From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" 
Subject: RE: (urth) TBOTSS and colonialism
Date: Tue, 28 May 2002 12:00:54 -0700

Alga,

I apologize for miscrediting someone else's "list" to you.

> That wasn't my list and the current format of the Urth list 
> makes it too difficult to go back to find who it was. I
> insisted on the paradigm of the scorpion and the frog, that
> the inhumu cannot help his nature and thus is arguably *not*
> "evil," as a lion who kills an antelope is not evil. 

Antelopes almost certainly have a radically different opinion of 
lions than you do. For an antelope (at least one with inclinations
toward ethical philosophizing), to be killed by a lion is a great 
evil indeed, and lions are evildoers. 

> I said that I would enjoy, in a debate, taking the position that 
> they are not evil. We get to know four of them very well: Quetzal,
> Krait, Fava and Jahlee, All of them struggle against their nature.

I'm don't think that Krait and Quetzal do -- I reserve judgement on
the other two until I've reread tBotSS, as I've begun to do. But 
Quetzal does not seem to me to be struggling against anything; he
drinks beef tea because he is in a position where it will be noticed
if he never takes any nourishment at all ... but there are at least
two, and probably several more, cases of his attacking people in the
course of the BotLS.

> (I can't help thinking of Quetzal wrt the current brouhaha re
> Catholic priests, has this struck anyone else? 

Good heavens, no! but it's really an obvious comparison once you
mention it, isn't it?

> But I remind you that he tried very hard to stick to beef tea.

Okay, then: I just reread LS, and I did not see anything that made
me think he was trying to "stick to" beef tea ... it seemed to me
that the beef tea was his camouflage, as mentioend above. Can you
cite anything in the text to make "trying to stick to beef tea"
more plausible?

--Blattid


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