H. Beam Piper vs. Eric Flint
Sinister Purpose
get really strange])....perhaps it's the merlot, but I just realized
what it is about his writing that gets to me. He's H. Beam Piper
reincarnated!
Hey Eric! You like a good brew? I wouldn't mind trucking over across
the state line to kick back and spill a few......
Damn. Baen got it right. I've read a few of Mr. Flint's books in the
last few years, a fiend or two insisted that I should read 1632, etc. I
downloaded 1632 & 1633 from Baen's website, got through chapter 25, went
to Pages for All Ages (Champaign, IL) and picked up 1632 in paper, Ring
of Fire & 1634 in HB, but I'm going mad....I can't seem to find a hard
copy of 1633.
Egad! I've spent around $400 on the real material in the last month
(when I dropped $150+ the other week, my boss went "It must be nice to
be wealthy")...walking the tightrope here....but I can't stop myself
from buying the good stuff anymore. I would never forgive myself, if I
didn't pick up the great old stuff (like Dangerous Visions, couldn't
afford it when it came out, couldn't find a copy when I could). Yes,
I'm going insane...so sue me.
I finally have a good DVD copy of WoSaT [Mike Jittlov is a GOD!], I just
picked up the DVD [complete version!] of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy....I'm just waiting for the new Starcastle album to finally
(after like eight years) to get out (Gary Strater just died, damn it).
Ignore me, I'm a raving drunk.
Anyway, I'm not kidding about Eric Flint|H. Beam Piper. It's funny,
with most authors, oversimplifying politics makes me grind my teeth, but
in both cases, they appear to do it, without really just glossing over
like too many people do.
Anyone who will be hanging out in the consuite (drinking/smoking
version) at Chambanacon this year, I intend to bring WoSaT and other
happy collectings in to play.
Enough babbling.....I'm going to bed. {Ok, when I finish drinking)
JoatSimeon
>I've been reading 1632 (shut up, I can't read everything at once [It'd get
really strange])....perhaps it's the merlot, but I just realized what it is
about his writing that gets to me. He's H. Beam Piper reincarnated!
-- oddly enough, Eric is _not_ at all fond of Piper's stuff... 8-).
Keith Stokes
<gh...@ameritech.net> wrote:
>I've been reading 1632 (shut up, I can't read everything at once [It'd
>get really strange])....perhaps it's the merlot, but I just realized
>what it is about his writing that gets to me. He's H. Beam Piper
>reincarnated!
You think so?
I don't think folks will be reading Flint when he has been dead as
long as Piper is.
Keith
Pete McCutchen
Why not? Too Kiplingesque for him?
--
Pete McCutchen
Michael Stemper
>I've been reading 1632 (shut up, I can't read everything at once [It'd
>get really strange])....perhaps it's the merlot, but I just realized
>what it is about his writing that gets to me. He's H. Beam Piper
>reincarnated!
>Anyway, I'm not kidding about Eric Flint|H. Beam Piper. It's funny,
>with most authors, oversimplifying politics makes me grind my teeth, but
>in both cases, they appear to do it, without really just glossing over
>like too many people do.
It's not clear from what you wrote what the similarities are that
you see between Flint and Piper. Is it appearing to simplify politics
without glossing over? Or is that just a side light? Do they have
similar narrative styles? Do they both do history lessons in space?
Do they both show humanity expanding into space and then fragmenting?
Do they both have imaginatively-designed aliens?
--
Michael F. Stemper
#include <Standard_Disclaimer>
If this is our corporate opinion, you will be billed for it.
JoatSimeon
>Why not? Too Kiplingesque for him?
-- too favorable to feudal/aristocratic systems.
Steve Moss
My first, and only effort at reading Eric Flint was for a novel
centering around Belasarius, Justinian's general. The blurb sounded
good but I couldn't get more than a half dozen pages into it. It
seemed as if every paragraph had an exclamation point. For some
reason, that grated on my nerves and I stopped reading.
Never finished it. Donated the book to the library and never bout a
Flint book again.
Steve Moss
Pete McCutchen
I thought you might say that. Has he actually *read* any books by his
co-author and friend David Weber?
--
Pete McCutchen
Michael Stemper
>My first, and only effort at reading Eric Flint was for a novel
>centering around Belasarius, Justinian's general. The blurb sounded
>good but I couldn't get more than a half dozen pages into it. It
>seemed as if every paragraph had an exclamation point.
So that's what he did with all of the exclamation points that he took
out of Schmitz's work!
Peter D. Tillman
ste...@uneedspeed.net (Steve Moss) wrote:
> > On Tue, 28 Sep 2004 06:53:31 GMT, Sinister Purpose
> > <gh...@ameritech.net> wrote:
> >
> > >I've been reading 1632 (shut up, I can't read everything at once [It'd
> > >get really strange])....perhaps it's the merlot, but I just realized
> > >what it is about his writing that gets to me. He's H. Beam Piper
> > >reincarnated!
> >
>
> My first, and only effort at reading Eric Flint was for a novel
> centering around Belasarius, Justinian's general. The blurb sounded
> good but I couldn't get more than a half dozen pages into it. It
> seemed as if every paragraph had an exclamation point. For some
> reason, that grated on my nerves and I stopped reading.
>
> Never finished it. Donated the book to the library and never bout a
> Flint book again.
>
You might want to try his _Mother of Demons_, nicely-done
military-political SF, with good historical and scientific
underpinnings. Featuring bronze-age land-squid, and a famously silly
cover-bobble:
<http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=bgcvgyeyq9a.fsf%40deepspace.media.m
it.edu>
And/or _1632_, a nice variation on the ISOT theme, with a contemporary
WVA coal-town Mysteriously Transmitted to some interminable old
European war. Truth, justice and the American Way triumph. Actually
quite nice.
His two best, that I've read anyway. I haven't cared for the 2 or 3
Flint collabs I've tried, either.
Cheers -- Pete Tillman
Book Reviews: http://www.sfsite.com/revwho.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/cm/member-reviews/-/A3GHSD9VY8XS4Q/
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk//nonfiction/reviews.htm
Google "Peter D. Tillman" +review for many more!
Steve Moss
snip
> > My first, and only effort at reading Eric Flint was for a novel
> > centering around Belasarius, Justinian's general. The blurb sounded
> > good but I couldn't get more than a half dozen pages into it. It
> > seemed as if every paragraph had an exclamation point. For some
> > reason, that grated on my nerves and I stopped reading.
> >
> > Never finished it. Donated the book to the library and never bout a
> > Flint book again.
> >
>
> You might want to try his _Mother of Demons_, nicely-done
> military-political SF, with good historical and scientific
> underpinnings. Featuring bronze-age land-squid, and a famously silly
> cover-bobble:
> <http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=bgcvgyeyq9a.fsf%40deepspace.media.m
> it.edu>
>
> And/or _1632_, a nice variation on the ISOT theme, with a contemporary
> WVA coal-town Mysteriously Transmitted to some interminable old
> European war. Truth, justice and the American Way triumph. Actually
> quite nice.
>
> His two best, that I've read anyway. I haven't cared for the 2 or 3
> Flint collabs I've tried, either.
On the strength of that recommendation I'll try "Mother of Demons".
But only if the library has it.
Steve Moss
David E. Siegel
> "Peter D. Tillman" <til...@aztec.asu.edu> wrote in message news:<tillman-2A9EDA...@individual.net>...
