Wall of Nessus

Jerry Friedman · 15 Jun 2010, 18:42 · from 2010-June.txt.gz

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From: jerry_friedman at yahoo.com (Jerry Friedman)
Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2010 11:42:28 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Wall of Nessus
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>From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson 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.

I'm not talking about warm fuzzy conservation, and anyway we know many exultants like to hunt.  But as Brunians pointed out, you don't have to be a nice person to want to assure yourself and your descendants a supply of animals to kill.  That kind of conservation was pretty much the original in civilization, I think, and it's still very powerful (Ducks Unlimited, Trout Unlimited, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, etc.).

(But see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houbara_Bustard#Relation_with_humans and references therein.)
  
> Then again , there are some number of hungry folk who come into possession of energy weapons in the course of any number of wars,

There's more than one war?

> and their line-of-sight range may indeed make high flight a survival liability.

I don't think high flight would ever be a liability for waterfowl.  It just wouldn't help anywhere near as much against energy weapons as against bows.

It's not clear to me that the poor could recharge ex-military energy weapons enough to use for much hunting, or that the weapons would leave much edible meat on a bird.

Jerry Friedman

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