(urth) Gene Wolfe Fans Talk Politics (Again)

[Jerry Friedman]

--- On Tue, 5/19/09, brunians at brunians.org <brunians at brunians.org> wrote:
> > 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

You sure he's not someone who modifies quotations
and puts his name after them?  That one looks like,
"You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply
result from stupidity," from Heinlein's "Logic of Empire".
Wikipedia traces the idea back to Goethe's /Werther/,
"...misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion
in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the
last two are certainly much less frequent."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_Razor

I don't think I'd trust Geller on quotations from George
Washington either.

Jerry Friedman