> > In article <93f95679.0409...@posting.google.com>,
> > ste...@uneedspeed.net (Steve Moss) wrote:
>
> snip
>
> > You might want to try his _Mother of Demons_, nicely-done
> > military-political SF, with good historical and scientific
> > underpinnings. Featuring bronze-age land-squid, and a famously silly
> > cover-bobble:
> > <http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=bgcvgyeyq9a.fsf%40deepspace.media.m
> > it.edu>
> >
> > And/or _1632_, a nice variation on the ISOT theme, with a contemporary
> > WVA coal-town Mysteriously Transmitted to some interminable old
> > European war. Truth, justice and the American Way triumph. Actually
> > quite nice.
> >
> > His two best, that I've read anyway. I haven't cared for the 2 or 3
> > Flint collabs I've tried, either.
>
> On the strength of that recommendation I'll try "Mother of Demons".
> But only if the library has it.
>
> Steve Moss
I second the reccomendation for _Mother of Demons_. i enjoyed it very
much, rather more than any of his Belasarius books. In addition to the
above it is also a first-contact-with-aliens book, and a book about
the interactions of several quite distinct cultures.
And an e-book copy is available absolutely free, and 100% legal at
<http://www.baen.com/library/067187800X/067187800X.htm> OR
<http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm>. Try a chapter or two
and see what you think, at least.
-DES
Bill Woods
> "Peter D. Tillman" <til...@aztec.asu.edu> wrote in message news:<tillman-2A9EDA...@individual.net>...
> > In article <93f95679.0409...@posting.google.com>,
> > ste...@uneedspeed.net (Steve Moss) wrote:
>
> snip
>
> > > My first, and only effort at reading Eric Flint was for a novel
> > > centering around Belasarius, Justinian's general. The blurb sounded
> > > good but I couldn't get more than a half dozen pages into it. It
> > > seemed as if every paragraph had an exclamation point. For some
> > > reason, that grated on my nerves and I stopped reading.
> > >
> > > Never finished it. Donated the book to the library and never bout a
> > > Flint book again.
> > >
> >
> > You might want to try his _Mother of Demons_, nicely-done
> > military-political SF, with good historical and scientific
> > underpinnings. Featuring bronze-age land-squid, and a famously silly
> > cover-bobble:
> > <http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=bgcvgyeyq9a.fsf%40deepspace.media.m
> > it.edu>
> >
> > And/or _1632_, a nice variation on the ISOT theme, with a contemporary
> > WVA coal-town Mysteriously Transmitted* to some interminable old
> > European war. Truth, justice and the American Way triumph. Actually
> > quite nice.
> >
> > His two best, that I've read anyway. I haven't cared for the 2 or 3
> > Flint collabs I've tried, either.
>
> On the strength of that recommendation I'll try "Mother of Demons".
> But only if the library has it.
You can get both from the Baen Free Library,
http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm ,
if you don't mind reading ebooks.
--
Bill Woods
_Cryptonomicon_ and _Quicksilver_ are novels for people
who liked the whaley bits in _Moby Dick_.
-- Martin Wisse
Sean Eric Fagan
Peter D. Tillman <til...@aztec.asu.edu> wrote:
>You might want to try his _Mother of Demons_, nicely-done
>military-political SF, with good historical and scientific
>underpinnings.
I describe MoD to people as hard science fiction -- with the sciences being
biology and history. If nothing else, it's *unusual* -- biology gets done a
bit (but not enough, I think), but I haven't read much SF in which the study
of history played a pivotol role.
Charlie Stross
as <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> declared:
Let me stick my oar in here ...?
For my own reasons (which should become obvious in a month or so) a year
or two ago I re-read the whole of the Paratime/Lord Kalvan stories, and
a couple of other Piper novels on the side. And I've read (cough, cough)
most of David Weber and Eric Flint's output.
Piper's personal philosophy seems to have been libertarian-ish (in the
muscular he-man "I stand alone, what do I need a government telling me
what to do for?" tradition), but the political ideology that infused the
Paratime stories (or at least, that of the First Level civilization,
from whose point of view all the stories are framed) is not that far
away from fascism. Kiplingesque it ain't, except in passing and in the
colonial attitudes evoked in some secondary works (e.g. Uller Uprising).
The First Level Civilization of the Paratime stories is portrayed
internally (albeit from the point of view of mostly high-ranking Time
Police officers and their friends) as a utopia ... complete with a Bureau
of Psychological Hygeine, hereditary second-class gastarbeiters imported
from backward timelines, imperialist strip-mining of inhabited time
lines (where the inhabitants aren't advanced to resist), and a general
might-makes-right ethos. The First Level Civilization is, to put it
bluntly, parasitic -- having only made one technological innovation in
several millenia to put it ahead of the Second Level time lines -- and
there's some very nasty shit buried under the chromed cladding.
For a detailed run-down on the ideological outlook in the Paratime
stories, a good place to start if you don't want to read the whole lot
is John F. Carr's introduction to "The Complete Paratime" (republished
by Tor in 2001 -- ISBN 0-441-00801-1).
I will confess that a certain knee-jerk rejection of Piper's ideological
underpinnings for the Paratime stories crept into my own next novel[*],
and I can quite see why Eric might look at them and go "ick". As for
David Weber, he isn't naive enough to portray a social system as
dementedly exploitative as the First Level bunch in terms of unalloyed
approval; while his space operas are full of approvingly-described
empires, they mostly provide some benefits for their subjects (like,
um, not having the crap bombed out of them by the other guys?) as well
as associated costs.
NOTE: I recognize that it is quite possible for authors to sympathetically
portray ideologies and environments that they don't actually sympathize
with in real life. So while I might accuse Piper's *creation* of being
a totalitarian right-wing slave state rather than a utopia, I don't
intend to cast any aspersions on the man himself. Also, the standards
and expectations of political insight in SF in the 1940's through early
60's when Piper was writing were, to say the least, very different from
those of today.
SECOND NOTE: Despite all of the above, they're also cracking good yarns --
they just leave a nasty taste in the mouth. (Although I'd take the First
Level Civilization over the Draka any day of the week :)
-- Charlie
[*] "The Family Trade", due from Tor next month.
JoatSimeon
>Also, the standards and expectations of political insight in SF in the 1940's
through early 60's when Piper was writing were, to say the least, very
different from those of today.
-- or you might say that they were more matter-of-fact and realistic about how
people behave.
>
Charlie Stross
From a strictly Hobbesian point of view, perhaps.
I think the jury is still out on Hobbes' hypothesis -- the one about
self-interest disguised as virtue. A fair bit of recent behavioural
research in primates suggests that altruism, like deception, kicks in
way earlier than language: there are also sociobiological and genetic
arguments for why this might confer selection advantages.
Politics in the 1914-1989 period was unavoidably influenced by the way
the balance of power shifted in the wake of the disintegration of the
old monarchies, and the structures that tended to be thrown up in haste
replace them were frequently heavily influenced by half-baked theories
of social darwinism that don't actually hold up to close examination.
As so many of these theoretical monsters in turn harked back to Hobbes,
it's hardly surprising that the period in question was dominated by
Hobbesian leviathans locked in struggle -- until nukes raised the
stakes so high that stabilization by game theory became desirable. If
you place Piper against the backdrop of WW1/WW2, the politics in his
writing aren't totally out of whack. But whether they're out of whack
in another context is, well, another matter.
(Long festering arguments about stirring Leviathans in the Middle East
will be gracefully declined at this point.)
-- Charlie
Mark Reichert
> -- or you might say that they were more matter-of-fact and realistic about how
> people behave.
You mean boys will be boys?
I realized after your analysis of 1940's men in relation to their
portrayal in Weapons of Choice that you were describing boys, not
mature men charged with running a complex society with many
conflicting viewpoints.
The causalness with which they fought, the eagerness to escalate the
conflict in numbers if not necessarily lethality, the eagerness to
interpret things as an insult to one's honor that must be paid back
are all signs of immaturity by today's standards. I wonder what level
the casual brutality would reach on the sociopathy scale.
