(urth) The Politics Of Gene Wolfe

[James Wynn]

This is an ingenious method to kill a zombie thread ("Appearance of 
Inire"): reintroduce an old zombie thread that has already resurrected 
itself 3 times previously to flush it away. Presumably, the list has 
built up enough antibodies to fight off "The Politics of Gene Wolfe" in 
short order and then both zombie threads are gone. We shall call this 
the Zombie Colonic.

u+16b9

On 7/2/2010 6:50 AM, Gwern Branwen wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 11:20 AM,<brunians at brunians.org>  wrote:
>    
>>>> I guess I'm a moderate conservative or libertarian on the issue.
>>>> I think the Second Amendment creates an individual right and
>>>> that that individual right clearly isn't meant to cover every
>>>> conceivable form of weapon.
>>>>          
>>      
>>> I would argue that the intent was self-evidently for it to cover every
>>> conceivable type of weapon.
>>>        
>> Indeed, the most powerful weapons available in the eighteenth century were
>> warships, many of which were privately owned, as was much artillery in the
>> sense of crew-served weapons.
>>
>> The intent of the second amendment is to allow the citizenry to more
>> readily defend themselves against the government, when this becomes
>> necessary, as it inevitably does.
>>      
> I don't think that this is what the founders thought, but I'd bet good
> money this is what Gene thinks.
>
> I've read through most of _Starwater Strains_ now, and my initial
> belief has hardened: Gene's writings are definitely getting more
> political. In his older works like _Peace_ or _Book of the New Sun_
> (pre-90s), I didn't notice anything political, or at least,
> contemporary. But in stuff from the last 2 decades? My suspicion has
> become certainty.
>
> The stories in SS though are absolutely littered with
> libertarian/conservative plots or asides. Some stories do nothing but
> push such ideas. "Viewpoint", for example, has a dystopian government
> which claims to own all money and which suppresses all weaponry, the
> better to oppress its citizenry; the protagonist, who is a heroic
> moral wilderness survivalist fellow, spends most of the story trying
> to get a weapon. His great victory is to murder a government agent.
> "Has Anyone Seen Junie Moon?", when it's not trying to channel
> Lafferty, ends with best wishes for a rebellion that will kill 'the
> big important gangs with suits and guns' (the government). "The Fat
> Magician" ends with a rant about totalitarian governments. Another
> story seems to implies that the government is responsible for taking
> away everything interesting and handing over power to machines and
> rules ("Petting Zoo"), while in "The Dog of the Drops", the government
> seems to engineer the extinction of dogs because dogs don't pay taxes
> and don't love the government but their owners. (I'm speculating a
> little with this one because the dialect is so hard to read.) And so
> on.
>
> I haven't even finished, but it's all far more blatant than _An Evil Guest_.
>
>