Posts by BenWilson
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Good luck! Congratulations on getting to this point. Well done for all the work! Not finished yet, presumably, but I expect from now on it's all going to feel really good, every task completed will be a put up, rather than a pull down. Filling holes rather than making them!
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Hard News: War, now and then, in reply to Lilith __,
Aren’t “Who’s braver?”, and “Who’s more important?” red herrings anyway?
Of course, especially since a conscientious objector is objecting to going to war on moral grounds. So the bravery is irrelevant - they really think that war is a bad thing to be involved in, brave or not. You have to be brave (in the sense of being prepared to risk your life) to rob a bank, too. Doesn't make it a good thing.
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Hard News: War, now and then, in reply to John Madden,
Don't know what a straw man is.
It's arguing against an argument that no-one made - the straw man is like a punching bag you set up to knock down. The fallacy is in then claiming to have knocked down the actual people you would seem to be arguing with.
I'm not really sure if you're arguing with anyone, but you made a comment:
Maybe it is just too cosy liberal round here.
which suggested you're arguing with people on this forum about something. Are you? I couldn't actually tell. To me, you were simply reflecting in a skeptical way about the valor around war, either in involvement or in refusal. But I'm pretty forgiving of new speakers who may have inadvertently appeared to be picking a fight. Perhaps you didn't get that calling people cozy liberals appears to be a criticism, a way of saying their views are biased or uninformed?
I want to hear more from you, new voices are usually good to get, and your perspective in this thread is interesting. I wouldn't want you to alienate yourself just because you don't know that this place has a culture of careful good manners.
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Hard News: War, now and then, in reply to Joe Wylie,
It was a horribly practical decision.
Victory over Japan in the Pacific was obviously what concerned NZ's security and sovereignty directly.
It also meant the "real" end to the war, so of course it was celebrated massively. It meant troops coming home, and extraordinary amounts of sex.
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Hard News: War, now and then, in reply to Lilith __,
Thoughts?
I think it's twisting the term "pacifism" to include designing nuclear weapons that end up getting used to kill vast numbers of civilians, and threaten rival superpowers. Why bother to do that? You don't need to be conflicted about believing that violence is justified in order to secure peace, it's one of the oldest ideas about violence, practically its only justification, outside of seeking spoils.
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Hard News: War, now and then, in reply to Lilith __,
Wow. Nice to know what God's purposes are.
I read that as being deliberately cagey. He was neither confirming nor denying whether he would pray for England, but saying that England, if they won, would thus be fulfilling God's Purpose (since not fulfilling it is basically impossible when you believe in an all-powerful and benevolent deity), so they'd probably be indirectly getting his prayers.
It was a good answer to a stupid question.
Having seen the occasional UK vet in a chair minus any limbs, I suspect they might swap 5 or 6 years in the can to get those pieces back. Maybe it is just too cosy liberal round here.
In hindsight, that's probably true, but that doesn't detract from the valor of actual objectors. It's not the way a coward would dodge the draft - there were far easier ones. Join an essential industry. Leave the country. Shoot yourself in the leg. Act insane. Sign up early in some non-combatant capacity, like catering. Go AWOL, or desert outright. Hide out in the bush. Disobey orders that involve actually going into combat, hiding behind incompetence.
the faint hint that this was real heroism begins to grate these days.
I think your real objection is the suggestion that fighting wasn't heroism? If so, it's a straw man, although there may be some people who would think that, no one has actually said it.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Emma Hart,
That said, it's still important to pay more attention to people's intentions, to what they mean, than the words they use to say it.
Glad to hear I'm not the only one to believe this.
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Good luck with trying to change the usage of the deepest core of the language. I'd like to see andor and xor used more, but it's just not catching on.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Deborah,
The social control in The Dispossesed is extraordinary.
Yes, one of the characters makes a stage play which violates their strongest taboo, the mingling of people from the two planets, in which an Urrasti comes to Anarres and behaves like a "propertarian", even trying to procure sex for money (which the Anarresti don't use). The audience is not amused and tear shreds off him in a big village meeting, so bitterly that he ends up killing himself.
A lot of the book is devoted to showing how it is that people would be able to feel such a strong sense of social responsibility in the absence of any official compulsion. The ideas of their society are drilled in from the very youngest of ages, one scene has Shevek being lectured before he can even walk, because he gets angry at another baby crowding into a sunny patch he is sitting in. In another, he spontaneously, at a very young age, solves a very difficult puzzle in physics, and is berated for explaining this to a group in his classroom because it is showing off that he has knowledge that others don't, and is thus being immature. Which is a poignant foreshadowing of his whole life, how his extremely unusual talent, which in Urrasti society would have made him respected and famous, led in Annaresti society to him feeling isolated and being treated with contempt and fear.
One character (I can't recall his name, I'm sorry) puts in for a job reassignment, and the only one that is offered is some position doing manual work for which he is completely unsuited, and yet he takes it, because no one ever refuses a job allocation.
This happens to Shevek constantly. He is a "good Anarresti", ironically, has so totally internalized their morals that he never shirks on tilling the fields or other menial tasks, despite the fact that he's clearly meant to be the Einstein of their planetary system. But I think LeGuin intended for it to be clear that his acceptance of his societies mores is a big part of what enables his deepest creativity too, that in some way it led to a freedom in his mind that had constrained all of the foreign physicists, that his struggles to study and develop his highly abstract and apparently (to his society) useless physics flowed from his own interpretation of anarchism and the right to self determination that transcended, everyone, even including his own transcendent society. I was instantly reminded of LeGuin when I first discovered Paul Feyerabend's "Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge". Did one inspire the other? If so, which?
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...continued.
Obviously this was a work of fiction, but it's an interesting thought experiment, well worth a read. I came away from reading it thinking "yes, there's some good and bad things about utopias, aren't there?". It's actually pretty hard to conceptualize being attracted to something that you aren't attracted to already.
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