I also have to ask why you picked "middle-aged upper-middle-class
woman" rather than say any true christian who believed in the Golden
Rule. I guess because either no man actually took that seriously or
one actually expected people to beat the crap out of you so you might
as well do it to them.
>Today, people would be running around waving their hands in the air
and
>screeching as if the world was going to end, and calling in
therapists and
>considering medication.
Did you ever consider that people actually trying to solve problems
not present in the past or not bothered with?
Just what was the daily level of lethal violence they had to deal
with?
JoatSimeon
>Politics in the 1914-1989 period was unavoidably influenced by the way the
balance of power shifted in the wake of the disintegration of the old
monarchies
-- actually, Hobbesian, Social-Darwinist (and for that matter
Aryanist-racialist) theories were rife in Europe before 1914; the war just
broke down the barriers which had kept them marginalized and their extreme
forms out of mainstream political and cultural life.
Both Hitler and Lenin/Stalin were quintessial products of the Belle Epoque, but
of its lunatic fringe, who took to their logical conclusion ideas which had
been floating around the zeitgeist in their youth.
If you read, say, Rider Haggard or Conan Doyle, you'll be startled to
occasionally come across what sound like "Nazi" ideas. They aren't; they're
just the intellectual commonplaces of their era.
>If you place Piper against the backdrop of WW1/WW2, the politics in his
writing aren't totally out of whack. But whether they're out of whack in
another context is, well, another matter.
-- I think you're confusing cause and effect. Piper's generation had to
confront the nitty-gritty of history at first hand; hence, they tended to have
a common-sensical realism about power and its uses.
The 'long peace' that followed WWII, and particularly after the postwar
reconstruction period, have encouraged an increasing amount of moralistic
princess-and-the-pea syndrome, in the US and even more back on the eastern
shore of the pond.
The fact that this holiday from history is visibly coming to an end is
provoking no end of angst, as illusions -- of 'international law', of 'social
progress', secularism, etc. -- are pricked and shown to be mere contingent
historical soap-bubbles.
Robert A. Woodward
Charlie Stross <cha...@antipope.org> wrote:
Wasn't the strip mining operations on uninhabited Fifth Level time
lines? Because, it is my distinct impression that their operations
on ALL inhabited timelines were rather covert. At least the legal,
authorized ones (the criminal organization "Time Crime" being a
rather obvious exception).
--
Robert Woodward <robe...@drizzle.com>
<http://www.drizzle.com/~robertaw
JoatSimeon
>You mean boys will be boys?
-- more like "people will be people".
You can no more purge aggression, tribalism and violence from their behaviors
than you can get rid of altruism or rationality.
Each has its appropriate role, and needs to be channeled within the framework
of proper socialization. Hysteria doesn't help.
The "Lord of the Flies" is an illustrative work there. Cf. also Freud's concept
of the "return of the repressed", which has a lot better grounding than most of
his theories.
>The causalness with which they fought, the eagerness to escalate the conflict
in numbers if not necessarily lethality, the eagerness to interpret things as
an insult to one's honor that must be paid back
are all signs of immaturity by today's standards.
-- beware of chronological snobbery.
"Today's standards" are themselves ephemera... not to mention the question of
exactly _whose_ standards we're talking about.
Things will probably be quite different in 50 years, anyway -- and it's
impossible to predict what sort of changes will occur.
History moves, but it isn't "going anywhere". That's the teleological myth of
progress. Actually it just changes.
An ancient king once challenged his wise men to come up with a saying that
would be true in all times and places.
After consideration, they nominated: "This, too, shall pass."
Incidentally, concepts of 'honor' are highly functional in many contexts.
>I wonder what level the casual brutality would reach on the sociopathy scale.
-- you're confusing different phenomenon.
Sociopathy is a mental disorder, and probably biological in origin, although it
can also be induced by certain types of stress during the appropriate latency
periods.
We were talking about differing cultural mores.
In other words, sociopaths have no sense of right and wrong. We were
discussing what is _considered_ right and wrong, and to what degree.
>I also have to ask why you picked "middle-aged upper-middle-class woman"
rather than say any true christian who believed in the Golden Rule.
-- well, Christians have tended to believe in smiting the ungodly... 8-).
What we were talking about was emotional attitudes, as much as formal belief.
>Did you ever consider that people actually trying to solve problems not
present in the past or not bothered with?
-- define "problem" in this context. Also consider that if people didn't
bother with it, it may not have been worth bothering with.
For example, you don't make the world much safer by becoming obsessed with
risk. You just spend a lot of time being nervous.
>Just what was the daily level of lethal violence they had to deal with?
-- depends what period you're talking about. Violent crime fell rather steeply
throughout most of the early 20th century in the US; ditto Britain, although
the US started from a rather higher level.
A.G.McDowell
<joats...@aol.com> writes
>
>-- I think you're confusing cause and effect. Piper's generation had to
>confront the nitty-gritty of history at first hand; hence, they tended to have
>a common-sensical realism about power and its uses.
>
amount of cynicism about the competence and/or trustworthiness of those
in power - see, for example, some parts of "Popski's Private Army" by
Peniakoff, and I believe Waugh's "Sword of Honour" books (with which I
am less familiar).
Politics based on idealistic views of human nature could and did survive
the war, one example being the social legislation in the UK just after
the war, and more generally the policies of the UK Labour party from
then till its near-death experience against Thatcherism. (I don't ask
you to believe that those policies were correct - only that they assumed
a world in which, for instance, people would work hard, well, and as
directed without explicit financial incentives for doing so. This is
stated in "The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists" - a pre-war book that
became a minor icon of the Labour movement(http://www.unionhistory.info/
ragged/ragged.php, http://www.gutenberg.net/etext/3608). I believe this
to be an exclusively urban myth - rural labourers know what real hard
work is).
>The 'long peace' that followed WWII, and particularly after the postwar
>reconstruction period, have encouraged an increasing amount of moralistic
>princess-and-the-pea syndrome, in the US and even more back on the eastern
>shore of the pond.
>
Few politicians are genuinely constrained by personal morality: when
sufficiently provoked, the most apparently limp-wristed proponent of
bleeding heart liberalism will unleash an inner tribal warrior just as
prone to vicious personal attack and dirty fighting as that of any
social darwinist.
IMHO for every "we can't possibly do that" argument there is a 'black
magic' "if it is dirty, it must work" argument - and neither of the two
arguments are more than flannel thought up to defend a position. I
suspect that we need experience from those who really are at the sharp
end, plus careful study not yet done.
Black magic that may not work - there seems to be at least some evidence
that amateurs that use torture hear only what their victim thinks they
want to hear, and that effective professionals by and large don't use
torture - preferring carefully prepared questions to subjects not under
extreme stress who will be rewarded if their intelligence checks out. I
also remember seeing a congressman almost roaring "DO YOU KNOW WHY WE
DON'T DO THIS??" - I think his point was that amateurs who suggested
that working against Bin Laden justified torture had forgotten that
every US serviceman and women was a potential victim of torture if it
became regarded as acceptable, in any circumstance.
ObSf/Yasid - There is a nice short story I can't place in which a
liberal colonial officer works hard to do things his own way, fearful
that the brute force ideas of an older worker will prevail. At the end
of the story, successful at his work, he desperately argues against the
crude approach of the old school. His superiors tell him his argument is
wrong-headed: their only requirement is success, not morality - but
since he was successful, his methods (if not his philosophy) will become
standard practice in this situation.
