(urth) The Politics of Gene Wolfe
Jeff Wilson
jwilson at io.com
Sun Jul 4 09:57:52 PDT 2010
On 7/4/2010 8:39 AM, David Stockhoff wrote:
> Below.
>
> Jeff Wilson wrote:
>> On 7/4/2010 6:48 AM, David Stockhoff wrote:
>>> Of course fascism hadn't been invented yet. Nor had lynching and armed
>>> race riots.
>>
>> I'm not sure how much of this is humor or rhetoric.
> Neither. Just the facts.
I'd agree on texbook fascism then, but lynching and armed race violence
go back to biblical times. There was also no shortage of mob justice and
score-settling under the pretext of political differences before during
and after the Revolutionary War.
> Although one could argue that absent any police force or guard at all,
> either of these "rights" may suddenly become useful. And that's what SF
> is good for---exploring such situations. Zombies, for example. Don't
> take that argument to the SC, though.
That's just what they did not have; there was nothing like the modern,
full-time municipal police force for the great majority of people then.
The context is different today, thank god, but one still cannot count on
immediate police response in general, chiefly because they have finite
resources, to make demands on their time is easy, convenient, and
subsidized, and there are signficant legal, financial, and political
consequences to the police for responding and acting in way later judged
improper, but essentially none for their failure to respond in a timely
fashion or all.
To maintain thread relevance, this is the sort of lamentable systems
failure from perverse incentives so many of Wolfe's characters remark upon.
--
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
IEEE Student Chapter Blog at
< http://ieeetamut.org >
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