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Post by Optimism is my Phil-osophy on Jun 10, 2020 12:03:28 GMT -5
Glad you touched on this subject, and that is evidence that confirms my arguments. I have to admit that it was very difficult for editors to contact Lemony, as he evidently had no physical address during the time that LSTUA was being published. However, the fact is that despite the many difficulties, there is evidence that the book after capitulated and paginated reached Lemony's hands. It is likely that in order to reach Lemony's hands, this book went through several hands. I agree with it. But in reverse, it is just the opposite. Lemony knew how to contact her editors, and letters to the editor prove just that. The difficulties that Lemony faced in ensuring that ASOUE's letters and manuscripts arrived served to guarantee delivery.
Lemony Snicket's enemies are not known for tampering with information. They are known to destroy information. They are arsonists, not document forgers. If any of Lemony's manuscripts fell into the hands of their enemies, these manuscripts would most likely be destroyed. Lemony knew exactly what to do to make sure it didn't happen, and he knew how to contact the editors, and his letters prove just that. Then, after the notes made by Lemony in the book LSTUA, the available evidence indicates that the book reached the editors' hands again (almost intact, as a photograph was burned, or by someone who had touched the book before reaching Lemony or by Lemony himself). If Lemony didn't want the book to be published, he would have destroyed the book. If he did not want the book to be published, he would not have asked the editor to make changes to the book.
As for the title of the book, it is clear that this title was created before Lemony took his notes. Before that, Lemony had not given permission to publish the book. But after the book was capitulated and paginated, Lemony not only authorized it, but made manual changes to the text of the book, as indicated on the content page and as indicated in the chapter titles, and as indicated in the sticky notes he included asking for it to be changed the information about the photographs included in the work. That said, we can say that if Lemony disagreed with that note at the end of chapter 1, if it had been made by someone else as you have suggested, Lemony would have crossed it out or made it unreadable. Lemony did this in the original chapter titles. The same can be said if he had disagreed with the note at the end of the chapter.
I don't believe that these notes were made by different people. The easiest and most logical solution from my point of view is that Lemony was the only person who wrote manual things in this letter and in the annex, but I recognize that the simplest logic is not always the only possible one, nor the real one. You are the ones who believe that other people wrote things in that letter and in the attachment. What I'm showing you is that if that happened, there is still evidence that Lemony Snicket agreed with those notes, which proves that Lemony came to believe that he was kidnapped by VFD when he was a baby, in addition to the time he remembers very well when he was a small child.
Even the photograph of the baby in the crib is suggestive. The photo chosen to represent Lemony in the crib is of a baby hiding his ankle. There, in the fictional universe, the tattoo by VFD could have been when Lemony was a baby and was taken for the first time. Furthemore as Dante said very well, the notes and the photo serve precisely to contradict Lemony's letter. But, please think in 4 dimensions. Lemony wrote the original letter at the time of his wedding. That letter ended up in the hands of Professor CP. After that, for some reason, Lemony recovered that letter. Many years after writing the letter, Lemony claimed that that letter was in the personal notes he carried with him. The question is, "Why did Lemony find it important to recover that letter?" I will avoid answering my opinion so as not to be accused of fanfic, but I think you can deduce it, and you can disagree with it. I just want to highlight the passage of time, and indicate that Lemony could very well have changed the way of thinking about the content of that letter over the years. After that (after an indefinite period of time but which probably lasted a few years), a set of documents reached the editors' hands. These documents were paginated and capitulated and delivered by an unknown means to the hands of Lemony Snicket. In the meantime, Lemony may have investigated things and simply changed his mind about what actually happened in his childhood. If Lemony was not investigating anything about his childhood, why recover the letter? The photo and notes that contradict the things Lemony wrote in the letter may have been generated by Lemony himself years later!
I appreciate the explanation of what Lemony's mother said. The Portuguese version was translated "Who took this photo". I believe that the translators' understanding was similar to my understanding. It confused everything for me, and now I understand. With respect to the time when tattoos stopped being made, I can say that it is a matter of opinion. For me, after the beginning of the Great Schism, the practice of tattooing neophytes was immediately stopped by the fire-extinguishing side. And I present as evidence the fact that Beatrice and Bertrand do not have tattoos. As additional evidence I present the strange behavior shown by the waiters at Hotel D. When someone Lemony calls a villain asked for sugar, the villain was inspected on the ankles. The man did not have a tattoo and was therefore found not guilty. This is evidence that the waiters believed that only people with tattoos could be villains, as the villains came into existence during the Great Schism, and they were all members of pre-great Schism VFD, so everyone would have tattoos. They believed that if you don't have a tattoo it is because you are not from VFD or you are from the post-great Schism generation, so you are not a villain. The reasoning was wrong, as people after the great schism (like Esmé) became villains. She had no tattoo because she wore a bikini without fear of being discovered. But she still became a villain. She supported Olaf's Schism, which happened many years after the Great Schism. At the time of Olaf's Schism, the fire-extinguishing side no longer made tattoos. Another evidence that indicates that the VFD prior to the Great Schism kidnapped children without parental authorization, is the photographic record of a child (Daniel Handler) playing in a playground, along with a letter with obvious intentions of him being kidnapped without parental authorization. The original VFD kidnapped children without parental authorization, got tattoos on them and inserted them into a secret organization.
The music records that ... I don't understand why it is so hard to believe that the original VFD did that kind of thing. This kind of attitude was perhaps one of the reasons that led to the Great Schism.