--
A.G.McDowell
Charlie Stross
as <joats...@aol.com> declared:
>>From: Charlie Stross cha...@antipope.org
>
>>Politics in the 1914-1989 period was unavoidably influenced by the way the
> balance of power shifted in the wake of the disintegration of the old
> monarchies
>
> -- actually, Hobbesian, Social-Darwinist (and for that matter
> Aryanist-racialist) theories were rife in Europe before 1914; the war just
> broke down the barriers which had kept them marginalized and their extreme
> forms out of mainstream political and cultural life.
>
> Both Hitler and Lenin/Stalin were quintessial products of the Belle Epoque, but
> of its lunatic fringe, who took to their logical conclusion ideas which had
> been floating around the zeitgeist in their youth.
Yes, exactly. (I thought I'd made that clear?) The monarchies collapsed,
and what was waiting in the wings was a whole bunch of stuff that had
never been given a chance to discredit itself in a controlled manner.
> If you read, say, Rider Haggard or Conan Doyle, you'll be startled to
> occasionally come across what sound like "Nazi" ideas. They aren't; they're
> just the intellectual commonplaces of their era.
Ditto oh, John Buchan. Or just about any other writer of the time who
incorporated adventure or politics as themes and therefore had to suck
in some kind of background to justify it.
....
> The 'long peace' that followed WWII, and particularly after the postwar
> reconstruction period, have encouraged an increasing amount of moralistic
> princess-and-the-pea syndrome, in the US and even more back on the eastern
> shore of the pond.
>
> The fact that this holiday from history is visibly coming to an end is
> provoking no end of angst, as illusions -- of 'international law', of 'social
> progress', secularism, etc. -- are pricked and shown to be mere contingent
> historical soap-bubbles.
While the holiday from history might be coming to an end, this is where
I part company with you. We had two gigantic successes in the 1945-89
period. Success Story (1) was the fact that we manifestly didn't
exterminate ourselves; the balance of terror was, well, terrifying to live
through (about 30-40% of the folks my age who I know and who grew up here
on Airstrip One exhibit what look to me like symptoms of post-traumatic
stress disorder left over from exposure to fears of nuclear annihilation
at an early age) but it kept us alive. And Success Story (2) was the much
lower-key steel and coal pact that Ate Europe -- and stopped the French
and Germans getting it together for round five of their epic knock-out
(if you count round 1 as Napoleon I's little excursion eastwards).
It's beginning to look as if the prospect of a war within the EU is much
like the prospect of a war within the United States -- not likely in
the short to medium term. And there's nothing like freedom from foreign
jackboots marching on your soil to encourage odd ideas about an end of
history, the triumph of liberal democracy, etcetera.
The long-term prognosis I'll leave to someone who hasn't been born yet,
except in fiction: but I'll note in passing that as of a couple of years
ago constitutional democracy had gone from being a minority pursuit of
about 10-15% of the planet in 1950 (and a radical revolutionary ideology
in 1900) to being the system on which a majority of nations run. I'll
take that as an indicator of progress, if you don't mind.
-- Charlie
phil hunt
>>reconstruction period, have encouraged an increasing amount of moralistic
>>princess-and-the-pea syndrome, in the US and even more back on the eastern
>>shore of the pond.
>>
>Few politicians are genuinely constrained by personal morality:
This is in part a selection effect -- people with real moral qualms
are less likely to get to the top than those without.
--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
(Email: zen19725 at zen dot co dot uk)
Margaret Young
snipping various interesting comments
> We had two gigantic successes in the 1945-89
>period. Success Story (1) was the fact that we manifestly didn't
>exterminate ourselves; the balance of terror was, well, terrifying to live
>through (about 30-40% of the folks my age who I know and who grew up here
>on Airstrip One exhibit what look to me like symptoms of post-traumatic
>stress disorder left over from exposure to fears of nuclear annihilation
>at an early age) but it kept us alive.
I would really be interesting in reading more from you on this subject--I
suspect this is a very defensible claim but one I hadn't heard stated in quite
this way before.
--
Margaret Young
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Come the apocalypse there will be cockroaches, Keith Richards and the
faint smell of cat pee.
phil hunt
>I part company with you. We had two gigantic successes in the 1945-89
>period. Success Story (1) was the fact that we manifestly didn't
>exterminate ourselves; the balance of terror was, well, terrifying to live
>through (about 30-40% of the folks my age who I know and who grew up here
>on Airstrip One exhibit what look to me like symptoms of post-traumatic
>stress disorder left over from exposure to fears of nuclear annihilation
>at an early age)
I can't say I've ever noticed that, but there is a culture of
ridiculous over-emphasis on safety in the UK -- for example there
was a recent newspaper story about kids being banned from playing
conkers -- and I wonder if that's one of the root causes?
>It's beginning to look as if the prospect of a war within the EU is much
>like the prospect of a war within the United States
(About 0.5% likelyhood per year, if the historical record is
anything to go by.)
>-- not likely in
>the short to medium term.
It would appear to be. Certainly threats of military force within
the EU are noticable in their absence (even veiled threats). Until
recently I assumed this would continue to be the case in the EU, but
now I'm not so sure.
phil hunt
>>From: Mark_R...@hotmail.com (Mark Reichert)
>
>>You mean boys will be boys?
>
>-- more like "people will be people".
>
>You can no more purge aggression, tribalism and violence from their behaviors
>than you can get rid of altruism or rationality.
That's no longer true. People have a differing amount of genetic
propensity to all of these things, and with modern technology it
would be possible to (1) determine which genes correlate with
behaviours that are deemed undesirable, and (2) edit out those genes
from future people.
I expect at least one country will make serious efforts to do this
in this century.
>Each has its appropriate role,
True -- humans wouldn't evolve behaviours that didn't improve their
adaptedness.
>History moves, but it isn't "going anywhere". That's the teleological myth of
>progress. Actually it just changes.
Draw a graph of %age of people who a literate ofver time, for the
last 5000 years. The trend is upwards.
Ditto for life expectency.
Ditto for the effectiveness of weapons; progress too, of a sort.
>>I wonder what level the casual brutality would reach on the sociopathy scale.
>
>-- you're confusing different phenomenon.
>
>Sociopathy is a mental disorder, and probably biological in origin, although it
>can also be induced by certain types of stress during the appropriate latency
>periods.
>
>We were talking about differing cultural mores.
>
>In other words, sociopaths have no sense of right and wrong. We were
>discussing what is _considered_ right and wrong, and to what degree.
It's been observed that politicians often show signs of
sociopathy. Thus, it may well be the case that in a mild form, it
can be adaptive. In some situations, of course -- the main
difference between humans and other species is the increased
plasticity in our behaviour, so one would expect that sociopathy is
learned behaviour to some extent.
(Many mental illnesses can be considered exaggerated versions of
behaviour that is adaptive in some situations).
A.G.McDowell
<cha...@antipope.org> writes
>period. Success Story (1) was the fact that we manifestly didn't
>exterminate ourselves; the balance of terror was, well, terrifying to live
>through (about 30-40% of the folks my age who I know and who grew up here
>on Airstrip One exhibit what look to me like symptoms of post-traumatic
>stress disorder left over from exposure to fears of nuclear annihilation
>at an early age) but it kept us alive. And Success Story (2) was the much
real odds of nuclear annihilation, most people were only made aware of
this at second hand, largely by political speeches or the written word.
Compare this with the probability of death from disease or violence
throughout most of our evolution - or the probability of death by car
accident today - reinforced by personal example - the only instances of
sudden death and serious injury I am personally aware of are through car
and motorcycle accidents, yet I myself drive a car and ride a bicycle to
work, without really considering the odds, except theoretically. Safety
campaigners of all kinds seem to have to work exceptionally hard to get
their message across. (I don't know if this counts as part of Airstrip
One or not, but I grew up in (a sleepy rural part of) Northern Ireland).
