Re: CONFESSIONS OF A CHEERFUL LIBERTARIAN By David Brin

From: Nicq MacDonald (namacdonald@stthomas.edu)
Date: Fri Dec 01 2000 - 17:14:45 MST


> Yes, anyone who has read either uplift trilogy will see how he blithely
> accepts ideas of government enforced eugenics programs applied to all
> members of a species, should see how he is no libertarian, although he
> did redeem a bit in the second trilogy (Brightness Reef, Infinity's
> Shore, Heaven's Reach) by depicting a society of 'sooners' of several
> species illegally colonizing a fallow world, and sympathized with the
> view of a more anarchical society and against dogma, fascism, and force.
> He is smarmily two faced about things, and is right to understand that
> 'wishywashy' individuals like himself are no good.

I still don't see what's wrong with presenting and supporting two different
sides of an issue and being able to either empathize with or oppose both. I
think that's a sign of a flexible mind and a skilled artist- not being "two
faced" (which we all are, whether we admit it or not).

-Nicq MacDonald

"We do progress, but how? Not by the tinkering of the meliorist; not by the
crushing of initiative; not by laws and regulations which hamstring the
racehorse, and handcuff the boxer; but by the innovations of the eccentric,
by the phantasies of the hashish-dreamer of philosophy, by the aspirations
of the idealist to the impossible, by the imagination of the revolutionary,
by the perilous adventure of the pioneer. Progress is by leaps and bounds,
by breaking from custom, by working on untried experiments; in short, by the
follies and crimes of men of genius, only recognizable as wisdom and virtue
after they have been tortured to death, and their murderers reap gloatingly
the harvest of the seeds they sowed at midnight." -Aleister Crowley, "On
Original Sin"



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