(urth) Gene Wolfe Fans Talk Politics (Again)

[brunians at brunians.org]

>
> I'd be interested in a citation to Washington's writings
> for the quotation from his writings.  It's widely quoted
> at Google Books with various differences in wording, but
> the first hit I can find is from 1878 (in the Congressional
> Record).
>
> There are no hits on "Washington government
> force fire servant master" at yale.edu, which includes "The
> Papers of George Washington".
>
> http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/washpap.asp
>
> But that may not mean anything, as some books date
> the quotation to 1785, and the Yale collection has nothing
> that early.
>
> This site (which seems to support a right to gun
> ownership, but I just glanced at it) calls the quotation
> "bogus", along with many others attributed to the Founding
> Fathers.
>
> http://www.guncite.com/gc2ndbog.html
>
> The quotation from Josh Geller appears to go back to Max
> Weber and to be a compressed, indeed oversimplified, way
> of saying the government decides what violence is
> legitimate (including self-defense, which is legitimate
> violence not carried out by the government).

> By the way, who is Josh Geller?  (When I ask it that way,
> the initials are a little disturbing.)

Late twentieth - early twenty-first century aphorist.

"Never postulate conspiracy when stupidity will explain the known facts."

-- Geller's Second Law







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