--
A.G.McDowell
Nancy Lebovitz
Charlie Stross <cha...@antipope.org> wrote:
>
>While the holiday from history might be coming to an end, this is where
>I part company with you. We had two gigantic successes in the 1945-89
>period. Success Story (1) was the fact that we manifestly didn't
>exterminate ourselves; the balance of terror was, well, terrifying to live
>through (about 30-40% of the folks my age who I know and who grew up here
>on Airstrip One exhibit what look to me like symptoms of post-traumatic
>stress disorder left over from exposure to fears of nuclear annihilation
>at an early age) but it kept us alive. And Success Story (2) was the much
Details? I've wondered how much depression is caused by the pervasiveness
of predictions of disaster (nuclear, population, ecological, climate).
>lower-key steel and coal pact that Ate Europe -- and stopped the French
>and Germans getting it together for round five of their epic knock-out
And that's something I haven't heard of, so I'd like to see more
about it, too.
>(if you count round 1 as Napoleon I's little excursion eastwards).
>
--
--
Nancy Lebovitz http://www.nancybuttons.com
"We've tamed the lightning and taught sand to give error messages."
http://livejournal.com/users/nancylebov
Nancy Lebovitz
JoatSimeon <joats...@aol.com> wrote:
>>From: Mark_R...@hotmail.com (Mark Reichert)
>
>>You mean boys will be boys?
>
>-- more like "people will be people".
>
>You can no more purge aggression, tribalism and violence from their behaviors
>than you can get rid of altruism or rationality.
>
>Each has its appropriate role, and needs to be channeled within the framework
>of proper socialization. Hysteria doesn't help.
>
>The "Lord of the Flies" is an illustrative work there. Cf. also Freud's concept
>of the "return of the repressed", which has a lot better grounding than most of
>his theories.
_The Lord of the Flies_ is a novel. Actual human societies are considerably
more complex and necessarily operate on longer range considerations.
J Cresswell-Jones
"phil hunt" <zen1...@zen.co.uk> wrote in message
news:slrncmifme....@cabalamat.somewhere...
> On 10 Oct 2004 05:54:46 GMT, JoatSimeon <joats...@aol.com> wrote:
> >>From: Mark_R...@hotmail.com (Mark Reichert)
> >
> >>You mean boys will be boys?
> >
> >-- more like "people will be people".
> >
> >You can no more purge aggression, tribalism and violence from their
behaviors
> >than you can get rid of altruism or rationality.
>
> That's no longer true. People have a differing amount of genetic
> propensity to all of these things, and with modern technology it
> would be possible to (1) determine which genes correlate with
> behaviours that are deemed undesirable, and (2) edit out those genes
> from future people.
>
> I expect at least one country will make serious efforts to do this
> in this century.
ObHeinlein, _Beyond This Horizon_:
"...the technique of para-ectogenesis was seized on as a God-given
opportunity to get rid of war by stamping it out of the human spirit.
After the Atomic War of 1970, the survivors instituted drastic genetic
regulations intended for one purpose alone--the Parmalee-Hitchcock recessive
of the ninth chromosome and to eliminate the dominant which usually masks
it--to breed sheep rather than wolves.
It is wryly amusing that most of the "wolves" of the period--the
Parmalee-Hitchcock island is recessive; there are few natural "sheep"--were
caught by the hysteria and co-operated in the attempt to eliminate
themselves. But some refused. The Northwest Colony eventually resulted.
That the Northwest Union should eventually fight the rest of the world
was a biological necessity. The outcome was equally a necessity and the
details are unimportant. The "wolves" ate the "sheep"."
It's possible that a society could focus more on the "own goals" of losses
to internal disorganized violence, and deliberately reduce the capacity for
violence of its citizens, accepting the possibility that said citizens will
be preyed upon by everyone else in the world who does not reduce their own
aggressiveness.
Ie, take the theorectical nation of Niceland, pop. 10 million and original
murder rate 4.0, which is losing 400 citizens a year to internal violence.
If it could cut the rate in half, it saves 200 lives each year, so even if
it now suffers additional mayhem from the rest of the world which 'senses
weakness' (an arguable point) to the sum of 100 people a year, it's coming
out ahead.
One problem is that murder rates of different locales within the same
country can vary between 1.0 and 24.0 *without* any sort of genetic
engineering being involved. The external factors are so varied as to
overshadow any likely genetic mods.
Charlie Stross
> In article <mlbn32...@antipope.org>,
> Charlie Stross <cha...@antipope.org> wrote:
>>
>>While the holiday from history might be coming to an end, this is where
>>I part company with you. We had two gigantic successes in the 1945-89
>>period. Success Story (1) was the fact that we manifestly didn't
>>exterminate ourselves; the balance of terror was, well, terrifying to live
>>through (about 30-40% of the folks my age who I know and who grew up here
>>on Airstrip One exhibit what look to me like symptoms of post-traumatic
>>stress disorder left over from exposure to fears of nuclear annihilation
>>at an early age) but it kept us alive. And Success Story (2) was the much
>
> Details? I've wondered how much depression is caused by the pervasiveness
> of predictions of disaster (nuclear, population, ecological, climate).
Emergent side-effect of the first half of the Cold War. From about 1940
onwards, when Winston Churchill suckered Roosevelt into joining in WW2,
the UK served as America's unsinkable aircraft carrier off the coast of
the Third Reich. Stalin, being no dummy, recognized this as a continuing
trend after the war; there were, IIRC, about 60,000 US troops in the UK
as recently as 1990. In event of WW3 ever breaking out, any US military
attempt to resupply forces in western Europe was bound to use the UK's
port facilities as a strategic gateway. (Leaving aside the fact that the
UK was also the most powerful second-tier nation in the theatre,
militarily, until the late 1960's or later.)
With the advent of nukes on both sides, the USSR had a big strategic
problem -- namely, it was difficult for them to build weapons systems
that could credibly strike the US heartland. But it was dead easy to
build medium range ones (IRBMs and medium-range bombers) that could
reach the UK, which was only about 1200 miles from Warsaw Pact
territory.
So, despite all the "duck and cover" hoopla of the 1950's, the real
targets of most of the USSR's early nukes lay in Western Europe -- and a
whole bunch of them in the UK. Which is actually a very small place, in
US terms. Even by 1962, it was pretty obvious that in event of a nuclear
war the UK was going to be a smoking hole in the North Atlantic and a
death toll in the first 24 hours likely to exceed 66% (and expected to
top 90% within 6-12 months after a nuclear war). If you grew up in the
US in that period, you at least had some hope of survival unless you
lived in the heart of a big city like NYC; in the UK, game over.
So there's the background. Add on top of it the fact that during the
_second_ half of the cold war, the UK progressively lost influence on
the world stage. During the 1980's the cold war seemed to be run -- from
a UK perspective -- by a deranged cowboy who actually *wanted* Brezhnev
to make his day, with the assistance or connivance of Maggie Thatcher
(who had a bed reserved for her in a government bunker somewhere). There
was a serious sense of powerlessness and pervasive low-level nihilism
among teenagers growing up during that period that went beyond the
usual live-fast-die-young-leave-a-pretty-corpse denial of maturation;
young people basically grew up expecting to be murdered by distant
politicians.
This manifest itself in several ways. For one thing, I don't think there
was a US equivalent of CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament --
at least, nothing on the same scale as the British movement (which was
basically a crie de coeur: "don't kill us!"). And for another, asking
people around me about their nightmares threw up a surprising number
who said they'd had regular dreams about dying in a nuclear holocaust,
right through their teens and early twenties, until the collapse of the
Berlin Wall. And the whole thing coloured their attitude and outlook on
life, to things like studying (why go to college if you're going to
die?) or saving (ditto) or planning for the future or having kids.