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Post by Dante on Jun 12, 2020 3:55:53 GMT -5
The primary evidence that the doorman is Lemony is that he writes to 'Dear Dairy'. This appears, from Chapter 1, to be something personal to Lemony rather than a regular VFD code. There is also an explicit reference to the possibility of a long chain of transmission being invented. EDIT: And if the doorman is Lemony it follows that he did indeed know that the publishers had the papers. As for how he got hold of them again after the editing, it seems likely that DH knows where he is and was able to pass them to him. This, however, does not explain the villainous notes, which are, quite honestly, hard to explain on any hypothesis. I'm reminded of the published film script and some of the Netflix teasers, which imply that Olaf exists and is able to comment on things, at a point when as per the story he could not possibly have done so. It is also confusing that the villain's handwriting seems indistinguishable from Lemony's. EDIT TO EDIT: But also from Sir's and Gustav Sebald's. Perhaps everyone in Snicketland has the same handwriting. Interesting, though as Filene points out, the moment somebody other than Lemony uses "Dear Dairy", which is the case per Kit's note on page 75, the argument that this makes the doorman Lemony is null and void. It may even be a genuine misspelling, per page 11. In addition, this picture is blurred by the fact that the doorman writes in the same style as Olaf's "Dear Genius" henchman sent to retrieve the missing reptiles, page 145. And of course, if the introduction is part of a fabricated chain of transmission, it can no longer be used as evidence! And of course, the first twelve chapters of the book are all part of the introduction... Lemony Snicket's enemies are not known for tampering with information. They are known to destroy information. They are arsonists, not document forgers. If any of Lemony's manuscripts fell into the hands of their enemies, these manuscripts would most likely be destroyed. Lemony knew exactly what to do to make sure it didn't happen, and he knew how to contact the editors, and his letters prove just that. Then, after the notes made by Lemony in the book LSTUA, the available evidence indicates that the book reached the editors' hands again (almost intact, as a photograph was burned, or by someone who had touched the book before reaching Lemony or by Lemony himself). If Lemony didn't want the book to be published, he would have destroyed the book. If he did not want the book to be published, he would not have asked the editor to make changes to the book. This is an unusually naive view from you, Jean Lucio. Lemony's enemies falsify information on many occasions. There is the probably forged letter from R. There are the libellous articles in The Daily Punctilio, and the general major theme in the U.A. of the corruption of the press in order to disseminate false information. There is Stephano's fake letter of resignation, and Aunt Josephine's fake will. The villains falsify information all the time. Per your argument that Lemony asked the editor to make changes, we do indeed see that he asked - and that the editor did not oblige. The original chapter divisions by the publishers and their corresponding questions are still there, merely written over by Lemony. So we are permitted to hypothesise other changes Lemony may have requested but which too were not made. As it happens, I'm not certain if we're even intended to interpret the U.A. as a published book at all; the format presents it to us as a heavily-annotated bundle of papers, which agrees with the original U.S. cover representing the book as a paper package. (This equally agrees with my long-remembered but no longer provable statement that the U.A. started life as a short pamphlet but expanded considerably in the writing, though I don't cite that as evidence because I can no longer prove it to be the case.) We will set aside the question of whether or not Lemony agreed with the notes, as this cannot be proven or disproven; my own personal suspicion is that even additions and amendments are things which Lemony would regard as part of a complete file, as they, too, are evidence; and, as I discuss above, far from the only evidence he includes in the file of attempts to discredit him. Here is the crux of the matter. You propose that all notes on the Patton letter are made by Lemony himself. But, as Hermes points out, what about the exclamation of "Drat!" on page 11, accompanying Lemony's remark that he would not identify his cheesemaker associates? This is a remark which only makes sense if an enemy got their hands on this letter, hoping to use it to gain some leverage against Lemony's allies, and was frustrated. And of course, if one annotation on the letter was written by an enemy, not only the possibility but the probability is created of all other notes on the letter being written by said enemy. "Drat!" is the prompt to us to see the subsequent additions regarding the baby photo as written by an enemy. As to why Lemony didn't remove these additions - well, why should he? He's trying to assemble a complete file. Do you really think he's going to take an eraser to direct evidence of his enemies' research into his past? I did wonder if that might be the case. For what it's worth, I do not hold translator errors against you. Well, strictly speaking, we don't know for sure that none of these people had tattoos. ASoUE presents numerous ways in which a tattoo can be hidden, and although there is no evidence for laser removal or some kind of surgical alteration, we can still hypothesise the possibility if the result makes more sense. There is no evidence either in the letter on the probable young Daniel Handler or in The Little Snicket Lad that takings are conducted without permission. The mere fact of V.F.D.'s agents having to act covertly is not evidence of immoral intent, merely evidence of their secrecy. If we trust Dewey's history of V.F.D. as delivered on TPP page 179, in fact, that the organisation was originally a public one, then it becomes very unlikely indeed that historical V.F.D. ever did such a thing. Their actions became more covert over time, so it is unlikely they would transition from unpermitted taking to permitted.
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Post by Hermes on Jun 12, 2020 6:01:34 GMT -5
Good point that Kit also uses 'Dear Dairy', but that still seems to make it a Snicket family thing; and it seems unlikely that the doorman is Kit (who was probably dead when this took place, though Handler may not yet have decided this). And Jacques, who might also have used it, is certainly dead by now.
And yes, the unreliable chain of transmission means we can't be sure any part of the story is true - perhaps the editor invented it, parhaps DH did. But of course we then face the problem that DH did invent it, but that doesn't tell us what we should believe about what happened in the story. A narrative with an unreliable narrator still has to be treated as true in some respects, otherwise the narrator just collapses into the real-world author, who is of course unreliable, because they are writing fiction. So while we cannot know for certain where the chain of transmission really begins, the doorman seems to me quite a likely place.
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Post by Optimism is my Phil-osophy on Jun 12, 2020 6:29:55 GMT -5
With regard to the expression "Drat", I have to say that instead of proving that an enemy of Lemony wrote words in this letter, this just indicates that Lemony himself has changed his point of view about cheesemakers over time. After all, these cheesemakers would have been one of the main liars when it came to Lemony's childhood.
(Important note for me: although some volunteers have identified the man in the guise of a cow as Olaf's sidekick, there is nothing to suggest that Genius is indeed Olaf. It could be any enemy of Lemony ... Kit said: "Count Olaf is one of our enemies" ... But that's a topic for another Thread).
About surgical removal of tattoos: this kind of thing is not even mentioned at any time. Quite the contrary: one of the reasons why VFD stopped getting tattoos was that they realized that it makes no sense to mark someone forever with a symbol that can change their meaning. So, (my revenge?) this is fanfic. LSTUA was published as a book in the ASOUE universe, as all the evidence proves it. Including the index at the end. Another important detail: the book LSTUA was paginated by the editors. And as the introduction indicates, the pages were delivered to them little by little, and some original pages were lost. So, that note that talks about the Storyteller, is simply in the wrong place, or was inserted missing the context. Something similar happens with the Snicket File of the books: the Baudelaires have access only to page 13, and draw conclusions based on incomplete information.
