Loyal to the Group of Seventeen

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 12 Jun 2002, 20:47 · from urth-v0206.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: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Subject: RE: (urth) Loyal to the Group of Seventeen
Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2002 13:47:12 -0700
Message-ID: <urth-v0206-1226 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0206/1226.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Bob King wrote...

H'mmm. Bob, your long one-line paragraphs are getting cut off. Perhaps you
can use the occasional carriage-return/line-feed?

> I see a connection with Newspeak here, but more in the sense=20
> that Wolfe is rejecting Orwell's pessimism (if I'm=20
> interpreting him correctly) about the human mind's ability to=20
> overcome totalitarianism.

Well, yeah, I agree with that, at least; Orwell's totalitarian
state was involved in a pragmatic application of the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis that suggests that our perceptions of reality are=20
defined and delimited by our language; the Group of Seventeen
seem to be doing much the same thing. Nonetheless, I hold and=20
insist that the more direct application of "Correct Thought" is
to the Mao-quoting habits of Chinese Communists, especially in
the '60s and '70s.

I wonder also if the choice of the number seventeen is=20
significant -- perhaps a sort of sideways reference to another=20
stfnal instantiation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I refer, of
course to Samuel R. Delany's novel in which a language with no
words for "I" and "You" plays a major role -- Babel-17.

--Blattid

You are trapped in that bright moment when you learned your doom

--=20

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