>>lower-key steel and coal pact that Ate Europe -- and stopped the French
>>and Germans getting it together for round five of their epic knock-out
>
> And that's something I haven't heard of, so I'd like to see more
> about it, too.
Hint: these days it's grown a wee bit, and we call it the EU.
-- Charlie
A.G.McDowell
<na...@unix5.netaxs.com> writes
>In article <20041010015446...@mb-m03.aol.com>,
>
>_The Lord of the Flies_ is a novel. Actual human societies are considerably
>more complex and necessarily operate on longer range considerations.
here. Good google keywords: "game theory hawk dove". It is likely that
the proportion of sheep/doves vs wolves/hawks does oscillate over time.
Whether we have/are wolves because of genes, upbringing, or a
combination of the two may take a little longer to work out.
--
A.G.McDowell
Danny Sichel
> Emergent side-effect of the first half of the Cold War. From about 1940
> onwards, when Winston Churchill suckered Roosevelt into joining in WW2,
That's not at all fair. Roosevelt was looking for an excuse, and thank
god Churchill helped him find one.
Walter Bushell
Charlie Stross <cha...@antipope.org> wrote:
<snip>
> Emergent side-effect of the first half of the Cold War. From about 1940
> onwards, when Winston Churchill suckered Roosevelt into joining in WW2,
> the UK served as America's unsinkable aircraft carrier off the coast of
> the Third Reich. Stalin, being no dummy, recognized this as a continuing
> trend after the war; there were,
Germany declared war on the US first.
--
Guns don't kill people; automobiles kill people.
Louann Miller
wrote:
If this is going to turn into a Pearl Harbor conspiracy thread, I'd
rather not. Been, done, got.
Louann, with a pretty comprehensive collection of Gordon Prange on the
topic.
James Nicoll
Walter Bushell <pr...@panix.com> wrote:
>In article <if3o32-...@antipope.org>,
> Charlie Stross <cha...@antipope.org> wrote:
><snip>
>> Emergent side-effect of the first half of the Cold War. From about 1940
>> onwards, when Winston Churchill suckered Roosevelt into joining in WW2,
>> the UK served as America's unsinkable aircraft carrier off the coast of
>> the Third Reich. Stalin, being no dummy, recognized this as a continuing
>> trend after the war; there were,
><snip>
>
>Germany declared war on the US first.
Lend-lease came around before Hitler's Third Big Oopsie
(Provoking Britain and France in war being H's First BO, and invading
Russia being the second BO).
--
"You work for the A-Sharp beings, and you help out the E-flat beings
and you've done considerable for the B Major beings. But what have you
done for the _sound absorbent_ beings?"
Coyu, giving [Rot Lop Fan] a hard time.
JoatSimeon
>That's no longer true. People have a differing amount of genetic propensity to
all of these things
-- the statement should be "may no longer be true at some point in the future".
>Draw a graph of %age of people who a literate ofver time, for the last 5000
years. The trend is upwards.
-- only quite recently. There's no smooth upward curve, just jerks and bumps
occasionally.
Eg., draw a curve of the trend in aircraft speeds.
JoatSimeon
>Success Story (1) was the fact that we manifestly didn't exterminate
ourselves; the balance of terror was, well, terrifying to live
through
-- actually, it never bothered me much, or anyone I know, and I remember the
family packing for a trip to the fallout shelter in 1962.
(My father was slated for the Canadian national command bunker; he thought,
probably rightly, that the rest of the family would have a better chance in the
shelter we built under our country cottage.)
I mean, we're all going to die in the end, Charlie, and most of us slowly, inch
by inch, in tremendously agonizing pain and fear. And it can happen to anyone
at any time, any second from birth to --
arrrghhh...aahhggrrrra... 8-).
Why get all bent out of shape about a marginal chance it may happen a bit
early? Que sera, sera.
By your calculation, we all ought to be traumatized by the realization we're
going to get cancer eventually, or whatever.
There was never the slightest chance we'd exterminate ourselves, anyway. In the
worst-possible-case scenario we could kill hundreds of millions and destroy
civilization, yes. Exterminate the species, no.
>And Success Story (2) was the much lower-key steel and coal pact that Ate
Europe
-- the Europeans haven't become more peaceful because they've discovered
Enlightenment, but because (a) they're an American protectorate and the
Americans do their fighting for them, and (b) they're culturally exhausted and
decadent.
That is, they've never recovered from the shocks to their morale in the 1914-45
period.
In other words, they went off war because first, their experience of it was so
bad and secondly because they could afford to do so as someone was looking out
for them.
For the US, by way of contrast, the past century has largely been a series of
successes, bought at reasonable cost. You can see the psychological difference
in the war memorials.
>to encourage odd ideas about an end of
history, the triumph of liberal democracy, etcetera.
-- one shouldn't mistake the local weather conditions for the global climate.
JoatSimeon
>Until recently I assumed this would continue to be the case in the EU, but
now I'm not so sure.
-- well, the EU's boundaries now touch Russia's, and will soon touch Iran,
Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia.
Much happiness to y'all...
JoatSimeon
change in attitudes which has made Turkish accession to the EU possible.
They've been knocking on the door for 40-odd years, after all.
Turkey now has about the same birth-rate as France.
(TFR of 1.9 vs. France at 1.85).
JoatSimeon
>it was dead easy to build medium range ones (IRBMs and medium-range bombers)
that could reach the UK
-- someone once defined a "tactical nuclear weapon" as "one which explodes in
Germany".
>There was a serious sense of powerlessness and pervasive low-level nihilism
among teenagers
-- by the 1980's, the USSR had plenty of weapons which could reach the US.
Didn't seem to bother us all that much.
(And teenagers (or most people, for that matter) are utterly powerless anyway.
I get to cast one of 120 million votes next November -- whoopie-**it, as the
saying goes.)
Of course, one should also remember that sweating and blinking and looking
scared are a VERY bad way to win a Mexican Standoff situation.
Giggling and drooling and fingering the pin on the grenade you're casually
tossing up and down work a _lot_ better.
Let the other guy be scared -- and give up.
JoatSimeon
>If this is going to turn into a Pearl Harbor conspiracy thread, I'd rather
not. Been, done, got.
-- not the same thing at all. Few serious observers at the time, and few
serious historians since, have doubted that FDR wanted to get the US into the
war as soon as possible after the fall of France.
That's when he realized Hitler (who he'd always hated and feared) might win if
the US didn't intervene directly.
There's no evidence of a conspiracy, or hiding the Japanese intentions, or
anything.
FDR was infuriated when the US forces were caught napping -- he'd been telling
them for months that war with Japan was a high probability.
But he'd been deliberately pushing measures which left Japan no choice but a
humiliating climb-down and war, and he'd been ordering the US forces to attack
German U-boats.
David Bilek
>>From: Charlie Stross cha...@antipope.org
>>And Success Story (2) was the much lower-key steel and coal pact that Ate
>Europe
>
>-- the Europeans haven't become more peaceful because they've discovered
>Enlightenment, but because (a) they're an American protectorate and the
>Americans do their fighting for them, and (b) they're culturally exhausted and
>decadent.
>
>That is, they've never recovered from the shocks to their morale in the 1914-45
>period.
>
>In other words, they went off war because first, their experience of it was so
>bad and secondly because they could afford to do so as someone was looking out
>for them.
>
>For the US, by way of contrast, the past century has largely been a series of
>successes, bought at reasonable cost. You can see the psychological difference
>in the war memorials.
>
It's not nice to point this out constantly.
I read another article about the death of Russia today. It's even
worse than I'd feared. Time to plan a visit. I don't expect a
recognizable "Russia" will exist for much longer.
How could one of the only two superpowers to ever exist destroy itself
so quickly?