Regarding the information we have about VFD in TPP. Follow what Kit and Dewey said, and see how it proves my point.
Kit said TPP chapter 2:
"A long time ago, of course, you could spot members of V.F.D. by the tattoos on their ankles. But now there are so many wicked people it is impossible to keep track of all our enemies-and all the while they are keeping track of us...
"Before the schism, there were countless places that served such purposes. Bookstores and banks, restaurants and stationery stores, cafes and laundromats, opium dens and geodesic domes-people of nobility and integrity could gather nearly everywhere."
"Those must have been wonderful times," Violet said.
"So I'm told," Kit said. "I was four years old when everything changed. Our organization shattered, and it was as if the world shattered, too, and one by one the safe places were destroyed. ... Frank will help you as best he can, but be very careful. The schism has turned many brothers into enemies. Under no circumstances should you reveal your true selves to Frank's treacherous identical brother Ernest."
So, notice an important detail. Despite not having strong memories of the events prior to the Great Schism, Kit knows that she was already a member of VFD at the age of four, and that she already existed when the Schism happened. She implies that Frank and Enerst (and later we know that Dewey too) were already alive when the Schism happened, and that they were already members of VFD when the Schism happened. In other words, Dewey, Frank and Ernest had already been kidnapped by VFD at least once when the Schism happened. And the three of them already had the tattoo when Cisma happened, because they were already members of VFD. It is easy to deduce that Kit Snicket, when she was 4 years old, also already had a tattoo. But let us turn our attention to the triplets that were separated by Schism.
Chapter 8:
"I scarcely remember it," Dewey said. "I was four years old when the schism began. I was scarcely tall enough to reach my favorite shelf in the family library-the books labeled 020. But one night, just as our parents were hanging balloons for our fifth birthday party, my brothers and I were taken." ...
"The woman who took me said that one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways. And she took me to a place high in the mountains, where she said such things would be encouraged."
Klaus opened his commonplace book and began to take furious notes. "The headquarters," Klaus said, "in the Valley of Four Drafts." "Your parents must have missed you," Violet said. "They perished that very night," Dewey said, "in a terrible fire. I don't have to tell you how badly I felt when I learned the news."
It is true that Dewey said that anyone could join the VFD, and that this organization was public. But he doesn't remember that. As he said, that is what he was told. And as he said, the organization is full of smoke and mirrors. I can say that I believe much more in music about Lemony's childhood (which was evidently written by someone who was harmed by VFD) than in the people who told Dewey about the golden years of the secret organization. Anyway, when Dewey was 5 years old, he had already been taken to VFD before that. Soon they already had tattoos. When they were 5, they were taken again by VFD. One was taken by the incendiary side of Cisma, and two of them by the fire extinguishing side. Most likely, the arsonists who took Ernest must have been the ones who set fire to the house where they were living. This explains Lemony's mother's question: "Who took this?" She wanted to know if the (adopted) children had been taken on the incendiary side or on the fire extinguishing side.
Further evidence that VFD pre-Grande Schisma kidnapped babies, is what is said by the sinister pair in TSS.
Chapter 6: "The woman with hair but no beard nodded. "Infant servants are so troublesome," she said. "I had an infant servant once – a long time ago, before the schism." "Before the schism?" "That is a long time ago. That infant must be all grown up by now." "Not necessarily," the woman said, and laughed again. (the infant probably died while he or she was still a child. Poor child ...)
With respect to counterfeiting. Lemony's enemies are known to falsify information, as Dante said. But they are not known for falsifying documents. There is evidence of them destroying documents, but not of them forging documents. There is a subtle difference. Not even in DP Eleonora falsified what Lemony had written. She tried to erase what he had written and then to deny what he had written. On the other hand, the fire-extinguishing side falsified the words in the Prufrock Prep library.
Returning to Kit. After the Great Schism, according to Dewey and Kit, there was a wave of kidnappings sponsored by both sides of the Schism. The target of the kidnappers was children who were already part of VFD. You don't have to be very creative to realize that what happened to Dewey was the same as what happened to Kit and her brothers. The fire-extinguishing side kidnapped the Snckets after the Great Schism. They already had tattoos. Probably Dewey and Kit saw themselves as members of VFD since forever, as a type of religion that when you are born your parents are already part of it. They saw their tattoos similarly to how a boy sees circumcision. It's not something that you actually stop to think about every time you go to pee. As you get older (if the criccision was done for religious reasons), you understand that that mark has meaning for your family, and that the mark was made when you were too young to remember. But it is something that you always know was there as a reminder that you are part of an organization. When looking at a tattoo, Dewey at age 5 knew he was part of VFD. Kit remembers that she, at the age of 4, was already part of VFD.
Now, returning to the possibility that an enemy has added the photo of the baby crawling. I still don't understand what you think this supposed enemy would gain from it. So what if Lemony was kidnapped when he was a baby? What do Lemony's enemies gain by reaffirming this? On the other hand, discovering the truth behind Lemony's own childhood was in Lemony's own interest. And because he recovered the letter, this is already evidence that he was investigating the matter. It makes sense to believe that Lemony, after many years, came to the conclusion that the cheesemakers lied to him, and so Lemony wrote an offense to such liars in the letter he recovered. It makes sense to believe that Lemony, in addition to retrieving the letter sohe could research his childhood, also searched and found a photo of him crawling. It makes sense to believe that Lemony associated this photo and the observation below the photo. And it makes sense to believe that Lemony, when hes was reviewing the book LSTUA already paginated and capitulated, reinforced the information regarding the photo and the note at the end of the chapter. It makes no sense to believe that LSTUA, despite having chapters, pages, indexes and a note by Lemony to Editor, was not published as a book in the ASOUE universe, when we believe that the 13 books by ASOUE (which contains most of these same characteristics) were published as books in the ASOUE universe.
