“60 Million Frenchmen Can’t be Wrong”

Special to FreeRepublic ^ | 3 June 2005 | John Armor (Congressman Billybob)

[Buckeye Battle Cry]

Yes they can.

[Red Sea Swimmer]

Can you possibly give any French person any credit whatsoever for the vote (which will help the good people of America), or is your praise so conditional as to be almost nonexistent ?

French bashing is so passe.

[patton]

it's from, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."

[ChildOfThe60s]

It is interesting.

I would suggest that it is certainly not a given that we have avoided, or will avoid the same trap.

I suspect that without some very significant domestic policy successes on the conservative side, in the next few years, the socialist trends in the US will resume as if this republican majority had not happened. We will not be given 60 years to prove that our way works, as the Dems were given.

[Cicero]

I just did a google search, and find several sites which confirm your statement that TANSTAAFL first appeared in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, an old favorite of mine.

But I'm pretty sure I recall seeing it earlier in one of his short stories, which appeared in Amazing or The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It's been fifty years or more since I read that story, so my memory is a bit vague.

[patton]

I guess I last read it around 1972...

[Cicero]

I used to include "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" in a Science Fiction course I taught. I just checked my records and the last time I taught the course was 1986. But the other story, if I remember it rightly, was much earlier, back in the early Heinlein days. I first started reading Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke back in the late 40s and early 50s.

[patton]

Got me beat - I wasn't born unti 1962! LOL

[TomasUSMC]

You know, lately, the French have been acting kinda right.

First they killed Arafat, then they knee capped the EU.

[NZerFromHK]

A good one, Congressman Billybob. Unfortunately as this foreigner I understand your point will look like alien-speak to Europeans, particularly French.

Their understanding of politics is too different/weird/eccentric/bizzare/deficient/retarded (circle one if you wish).

[sarasota]

ping

[RightWhale]

The phrase, Fifty million Frenchmen can't be wrong, was always taken as ironic.

[spacewarp]

They have been acting right by accident.

Arafat was a combination of their doctor's incompetance and his general condition. Basically, you don't wait until the person's already on life support to take them to the hospital.

The other was out of arrogance. They felt it didn't go far enough to communism.

Paul

[stripes1776]

When you add the ancillary documents and treaties that are also part of the Constitution, by reference. The base Constitution is absurd enough. It gets much worse when the other documents are added to the mix.

The bureaucratic mind lives my means of jargon, obscurity, ambiguity, and incoherence. The language they use is intended to make you think that they are really smart since they wrote this dense document, and you are really stupid because you cannot understand the incomprehensible, so you should just submit without protest. I think that the French and Dutch rejected the EU constitution from a gut reaction. And that is the proper response to claptrap, regarless of your politics.

[stripes1776]

I think a reflection on sacrifice illustrates the real problem here. The signators of the Declaration of Independence pledged (and ended up giving, most of them) their "lives, fortunes, and sacred honor" in support of creating a new political entity. The French voters won't even pledge their cushy August vacations. That, to me, is the difference.

Yes, I think you have summed it up very well. That is the difference.

[AFPhys]

I believe that "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" is the best Science Fiction books ever written in the category of "Not part of a trilogy". A couple of asimov's robot books, and Dune repersent close seconds ("trilogy" came much later) in that category. I would love to hear your other candidates.

TANSTAAFL, I was always under the impression, came from the book, but perhaps it appeared in some earlier work.

[Cicero]

I did mostly "classic" SF in the course, plus a few later novels that moved the genre. Here are books from the last few times I gave the course:

Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Asimov, Foundation.
Arthur Clark, The City and the Stars
John Wyndham, Day of the Triffids
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz
Frank Herbert, Dune
Robert Silverberg, Downward to the Earth
Samuel Delany, Nova
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep\
Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Larry Niven, Ringworld
Piers Anthony, Macroscope
Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer
J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun
William Gibson, Neuromancer

Some years I would do different books just to take a rest, such as Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano, or Kornbluth and Pohl's The Space Merchants.