On Sat, 21 Sep 1996, jim bell wrote:
At 01:51 PM 9/17/96 -0700, Steve Schear wrote:
On Mon, 16 Sep 1996, Steve Schear wrote:
Someone wrote: We've all heard these arguments, but are they true? Who says so, and how can they be certain? Jim's suggestion has never, to my knowledge, been tried on a consistant, large, scale. When all conventional alternatives have been tried and fail, what have we or the starving children got to lose?
I think "Lord of the Flies" answers this question quite well.
Does it? LOTF was fiction. Can you identify a recent instance in which a non-governmental organization attempted to influence political/military events via a concerted AP?
As you understand, I really have to question anybody who would take an extraordinarily contrived work of fiction like LOTF and exrtrapolate from it as some sort of "answer" to AP. However, Unicorn is sufficiently confused that it's not surprising that this would come from him.
While it's been well over two decades since I read it, LOTF engages in the artifice of separating out a handful of near-pre-adolescent boys, who don't seem to get along particularly well while stuck on an island after being shot down during a war. (Presumably, WWII.) It's hard to understand what kind of lesson we could learn from this, particularly since one person's opinion of what might happen should such an extraordinary and unlikely event occur can't be all that more significant or valuable than another.
Or, what if such an event actually happened, and the outcome was quite different? What would that say about Golding's opinions? Or, suppose a similar event occurred, but instead of a dozen boys it was a co-ed college's students, or a few geriatrics, or a family, or a few middle-aged women, or...what? What, exactly, are we learning from one specific speculation that Golding happened to want to commit to paper?
Unfortunately (or, perhaps _fortunately_?) I don't think we're going to hear from Unicorn why he thinks one particular dime novel is any more revelational about human behavior than any other.
Your "grasp" of literature gives the list my answer without me having to say a word. I notice you chose to ignore the factual political examples I gave. Not that this surprises me. "Your" concept, of rule by terror, has thousands of examples in historical context. I simply refuse to debate the matter any longer as it is clear you are not open to reasoned debate, nor, it would seem, are you clearly possessed of reason.
Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com
-- I hate lightning - finger for public key - Vote Monarchist unicorn@schloss.li