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Post by Uncle Algernon on Jun 13, 2020 17:29:51 GMT -5
Despite Dewey's attempts to suggest otherwise, I would hardly dignify any of these exchanges as V.F.D. ritual "takings". They were legal adoptions with no intention of the Baudelaires undertaking any V.F.D. training whatsoever, let alone being taken to the organisation's hidden headquarters. It's all fairly arbitrary semantics, but I'd argue that the sketchiness of the Baudelaires' tribulations is precisely evidence of the decay of V.F.D.'s traditions and institutions by the time of ASoUE. Those are what the traditional apprenticeships have been reduced to. Certainly Olaf wasn't planning to make the Baudelaires into equals, but I find it quite likely that had they been more cooperative and obedient, he would have raised them into members of his troupe; and henchfolk who may or may not eventually manage to pull their own weight and take over the running of operations seems to be the only kind of new recruit the fire-starting side is interested in by then (because of course, being defined by selfishness, they are largely unconcerned with the wider legacy of V.F.D.). As for whether the Baudelaires' fire-fighting guardians were interested in giving them V.F.D training, I may be projecting the movie and show's more explicit take on the matter to some extent, but it always seemed to me like Monty at least was intending to set himself up as their V.F.D mentor, what with the spiriting-them-away-to-a-faraway-location thing. Naturally, this is all post hoc rationalization, as far as the early books are concerned. But not particularly moreso than e.g. the significance of Olaf's eye tattoo. Their actions became more covert over time, so it is unlikely they would transition from unpermitted taking to permitted. Well, that depends. Take an army. A proper, well-funded, state-recognized army is going to have the authority to conscript whoever it likes — but if the government backing it falls, and its surviving members turn resistants and are forced into the shadows, they will now only be able to bolster their ranks with willing recruits, because they no longer have the necessary impunity to forcibly conscript random people. I'm not saying I definitely believe this, or Jean's wider theory; as always I'm being a bit of a devil's advocate. But it seems plausible to me that back in the day V.F.D. was powerful enough to reply "Well, tough" to any complaints from parents whose children were forcibly recruited, whereas the modern, underground, half-vestigial V.F.D. can no longer afford to take those kinds of risks except in the direst of emergencies.
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Post by Hermes on Jun 13, 2020 18:23:46 GMT -5
While in the olden days VFD as a whole was an open organisation, the people who were to become the villains were already active within it, so it's by no means impossible that some members were taking children wihtout permission.
But I remain unclear what the point of the double kidnapping would be. Successive kidnappings by rival factions would make sense - even if this is not exactly what later happened to the Baudelaires, it bears, as Algernon says, a certain analogy to it - but it can hardly be what did happen to L, since we know he was permitted occasional visits to his 'parents', who on this theory are in fact the first group of kidnappers.
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Post by Optimism is my Phil-osophy on Jun 13, 2020 19:53:10 GMT -5
I think Hermes' conclusion is the most balanced and correct, now that I've read it. I was commenting on the same mistake as the authors of the song, which is the same mistake made by many people today: judging an entire organization because of the mistake of some members of the organization. What we really know about VFD in the pre-schism times, is that there were members within the organization who are now known as villains due to their evil attitudes. They were part of the organization, but they obviously did not act according to the principles preached by the organization. The sinister pair was formerly known as "volunteers", but they enslaved babies even while being given the title of volunteers. It is clear that Schism did not form the villains. The schism simply tried to separate those who were villains from those who truly believed in the principles of VFD. It is natural that people outside the organization who did not know all the details and who were harmed by some of the members of VFD, formed a misconception about the entire organization. I now believe that the authors of the music gathered information that evidently had leaked incompletely about how the organization worked, joined with the traumatic experience they had when having their children (or the children of people close to them) abducted and created this sad song . If we add Hermes' conclusion to what Dewey said, that the organization was much more public in pre-Schism times, it is easy to see that it was much easier for people of dubious morals to join the secret organization.
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TheAsh
Formidable Foreman
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Post by TheAsh on Jun 15, 2020 6:41:15 GMT -5
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Post by Dante on Jun 15, 2020 16:09:07 GMT -5
And yes, the unreliable chain of transmission means we can't be sure any part of the story is true - perhaps the editor invented it, parhaps DH did. But of course we then face the problem that DH did invent it, but that doesn't tell us what we should believe about what happened in the story. A narrative with an unreliable narrator still has to be treated as true in some respects, otherwise the narrator just collapses into the real-world author, who is of course unreliable, because they are writing fiction. Unfortunately, this is exactly what I now believe. The U.A. is a deliberately untrustworthy volume that was specifically constructed not to give definitive answers that the author had to abide by in future. (Another way of putting that would be to say that it is just for fun.) With regard to the expression "Drat", I have to say that instead of proving that an enemy of Lemony wrote words in this letter, this just indicates that Lemony himself has changed his point of view about cheesemakers over time. After all, these cheesemakers would have been one of the main liars when it came to Lemony's childhood. But this makes no sense with regards to the context of the statement! I will transcribe the whole, with particular note to the underlining, in the same pencil (or charcoal) as the "Drat!" exclamation: "These cheesemakers, whose names I will not reveal, remain very close associates of my entire family." Why is Lemony frustrated, even obstructed, by his own refusal in the past to disclose the names of his close associates? Were the notes his and his intention to express present distrust of the cheesemakers, he would have underlined a different statement and made a different response. The notes here make sense only if the note-taker is frustrated at not learning the cheesemakers' identities; and the plot thread of the dairy becoming a target because of its links to Lemony is followed up in its alleged destruction on pages 184-185. I don't consider this response to be engaging with the actual points of my argument, and so I dismiss it. Olaf hides his tattoo, successfully, again and again and again. If he had only worn socks when the Baudelaires were in his care, they would never have known he had such a tattoo at all. The possibility exists that the Baudelaire parents could have done the same. As it happens, I don't even disagree with the point that Bertrand and Beatrice may be slightly later recruits, or some other combination of events frustrated their tattooing. But the fact is that the series chooses never to raise the question of why they didn't have tattoos; and indeed I rather think it wants to avoid that question. I would consider it a plot hole if it wasn't so easy to come up with potential get-out clauses. I disagree enormously with your reading here. Kit does not know that she was a volunteer when she was four years old. She knows that the schism happened then; but if she had to be told what the world was like before the