From: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>
Date: Sun, 22 Sep 1996 09:29:40 +0800
To: unicorn@schloss.li>
Subject: Re: Assassination Politics, was Kiddie porn on the Internet
Message-ID: <199609212321.QAA07036@mail.pacifier.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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.






Jim Bell
jimbell@pacifier.com