TBOTSS and colonialism

Andy Robertson · 01 Jun 2002, 19:37 · from urth-v0205.mbox · original

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: "Andy Robertson" <andywrobertson at clara.co.uk>
Subject: Re: (urth) TBOTSS and colonialism
Date: Sat, 1 Jun 2002 20:37:45 +0100
Message-ID: <urth-v0205-1077 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0205/1077.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

----- Original Message -----
From: "Adam Stephanides" <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
> > From: "Adam Stephanides" <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
> >>
> >> And depicting the relations between groups in terms of
> >> "evolutionary rivalry and conflict" to the death is also dangerous,
given
> >> this century's history.
 >
> > A good writer writes about reality, not avoiding what is "dangerous".
>
> To be sure.  I don't regard that view of relations between groups to be
> "reality," though.

It is not the character of Reality to be other than Dangerous.

Rather, the Real presents us with a series of Tests, each more unbearable
than the one before.

Wolfe is writing about one of these Tests.

Like all real tests, it is a moral one.

It is the question of how you behave when you have the ability  -  thrust
upon you by the horribly cruel machinery of Evolution - to create a living
soul within the body of a bloodsucking, predatory, reptile:  to create a
thing that then screams and weeps sincere psychic tears as it **continues**
to prey on and kill human beings.

It is not a test with an easy answer.

It seems to me that you are hopelessly thrall to the comfortable Star Trek
view of the universe, and the Other within it.

    hartshorn

--=20

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