schism, then it follows that she has only ever known the post-schism world. It is obvious that the details of the schism, too, are things she was only told about after the event. Similarly, I disagree that she is saying that Frank and Ernest were already volunteers in their infancy and turned against each other in the moment of the schism. The effects of the schism have resounded down the years; Dewey tells us that "With each generation, the schism gets worse" (TPP, p. 181). So it is not only possible but most plausible that the effects of the schism have only recently driven Ernest apart from his brothers; and indeed, for the Hotel Denouement's status as the last safe place to have been a secret to the villains, we can hardly imagine that one of the managers of that hotel was either ignorant of the secret or was keeping it from his own allies. This interpretation is not unreasonable, if we set aside the problem of the secret location of the last safe place, which cannot reasonably have been a secret to Ernest; the point of two or three different individuals capturing the various siblings, with Ernest's kidnapper also torching the Denouement home, is actually quite elegant. But again, the text in no way requires that they had already been kidnapped once and tattooed beforehand! This idea of a kidnapping hokey-cokey is ludicrous. I presume, then, that you are discounting Count Olaf as one of Snicket's enemies, despite all evidence to the contrary? Again, you are choosing not to engage with the points of my argument, which plainly presents documents being forged and false information disseminated all the time. Eleanora Poe I would hardly class as an enemy of Lemony; merely a fool who has no understanding of the big picture, as indicated by the fact that she eventually gets shut in the basement by Geraldine Julienne. Again and again you choose not to engage with my points. What do they gain? The same thing they're working on throughout the U.A.: Discrediting Lemony and undermining his efforts. We see it in his firing from The Daily Punctilio, and we see it here. From cradle to grave they fill his life with errors. And they did it too well; credulous readers are even doing their job for them! Meanwhile, what does V.F.D. gain with their ridiculous double-kidnappings? Kidnap children, tattoo them, place them for a handful of their infant years with an entirely fake family, then kidnap them again when they're still too young to remember the difference? It makes no sense whatsoever. You have spun a vast and nonsensical fantasy from a few stray scribblings of an individual who announces themselves as a villain before they even get to the part of the text you're interested in. Frankly, it doesn't even matter if the villain is right about Lemony's memories. The notes are a stranger's, the double kidnapping never happened; the only conclusion makes sense is that those annotations were inserted to undermine Lemony. Case closed. If you trust the Introduction, Jean Lucio, you trust that the entire manuscript of the U.A., paginated, chaptered, indexed, annotated, was being passed around in a brown paper packet to private individuals and house parties. Why didn't they just go to a bookstore? The Snicket package was never published. Considering those of the annotations which are Lemony's, it's reasonable to conclude that it was purloined from the publishers in a previous form, and never returned. Naturally, this is all post hoc rationalization, as far as the early books are concerned. But not particularly moreso than e.g. the significance of Olaf's eye tattoo. Post hoc rationalisation is fair, but the series had plenty of opportunities to post hoc declare that Monty or even Josephine were intending to train the Baudelaires, or even their parents. It didn't. Indeed, I would argue that instead the evidence points in the opposite direction. Monty never bothered to learn the Sebald Code - he's no committed volunteer. And that's fair, too. You don't have to agree with an argument to want to keep the facts straight. But I will always ask for those facts, or for a compelling logical deduction. While in the olden days VFD as a whole was an open organisation, the people who were to become the villains were already active within it, so it's by no means impossible that some members were taking children wihtout permission. But follow the logic here. Children are taken without permission; the parents naturally put up an outcry and call the police in; the wider organisation thus finds out almost immediately; and those responsible, if their actions were openly admitted to the organisation, are expelled, or if their actions were kept secret, are not acting as members of the organisation at all. I tend not to engage with the Snicket Sleuth's theories, and this one is a good example of why. It would take an entire post to dissect every misreading used to support this rickety house of cards - but we may as well start with the first one, in which Lemony allegedly "blatantly contradicts himself" by describing, first, the two leftover half-full cups of tea, and, second, his brother's claim that he was permitted to finish his tea. Lemony repeats uncritically the first report, and makes no comment as to the veracity of the second; yet somehow the conclusion we are supposed to come to is that Jacques's memories are correct and Lemony's report of unstated provenance is wrong. Why? The two statements are entirely compatible. He's heard one version of events, which he evidently trusts; Jacques repeats another, which he politely does not comment on. Even if Jacques were right, there's no statement that the half-full cups of tea are Lemony's own memory. And yet on this basis alone, the author accuses Snicket of split personality disorder! I could go on at any length - the Snicket Sleuth admits that their readers must be "rolling their eyes" - but I would prefer this post to actually be finished sometime, and addressing thoughts on this site alone can be quite exhausting enough.
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Post by Uncle Algernon on Jun 15, 2020 16:47:37 GMT -5
Naturally, this is all post hoc rationalization, as far as the early books are concerned. But not particularly moreso than e.g. the significance of Olaf's eye tattoo. Post hoc rationalisation is fair, but the series had plenty of opportunities to post hoc declare that Monty or even Josephine were intending to train the Baudelaires, or even their parents. It didn't. Indeed, I would argue that instead the evidence points in the opposite direction. Monty never bothered to learn the Sebald Code - he's no committed volunteer. And that's fair, too. You don't have to agree with an argument to want to keep the facts straight. But I will always ask for those facts, or for a compelling logical deduction. As you should, as you should! I'd argue that as a matter of fact, Dewey's line is in fact Handler taking advantage of one of those opportunities to propose a reframing of the earlier multi-kidnapping shenanigans as V.F.D takings (or decadent variations thereupon). Monty not knowing the Sebald Code I would characterize as more an effect of Handler only deciding later on that the Code would be this all-important V.F.D. thing, rather than one random cipher — not unlike the obviously post hoc decision that Olaf's disguises were bog-standard applications of the V.F.D. Disguise Kit as opposed to random things he threw together on his own, despite the (not insurmountable, but significant) logical issues involved. Of course, as always, I must confess that the cinematic and televisual lore may be coloring my view, though as I have mentioned before, I am very sympathetic to a view of the show, movie and books as all constituting one messy set of historical documents nominally documenting one universe, though I won't burden the fine folks here with the full implications of that, as I know it's a somewhat idiosyncratic view.
All the same, the facts are there: clearly the "V.F.D. apprenticeship system" with picturesque mentors/guardians who'll whisk the nippers off to foreign locales and teach them odd things was intended to echo the Baudelaires' adventures. Clearly "the sort of people who are Volunteers" is a category that built iself from the loose notion of what a Baudelaire-guardian could be expected to be like.
