Re: Niggling away at the edges (related to Homemade bullet proof vest)

Erol K. Bayburt wrote:

green_knight@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Catja Pafort) wrote:

David Friedman wrote:


First you say that your response to someone casually making a statement
that you saw as a politically offensive one would be to tell him to shut
up.

Then Erol points out that you yourself made a statement that someone saw
as politically offensive, or potentially so--a statement about an issue,
national health insurance, that is almost as common a source of
political arguments as gnu control.

There's a world of difference between talking about a subject and making
political statements about it.

As I pointed out at the time, the big problem I had with Helen's older
post is that her "until the advent of nationalized health care systems
or insurance" was a *gratuitous* political comment, unnecessary to her
point.

It seems to me as if you were overly sensitized to that point.

Her implication that there is necessarily a binary class
division between "rich" and "poor" is equally political, but much less
inflammatory here because it bears on her point and isn't just a
gratuitous aside.

It might have been somewhat simplicistic - there are more shades of grey
- but it worked in the context of the discussion.

But really, would it have killed you to *not* read a comment about
magical healers as a comment about 20th century politics? Or would it
have killed you to say 'there will be graduations' and have discussed
the context? Instead, you accused her - much to her (and my, and that of
a number of other people's) surprise - of gratituous political content.


Now I'll admit that some of the problem came from my misreading: I
parsed it as "(nationalized health) ((care systems) or (insurance))"
and Helen has said that that wasn't what she meant.

So what the hell posessed you to bring it up again?


But part of the problem was the deep and invisible-to-her assumption
that the lack of doctors for the poor was a problem due entirely to
bad political & social organization - and that the trivial solution
(which only bad people could oppose) was to put in a more humane and
enlightened political & social organization. No sir, it didn't have
anything at all to do with 19th century England simply being much
poorer in total than 20th century England.

It didn't. Because anywhere that doctors are a limited commodity, those
with the least money can least afford to pay them; regardless of
respective standards of living, unless you put a system into place that
cuts through that. (Charity is another - people who pay for doctors and
supplies and hospitals because they feel that people ought to have
access to doctors even when they can't afford to pay them; and that's a
system that goes a fair way back and is still practiced in third world
countries.)

But the point is that you're dragging the discussion away from a
hypothetical worldbuilding one - where such things could be discussed
value-free (heck, that's one of the reasons why peope *write* in other
worlds, _because_ readers don't bring assumptions to them and ideas can
explored without being judged automatically against current-world
politics. If you read your fiction in the same way as you read your
newsgroup, I would say that you reading protocoll fails.

Unfortunately, when you do it to a published book, you might get
enraged, stop engaging with ideas, and generally fail to have a good
time. When you employ the same technique in this newsgroup, you are
driving more nails into its coffin. You might not have meant it, but you
certainly have intelligence enough to have realised that your action was
likely to drive away some of the people who wished to discuss writing
SF.

Catja





--
writing blog @ http://beyond-elechan.livejournal.com
.

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