession of energy weapons in the course of any number of wars, and 
their line-of-sight range may indeed make high flight a survival liability.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
IEEE Student Chapter Blog at
< http://ieeetamut.org >

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