If one is unwilling to actually review the Baudelaires' tribulations as a very dysfunctional V.F.D apprenticeship, we could decide to hew closer to the causal order of things in the real world, and formulate the metafictional theory that V.F.D. designed their customs and policies to churn out generation after generation of resourceful storybook heroes; hence separation from their parents in (mock-)kidnappins and (controlled) globe-trotting adventures under the mentorship of (carefully-vetted) "eccentric new guardians". By the time of ASoUE, the institutions of V.F.D. have decayed, but as it turns out, the world doesn't need them to keep turning, and so the Baudelaires go not through the V.F.D. training as such, but through an authentic version of the set of unforeseeable events which the classic V.F.D. training was meant to imitate.
While in the olden days VFD as a whole was an open organisation, the people who were to become the villains were already active within it, so it's by no means impossible that some members were taking children wihtout permission. But follow the logic here. Children are taken without permission; the parents naturally put up an outcry and call the police in; the wider organisation thus finds out almost immediately; and those responsible, if their actions were openly admitted to the organisation, are expelled, or if their actions were kept secret, are not acting as members of the organisation at all. This ignores the possibility that pre-Schism V.F.D. was not a situation where the operation was nominally as noble as the fire-fighting side would later strive to be, with a few hypocritical defectors misusing its resources behind closed doors, but rather a case where the ideological divide between the more egotistical and more selfless members of the organization was out in the open, an uneasy truce like an increasingly frayed marriage, where each side grudgingly tolerates and backs the other even as they deplore quite what they are being forced to endorse. The more noble-minded pre-Schism Volunteers would decide, for the greater good, to present a united front and get the child-napping members off the hook, because the alternative is a full-blown Schism liable to spell the end of V.F.D., and of all its potential for good.
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Post by Optimism is my Phil-osophy on Jun 15, 2020 20:15:07 GMT -5
I was waiting for you to say something like that, so I can show off my canonical knowledge. Beatrice removed the sandals before going into the fountain and bathing with her children. So, canonically we have a scene where Beatrice has her bare feet in front of the children, and they don't notice any tattoos. Also, if it was Daniel Handler's intention to indicate that she still tried to hide the tattoo at that time, he would have written it. But it was not the case. Beatrice had no tattoo to hide.
Regarding "Drat" I understand the argument and agree. In any case, the main suspect of writing this then is Professor CP himself (perhaps a disguised VFD enemy) or another VFD enemy. And the word "Drat" does not indicate an attempt to convey false information. It just indicates anger, doesn't it? Most likely, it was written then before these documents were turned into a book. In any case, these enemies would have valid reasons for not liking cheesemakers. But they would have no valid reason to enter false information about Lemony's past in the hope that it would someday be part of a book. Furthermore, this does not contradict my other arguments. If Lemony disagreed with what the comments inserted by his enemies could mean, he would have written other observations adjusting the information when he reviewed the book. Lemony is very interested in the truth about her life being reliably portrayed. So, if Lemony missed these remarks and these photos, or if he wrote it himself (and he certainly was in the case of the photo at the beginning of the chapter) it still indicates that he had changed his mind about what happened in his childhood. Regarding LSTUA being just for fun, the introduction I made to this thread was just to invalidate this reasoning. If you believe it was done for fun by the author himself, in other words you are saying that the events portrayed in LSTUA happen in a parallel universe, so to speak. I disagree with that, but I can't prove that someone who thinks that way is wrong. In any case, even in this case, there is evidence that in this parallel universe, Lemony was kidnapped twice. But I note that I disagree that this is the case based on the points of similarity that exist between what is registered in ASOUE and between what is registered in LSTUA. But we could spend days arguing one way or the other, and we would not reach the final conclusion, because it is a matter of opinion. That is why I believe that when making theories, it is necessary to establish principles that support the theory. This is a typical case. If the story at LSTUA didn't really happen, it would be useless to argue anything based on LSTUA. But if it happened, you have to take all of LSTUA into account when making your theories. But good theorists will put aside their beliefs, and argue based on accepting one of these principles at a time.
Everything in TPP indicates that Ernest plays a double agent character. People say he's a villain, but I can't remember any really villainous acts on his part. And everything indicates that Dewey was taken to VFD Headquarters alone.
After Hermes' argument, I understood that what some VFD members did before Cisma does not represent what the organization's interests are in fact. I understand that in this context, the need for tattoos when Lemony was a baby is completely gone. If Lemony was kidnapped as a baby, it was not by the VFD organization, but probably by VFD members who were not really noble. Their reasons for doing so certainly involve child slavery and inheritance theft. These reasons are canonical.
As proof that the publication of LSTUA did happen, the book was not sold in bookstores. This was very common in times when some books were censored by the government. Even the English translation of the Bible had to be published clandestinely. You wouldn't find it in bookstores, but there were clandestine publishers, clandestine printers, and distribution to the clandestine public. In the case of LSTUA, it was even necessary to put on a fake cover so that the holders of the book were not easily identified.
As I said no comment from Hermes, this seems to be the most likely to have happened in the case of some babies. The Little Snicket Lad seems to be a song involving the abduction of Lemony Snicket by VFD but it lacks logic when thinking about "who composed this song?" I believed that the song was composed by the parents or friends of Lemony's parents after the kidnapping. In this case, how would these people know that Lemony fell and crawled during the kidnapping? And who would have taken that picture of an alleged Lemony crawling? The only ones who could have taken this photo, in this case, would have been the kidnappers themselves. In this case, why would the kidnappers share the information that Lemony fell to the ground and crawled with Lemony's parents or friends of Lemony's parents to compose the song? The song seems to have been composed by people who wanted to make it sound like VFD was an organization that kidnaps babies. In other words, the song was composed by enemies of VFD who wanted to portray the organization as being something dangerous, and it distorted facts on purpose to make the population fear or disapprove of VFD. The person who inserted the photo and the remark at the end, evidently wanted to prove that the lyrics of the song were right, despite this being a lie. Still, the manual writing about the end of the chapter is bothered me. For me, the evidence points to what Lemony wrote that about. But I may not have understood the purpose for which he wrote. Perhaps it indicates that he now disagrees with what he had written earlier in stating that photos cannot be contested.
