Crush on trial

maru · 02 Apr 2005, 07:16 · from 2005-April.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: marudubshinki at gmail.com (maru)
Date: Sat Apr  2 07:16:45 2005
Subject: (urth) Re: Crush on trial
In-Reply-To: <000001c53790$89b5f9b0$6401a8c0@TONYSPC>
References: <000001c53790$89b5f9b0$6401a8c0@TONYSPC>
Message-ID: <424EB736.70002 at gmail.com>

Tony Ellis wrote:

>Maru said, quoting me:
>
>  
>
>>>Severian’s murder of millions can’t be said to preserve any
>>>more unborn generations than Ozymandias’ murder of thousands.
>>>      
>>>
>> 
>>
>>The essential question is whether the Urth being able to continue 
>>supporting life will probably
>>produce more human life than the cost of making it so capable. With an 
>>open-ended universe, that
>>can almost be guaranteed.
>>    
>>
>In the post you're quoting from, the question was whether the mere
>preservation of future generations could be used to justify Severian's
>mass-murder *at all*. To which the answer is still "No".
>
>  
>
Not 'mere preservation'. To preserve something is to keep that which already
is.  The default for Urth is to dwindle and die.  Keeping that course of 
events
by not intervening (and not causing the death of untold millions yada 
yada) would
be 'mere preservation', since that course of events is what already is.  
This is not
the 'preservation' of future generations- it is *causing to come about*. 
Generation,
not preservation.
And considering the near-infinite depths of time, the extraordinary 
numbers of humans
and Green people and other un-hinted at civilizations and races, all 
that *easily* compensates
for the death of the multitudes, who frankly were doomed anyway.

>In the wider context, I don't see why the ability of the Urth to
>produce, or not to produce, a certain number of humans, should be the
>'essential' question.
>
>  
>
You don't?  Do you follow ethico-political issues at all?  What is the 
abortion
debate over if not over the *potential* of a fetus, or the debate over 
Schiavo
if not over her *potential* to one day wake up and be what we consider human
again (In which case any withholding of extaordinary medical attention would
have been murder.)?
This potential thing is ingrained in humanity by evolution, and by a 
calculus
of odds and actions- why 'women and children first'? But this is a tangent.

>'Why did so many innocents have to be sacrificed in the first place?'
>seems a more important question to me.
>  
>
Ask the Increate.  Or the Hierogrammates. Seems to be because that was 
the only way to stop
their revenge.

~Maru

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