All is Shadow and dust

maru · 01 Apr 2005, 18:22 · from 2005-April.txt.gz

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From: marudubshinki at gmail.com (maru)
Date: Fri Apr  1 18:22:47 2005
Subject: (urth) All is Shadow and dust
In-Reply-To: <BAY102-F344293E72F6AABC17AF7C586420 at phx.gbl>
References: <BAY102-F344293E72F6AABC17AF7C586420 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <424E01F1.6020808 at gmail.com>

Chris wrote:

>
> It indicates his attitude, which allows him to do as he does. But: do 
> you think it is right or wrong for him to hold this attitude? And if 
> right, then why?
>
> What's bizarre about the stance I am taking is that by it, I don't 
> intend to discount the actual narrative of the New Sun books, or the 
> actions of Severian. Nonetheless I feel this is a not only justified 
> but INTENDED point of view, and that these opinions are not 
> contradictory. I hope I can be forgiven for this lapse (though I think 
> it is an oddity that Wolfe intended to produce).
>
> Civet

That there's some excellent questions.  To counter-query: Do you feel 
that rights and the ontological status of beings which produces
those rights should be treated as being binary, or as falling on a 
continuum (ex. apparently fundamentalist Christian theology
in which animals and the enviroment have absolutely no rights, and 
humans can exploit them freely for any purpose as much as
they like., or ex. pro-abortion people who consider the mother to have 
more rights than the fetus.).
 If you opt
for the latter, then the H's who occupy a higher, realer plane of 
reality have justification for sacrificing so many
to their inscrutable projects. if the former, then they are merely 
commiting murder, even if the ends are themselves laudable.

A corpse can change nothing, in any final accounting.  Do people trapped 
on a doomed dying planet have a chance to matter?
Do people only matter in that they matter?

~Maru

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