That photo could not have been taken by the people who composed the song, if these people really were Lemony's parents or her friends. On the other hand, that photo may have been taken by the people who added the additional part of the song involving Lemony having egatinha. They could have taken any baby, taken a picture, and thought "Let's add a part to the song that shows Lemony fell and crawled during the kidnapping, and we are going to present this photo as evidence that it really happened". This is just a possibility. But in summary, after having heard all the arguments:
1 - There is no evidence that VFD as an organization has kidnapped children without parental authorization.
2 - There is evidence that some VFD members kidnapped children in pre-Schism times, but they had no support from the organization.
3 - Enemies of VFD composed the song the little Snicket Lad with the purpose of making the people afraid or disapproved by VFD. They took advantage of known cases of child abductions along with prejudiced information about VFD to compose the music using half-truths.
4 - The photo of a baby on the floor in chapter 1 cannot be Lemony Snicket. The baby's image was used by enemies of VFD to try to give credibility to the information contained in the song, in a similar way as some photos and footage are added to fake news to try to give credibility to a false story.
NOte: If I seem to be disregarding any of your arguments, don't get me wrong. Most likely it is because I have no reason to argue, but I am still not completely convinced. Still, it is because you have already partly convinced me. See how beautiful what we produced here was. Now I have a much greater understanding of the pre-schism era. We made a correlation between the fictitious events and the real ones. And now I am a better person and less prejudiced, because I realized the danger of judging organizations or historical facts in a rash way. The beauty of the argument is there, even in fictional facts.
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Post by Hermes on Jun 19, 2020 12:22:20 GMT -5
And yes, the unreliable chain of transmission means we can't be sure any part of the story is true - perhaps the editor invented it, parhaps DH did. But of course we then face the problem that DH did invent it, but that doesn't tell us what we should believe about what happened in the story. A narrative with an unreliable narrator still has to be treated as true in some respects, otherwise the narrator just collapses into the real-world author, who is of course unreliable, because they are writing fiction. Unfortunately, this is exactly what I now believe. The U.A. is a deliberately untrustworthy volume that was specifically constructed not to give definitive answers that the author had to abide by in future. (Another way of putting that would be to say that it is just for fun.) Oh, certainly we are not meant to come away from TUA with a definite answer to the question which events really happened and which did not. But surely we are meant to believe that some of the events really happened: the overall conclusion we come away with is not meant to be 'Daniel Handler made it all up'. The fraudulent documents, whichever they are, are fraudulent documents produced by characters in the story, not by an author of fiction. After all, TUA is our original source for many facts that are later confirmed by the main series - that VFD is an organisation of volunteers, that it uses certain codes and disguises, that there was a schism, and so on.
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Post by Optimism is my Phil-osophy on Jun 19, 2020 13:10:36 GMT -5
Even the Sebald code used by one of the D brothers can only be understood through LSTUA. (In the section between the introduction and chapter 11). The taxi driver's disguise including photos of relatives is confirmed in TRR. The bullfighter disguise is confirmed in TAA, as well as the Masked Ball itself. Duchess R is quoted in TGG. The telegrams sent by the children to Poe in THH appear written in LSTUA. Ivan's biography book was placed under someone's bed as indicated in LSTUA and TWW. Kit Snicket is quoted first in LSTUA before being quoted in TGG. All these points of similarity are and evidence that the story assembled through deduction in LSTUA and the story told in ASOUE happened in the same universe and are complementary to each other. The apparent contradictions can be interpreted in different ways: 1- Error of continuity of the author. 2 - Deduction error by the reader. 3 - Intention of the author to use unreliable characters to narrate some events. 4 - Natural unreliability of historical documents. 5 - Intentional falsification of documents by characters. Understanding what is most likely in each apparent contradiction is the role of the snicktiologist, without disregarding that the sncketiologist himself may be wrong. It is a difficult job, and the salary is very low and uncertain. But someone has to do this (or not).
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Post by Dante on Jun 29, 2020 13:46:49 GMT -5
Apologies to all for taking my time coming back to this; I've been very busy lately. This ignores the possibility that pre-Schism V.F.D. was not a situation where the operation was nominally as noble as the fire-fighting side would later strive to be, with a few hypocritical defectors misusing its resources behind closed doors, but rather a case where the ideological divide between the more egotistical and more selfless members of the organization was out in the open, an uneasy truce like an increasingly frayed marriage, where each side grudgingly tolerates and backs the other even as they deplore quite what they are being forced to endorse. The more noble-minded pre-Schism Volunteers would decide, for the greater good, to present a united front and get the child-napping members off the hook, because the alternative is a full-blown Schism liable to spell the end of V.F.D., and of all its potential for good. This proposal is paradoxical. Taking of children, either permitted or otherwise, can only have occurred once V.F.D. entered its covert phase, since unpermitted taking in particular, as I suggested earlier, would have resulted in public outcry; but V.F.D. only entered its covert phase after the schism flung the organisation into a violent civil war, and so there is no pre-schism status quo left to defend. If you are proposing a pre-schism, public organsation version of events where V.F.D.'s nobler side, as it were, swallowed their principles in order to publicly defend child-kidnapping within their organisation, then the aforementioned public outcry would have broken V.F.D.'s public face and forced them underground, at which point there is once again no longer a status quo to maintain in defending such unacceptable actions - and so it is difficult to see that this would have occurred. If you are proposing a pre-schism, public organisation in which the nobler side outright hid the crimes of the less noble side (who were kidnapping children with what justification, in this proposed version of events?), then it is difficult to see that the noble side of V.F.D. has any right to so regard themselves nor any pretence as to actually possessing any further potential for good. The circumstances required by this scenario grow ever more specific with each analysis; and thus, necessarily, ever less grounded in the text. I'm not sure I can sustain interest in an argument which has long since abandoned any pretence of textual justification, merely ever more convoluted attempts to cram an unindicated premise into the gaps in the text. There are places for such discussions, and I'd be happy to have them there; but not framed as, "This is canon." I was waiting for you to say something like that, so I can show off my canonical knowledge. Beatrice removed the sandals before going into the fountain and bathing with her children. So, canonically we have a scene where Beatrice has her bare feet in front of the children, and they don't notice any tattoos. Also, if it was Daniel Handler's intention to indicate that she still tried to hide the