-David
Sean O'Hara
>>From: Louann Miller loua...@yahoo.net
>
>
>>If this is going to turn into a Pearl Harbor conspiracy thread, I'd rather
>
> not. Been, done, got.
>
> -- not the same thing at all. Few serious observers at the time, and few
> serious historians since, have doubted that FDR wanted to get the US into the
> war as soon as possible after the fall of France.
>
Something else to keep in mind is that prior to Germany's declaration
of war on the US, it wasn't at all clear that a US/Japanese war would
lead to the US joining the fight in Europe.
--
Sean O'Hara | http://diogenes-sinope.blogspot.com
I hate breaking up into discussion groups, feel-good movies about the
mentally disabled, and the entire oeuvre of Barbra Streisand.
-Jonah Goldberg
Keith Soltys
>
>This manifest itself in several ways. For one thing, I don't think there
>was a US equivalent of CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament --
>at least, nothing on the same scale as the British movement (which was
>basically a crie de coeur: "don't kill us!"). And for another, asking
>people around me about their nightmares threw up a surprising number
>who said they'd had regular dreams about dying in a nuclear holocaust,
>right through their teens and early twenties, until the collapse of the
>Berlin Wall. And the whole thing coloured their attitude and outlook on
>life, to things like studying (why go to college if you're going to
>die?) or saving (ditto) or planning for the future or having kids.
>
>
>
>-- Charlie
I suspect that more than a few of those nightmares were caused by the 1960s
short film The War Game (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059894/), about a
nuclear attack on Britain. One of the most chilling films I've ever seen-I
still get the creeps thinking about it 30 years after seeing it.
Keith
Walter Bushell
David Bilek <dtb...@comcast.net> wrote:
Being a superpower is _expensive_. Raygun bankrupted them, I mean they
had to keep up, now didn't they?
David Bilek
>In article <d2cjm098v8aq5tiqa...@4ax.com>,
> David Bilek <dtb...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
>>
>> I read another article about the death of Russia today. It's even
>> worse than I'd feared. Time to plan a visit. I don't expect a
>> recognizable "Russia" will exist for much longer.
>>
>> How could one of the only two superpowers to ever exist destroy itself
>> so quickly?
>>
>
>had to keep up, now didn't they?
I'm not talking about their economy. Economies go into the toilet,
economies recover.
I'm talking about their nation and their people. The population will
be halved in something like 40 years. And it'll keep going down from
there.
-David
Paul F. Dietz
> I'm talking about their nation and their people. The population will
> be halved in something like 40 years. And it'll keep going down from
> there.
That's also arguably the case in some western european countries, isn't it?
Paul
Nancy Lebovitz
JoatSimeon <joats...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>-- the Europeans haven't become more peaceful because they've discovered
>Enlightenment, but because (a) they're an American protectorate and the
>Americans do their fighting for them, and (b) they're culturally exhausted and
>decadent.
Do you mean that if they were sound, cheery, healthy people, they'd be
having more wars?
>
>That is, they've never recovered from the shocks to their morale in the 1914-45
>period.
>
>In other words, they went off war because first, their experience of it was so
>bad and secondly because they could afford to do so as someone was looking out
>for them.
>
>For the US, by way of contrast, the past century has largely been a series of
>successes, bought at reasonable cost. You can see the psychological difference
>in the war memorials.
Details?
>>to encourage odd ideas about an end of
>history, the triumph of liberal democracy, etcetera.
>
>-- one shouldn't mistake the local weather conditions for the global climate.
Indeed, but sometimes the climate *does* change.
Walter Bushell
David Bilek <dtb...@comcast.net> wrote:
The moral factor goes with the economy when it is extreme enough, if you
cannot pay the police they become corrupt, the infrastructure fall
apart, medicine and education become bad jokes and so on. In the Soviet
Union the idea of a profit was frowned upon for many years, so only
gangsters will go for profit.
Oh yes, the Soviet Union was an empire and what they put together by
force is coming apart.
Walter Bushell
Absent conquest "Russia" consists of the Moscow and environs.
>
> How could one of the only two superpowers to ever exist destroy itself
> so quickly?
>
> -David
--
David Bilek
>In article <20041010155237...@mb-m18.aol.com>,
>JoatSimeon <joats...@aol.com> wrote:
>>
>>In other words, they went off war because first, their experience of it was so
>>bad and secondly because they could afford to do so as someone was looking out
>>for them.
>>
>>For the US, by way of contrast, the past century has largely been a series of
>>successes, bought at reasonable cost. You can see the psychological difference
>>in the war memorials.
>
>Details?
>
European war memorials are, on the average, much more somber and even
despairing. US memorials tend to the triumphalist, with the latest
(the WWII memorial) being positively Nuremburgesque.
The Vietnam memorial is downright exuberant compared to, say, La Mort
Homme of Verdun. And this thing is celebrating a great *victory*:
http://www.tnovosel.org/greatwargraphics/La%20Mort%20Homme-2.jpg
For comparison, here's the WWII memorial in D.C. Scale it up about
fifty times and you could march a whole lot of jackbooted soldiers
around:
http://www.wwiimemorial.com/construction/photos/2004-5memorial_plaza.jpg
-David
Walter Bushell
David Bilek <dtb...@comcast.net> wrote:
Well it is a point it is not 50 times its size, but note phallic symbol
in background.
Vronan
> >From: Charlie Stross cha...@antipope.org
>
> >Politics in the 1914-1989 period was unavoidably influenced by the way the
> balance of power shifted in the wake of the disintegration of the old
> monarchies
>
> -- actually, Hobbesian, Social-Darwinist (and for that matter
> Aryanist-racialist) theories were rife in Europe before 1914; the war just
> broke down the barriers which had kept them marginalized and their extreme
> forms out of mainstream political and cultural life.
>
> Both Hitler and Lenin/Stalin were quintessial products of the Belle Epoque, but
> of its lunatic fringe, who took to their logical conclusion ideas which had
> been floating around the zeitgeist in their youth.
>
> If you read, say, Rider Haggard or Conan Doyle, you'll be startled to
> occasionally come across what sound like "Nazi" ideas. They aren't; they're
> just the intellectual commonplaces of their era.
>
> >If you place Piper against the backdrop of WW1/WW2, the politics in his
> writing aren't totally out of whack. But whether they're out of whack in
> another context is, well, another matter.
>
> -- I think you're confusing cause and effect. Piper's generation had to
> confront the nitty-gritty of history at first hand; hence, they tended to have
> a common-sensical realism about power and its uses.
>
> The 'long peace' that followed WWII, and particularly after the postwar
> reconstruction period, have encouraged an increasing amount of moralistic
> princess-and-the-pea syndrome, in the US and even more back on the eastern
> shore of the pond.
>
> The fact that this holiday from history is visibly coming to an end is
What end? If by "long peace" you mean absence of war between
superpowers, this is going to last for the foreseable future.
Regional wars, proxy wars and general Third World bloodletting were
going on after WW2 and will continue, but are you seriously arguing
that danger of WW3 is greater now than 15 or 20 years ago ?
> provoking no end of angst, as illusions -- of 'international law',
International law is as strong as it always was - even Dubya had to
make lip service to it. :-)
> of 'social
> progress',
The Americans are discussing *gay marriage*. What is it, if not social
progress ?
>secularism,
Religion is growing only at the gunpoint in the Muslim world.
Otherwise, godlessnes is on the rise.
etc. -- are pricked and shown to be mere contingent
> historical soap-bubbles.