tattoo at that time, he would have written it. But it was not the case. Beatrice had no tattoo to hide. You have failed to trap me, Jean Lucio, because you failed to consider my entire argument. My opening statement, which you carefully removed in quoting me, was "Olaf hides his tattoo, successfully, again and again and again." The socks example is immaterial to my wider point precisely in that it is not an event which ever occurs. (Indeed, we see in TPP that while Olaf does possess a pair of socks, they contain a hole in exactly the right place to reveal his tattoo.) My point is that Olaf's actions demonstrate that inexhaustible ingenuity can produce any number of strategies for concealing a tattoo. But I also point out, again, the more pertinent point that the series avoids asking why X, Y, and Z characters didn't have tattoos. The Baudelaires never stop to ask, well, shouldn't Esmé have a tattoo (or indeed whether she was even in V.F.D.), shouldn't Fernald have a tattoo, shouldn't the Baudelaire parents have had tattoos; this is because the author does not have a reasonable answer to this question. ...But if I too were in the business of making things up in the absence of evidence - well then, perhaps the Baudelaires' otherwise perplexing lack of curiosity on this issue is because, having seen Olaf's resourcefulness in hiding his tattoo, they came to the conclusion that it was entirely reasonable for their parents and other characters to have found ways of hiding their own tattoos? I don't think the the U.A. contains even a single example of Lemony annotating or commenting on other people's annotations, so this is hardly evidence of anything - except that he either adopted a deliberate editorial policy of not commenting on such annotations (whether by himself or anyone else), or that all such annotations (whether by himself or anyone else) occurred at a point at which he no longer had the power to make extensive contributions to the manuscript. I'm not sure I have made this plain already, but I will do so now. I think it is entirely valid to accept parts of the U.A. as canon, and not other parts. This is because parts of the U.A. are validated by the main series, whilst other parts are invalidated. This can hardly be called news to anyone. And the idea that the whole text is deliberately unreliable can hardly be called news to anyone, either, considering the lengths it goes to to undermine itself at every step; notes and annotations disputing memory and provenance of letters, allusions to machinery to generate false photographs, misprints and crossings-out and unreadable pencil notations, and especially the memorable sentence, "For various reasons, portions of this chapter have been changed or made up entirely, including this sentence." (U.A. p. 159) The U.A. is playing a game with you, and it is not playing fair. It's not willing to set anything of itself in stone. Furthermore, your supposed evidence of two kidnappings is really just evidence of the surface layer accusation: That Lemony was simply wrong about his past. Your theory is really just a more complicated elaboration upon this idea, requiring more assumptions to ground it. You have a habit of saying "everything indicates" when in fact you are referring to an absence of indication. Ernest not doing anything villainous on-screen is not equivalent to him doing something heroic on-screen (and certainly does not eliminate the multiple occasions on which volunteers refer to him as an enemy); Dewey not mentioning his brothers is not equivalent to him saying they were not present. As it happens, I don't disagree with either premise; but that is different from declaring, "everything indicates". Forgive me if I misunderstand - so these inheritance thieves and slavers are the parents Lemony made several subsequent visits to? The ones whose personal investigations Lemony knows about? The ones he never has a bad word for? They appear to have played their role very convincingly. It's almost as if they were never child slavers or inheritance thieves at all. So you are willing to posit clandestine publishers with clandestine printers who print clandestine copyright acknowledgements and send to clandestine booksellers who use clandestine bar code scanners and ask for a clandestine recommended retail price, but not that Lemony might have been unavailable or overruled by his editors? I think there is room for discussion on the circumstances of "The Little Snicket Lad"'s composition, but it would be difficult to convince me that it was carefully composed as an anti-V.F.D. hit piece, considering the more philanthropic bent of the lyrics in the coda. Unfortunately, this is exactly what I now believe. The U.A. is a deliberately untrustworthy volume that was specifically constructed not to give definitive answers that the author had to abide by in future. (Another way of putting that would be to say that it is just for fun.) Oh, certainly we are not meant to come away from TUA with a definite answer to the question which events really happened and which did not. But surely we are meant to believe that some of the events really happened: the overall conclusion we come away with is not meant to be 'Daniel Handler made it all up'. The fraudulent documents, whichever they are, are fraudulent documents produced by characters in the story, not by an author of fiction. After all, TUA is our original source for many facts that are later confirmed by the main series - that VFD is an organisation of volunteers, that it uses certain codes and disguises, that there was a schism, and so on. Even the Sebald code used by one of the D brothers can only be understood through LSTUA. (In the section between the introduction and chapter 11). The taxi driver's disguise including photos of relatives is confirmed in TRR. The bullfighter disguise is confirmed in TAA, as well as the Masked Ball itself. Duchess R is quoted in TGG. The telegrams sent by the children to Poe in THH appear written in LSTUA. Ivan's biography book was placed under someone's bed as indicated in LSTUA and TWW. Kit Snicket is quoted first in LSTUA before being quoted in TGG. All these points of similarity are and evidence that the story assembled through deduction in LSTUA and the story told in ASOUE happened in the same universe and are complementary to each other. The apparent contradictions can be interpreted in different ways: 1- Error of continuity of the author. 2 - Deduction error by the reader. 3 - Intention of the author to use unreliable characters to narrate some events. 4 - Natural unreliability of historical documents. 5 - Intentional falsification of documents by characters. Understanding what is most likely in each apparent contradiction is the role of the snicktiologist, without disregarding that the sncketiologist himself may be wrong. It is a difficult job, and the salary is very low and uncertain. But someone has to do this (or not). It doesn't seem like the two of you misunderstand or disagree with my intention at all. Congratulations, you have identified elements in the U.A. which are confirmed in other books in the series. (A shame neither of you mentioned Geraldine Julienne; such a fascinating example.) Other elements remain unconfirmed. Still others were deconfirmed. I would call the U.A. an ironically more careful example of something we also see in the BBRE notes - groundwork. Elements are seeded, and the author subsequently picked up and carried away some, whilst abandoning others. The only thing I would add to Jean Lucio's otherwise fairly exhaustive list is that we should understand that there are abandonments, in addition to continuities and contradictions; there are some ideas placed in the U.A. which, rather than being further drawn on or outright inverted are instead simply left untouched. Those elements are the risky ones for people to choose to revisit and hold up as vital evidence.
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Post by Optimism is my Phil-osophy on Jun 29, 2020 14:09:58 GMT -5
I was defeated as a theorist, but I won as a fan. Thanks for the discussion.
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