Vronan
> Stoned koala bears drooled eucalyptus spittle in awe
>
> >>From: Charlie Stross cha...@antipope.org
>
> >>Politics in the 1914-1989 period was unavoidably influenced by the way the
> > balance of power shifted in the wake of the disintegration of the old
> > monarchies
> >
> > -- actually, Hobbesian, Social-Darwinist (and for that matter
> > Aryanist-racialist) theories were rife in Europe before 1914; the war just
> > broke down the barriers which had kept them marginalized and their extreme
> > forms out of mainstream political and cultural life.
> >
> > Both Hitler and Lenin/Stalin were quintessial products of the Belle Epoque, but
> > of its lunatic fringe, who took to their logical conclusion ideas which had
> > been floating around the zeitgeist in their youth.
>
> and what was waiting in the wings was a whole bunch of stuff that had
> never been given a chance to discredit itself in a controlled manner.
> > If you read, say, Rider Haggard or Conan Doyle, you'll be startled to
> > occasionally come across what sound like "Nazi" ideas. They aren't; they're
> > just the intellectual commonplaces of their era.
>
> incorporated adventure or politics as themes and therefore had to suck
> in some kind of background to justify it.
>
> ....
> > The 'long peace' that followed WWII, and particularly after the postwar
> > reconstruction period, have encouraged an increasing amount of moralistic
> > princess-and-the-pea syndrome, in the US and even more back on the eastern
> > shore of the pond.
> >
> > The fact that this holiday from history is visibly coming to an end is
> > progress', secularism, etc. -- are pricked and shown to be mere contingent
> > historical soap-bubbles.
>
> I part company with you. We had two gigantic successes in the 1945-89
> exterminate ourselves; the balance of terror was, well, terrifying to live
> on Airstrip One exhibit what look to me like symptoms of post-traumatic
> stress disorder left over from exposure to fears of nuclear annihilation
> at an early age)
I will guess that you
1/ are not a doctor
2/ grew up among very unusual people
3/ are just a little bit exagerrating
4/ all of the above ;-))))
Post-traumatic stress disorder is a real and nasty condition, very
different from ordinary shock and fear.
Just as clinical depression is something different than the feelings
you have, when, forex, your girlfriend dumps you and your pet hamster
dies.
Had 30% of British population really suffered from PTSD, Britain would
be far less pleasant place.
but it kept us alive. And Success Story (2) was the much
> lower-key steel and coal pact that Ate Europe -- and stopped the French
> and Germans getting it together for round five of their epic knock-out
> (if you count round 1 as Napoleon I's little excursion eastwards).
You forgot Louis XIV 8-)
It seems to me more plausible that the Soviet threat had something
with it. Look at the East Asia - there is no "Asian Union", but there
was no war of revenge between Korea and Japan (and if you think that
French have a grudge against Germans, look what Koreans think about
Japan...)
>
> It's beginning to look as if the prospect of a war within the EU is much
> like the prospect of a war within the United States -- not likely in
> the short to medium term. And there's nothing like freedom from foreign
> jackboots marching on your soil to encourage odd ideas about an end of
> history, the triumph of liberal democracy, etcetera.
>
> The long-term prognosis I'll leave to someone who hasn't been born yet,
> except in fiction: but I'll note in passing that as of a couple of years
> ago constitutional democracy had gone from being a minority pursuit of
> about 10-15% of the planet in 1950 (and a radical revolutionary ideology
> in 1900) to being the system on which a majority of nations run. I'll
> take that as an indicator of progress, if you don't mind.
>
>
> -- Charlie
J.B. Moreno
> Danny Sichel <dsi...@canada.com> wrote:
>
> >Charlie Stross wrote:
> >
> >> Emergent side-effect of the first half of the Cold War. From about 1940
> >> onwards, when Winston Churchill suckered Roosevelt into joining in WW2,
> >
> >That's not at all fair. Roosevelt was looking for an excuse, and thank
> >god Churchill helped him find one.
>
> If this is going to turn into a Pearl Harbor conspiracy thread, I'd
> rather not. Been, done, got.
Conspiracy theorist are almost uniformily idiots, and this is no
exception, but....
In this case, a Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory is not only stupid, it
also leads away from the real thing that was going on -- to whit, FDR's
policies were such that he was doing everything short of declaring war
himself to get in on both fronts of the world war.
If Pearl Harbor had actually been a FDR conspiracy, what happened would
have been drastically different: instead of catching us with our pants
down, it'd have been the other way around. He would have wanted us to
counter-attack as soon as their intentions were unmistakable.
I'm not sure if the Japanese had what we would consider "cause" for a
declaration of war, but the Germans certainly did, no if, and's or buts
about it. And in both cases it's clear that he was putting as much into
supporting their foes as he could *without* a declaration of war.
(Which is why it was such a stupid thing for the Japanese to attack
Pearl Harbor and for the Germans to "support" them with a declaration of
war. It's like they both sat down and asked what they could give FDR as
a Christmas present. With the declarations of war, his support for
their foes was only limited by our own interest).
--
JBM
"Everything is futile." -- Marvin of Borg
Keith F. Lynch
> (And teenagers (or most people, for that matter) are utterly
> powerless anyway. I get to cast one of 120 million votes next
> November -- whoopie-**it, as the saying goes.)
Millions of Americans -- more than at any time in the past eighty
years -- are forbidden from voting.
> Of course, one should also remember that sweating and blinking and
> looking scared are a VERY bad way to win a Mexican Standoff situation.
It's best of all not to play Russian Roulette in the first place.
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.
Keith F. Lynch
> ... as of a couple of years ago constitutional democracy had gone
> from being a minority pursuit of about 10-15% of the planet in 1950
> (and a radical revolutionary ideology in 1900) to being the system
> on which a majority of nations run.
Perhaps some radical revolutionary ideology of today, such as
libertarian anarchism, will be the majority opinion in another
century.
Lawrence Watt-Evans
wrote:
>European war memorials are, on the average, much more somber and even
>despairing. US memorials tend to the triumphalist, with the latest
>(the WWII memorial) being positively Nuremburgesque.
>
>The Vietnam memorial is downright exuberant compared to, say, La Mort
>Homme of Verdun. And this thing is celebrating a great *victory*:
Um. Having seen both first-hand, I wouldn't go that far. They're
both pretty damned depressing -- but yeah, the one in Verdun is
moreso.
It is, however, an extreme; the D-Day memorials in Normandy are more
in the American tradition. (The French ones, not just the American
ones; I know there are both.)
Is the old Soviet eternal flame still burning in what used to be East
Berlin? That one was pretty somber.
(In 1971 I took a high school field trip to Europe that was organized
by a guy with a real thing for war memorials; I saw a LOT of them, and
caught more on subsequent trips, as well. Those from the 20th century
do run much more downbeat than American ones. 19th-century ones, on
the other hand, are often so pompous and militarist they're scary.)
Mark Atwood
>
> How could one of the only two superpowers to ever exist destroy itself
> so quickly?
They didn't. Quickly, that is.
It can take years and years of invisible cancer metastasis for someone to
"suddenly get sick and die in a week".
Sort of the flip side of the observation that "behind every overnight
success, there are years and years of very hard work".
--
Mark Atwood | When you do things right, people won't be sure
m...@pobox.com | you've done anything at all.
http://www.pobox.com/~mra | http://www.livejournal.com/users/fallenpegasus
Mark Atwood
> JoatSimeon <joats...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>> Of course, one should also remember that sweating and blinking and
>> looking scared are a VERY bad way to win a Mexican Standoff situation.
>
> It's best of all not to play Russian Roulette in the first place.
Once can, indeed yes, choose not to play Russian Roulette.
However, that was not the game that Steve said. He said "Mexican
Standoff". And you *cannot* choose not to play Mexican Standoff. You
can choose to immediately lose the game, as many people do (and wish
to legislatively force everyone else to "choose" to do the same), or
you can immediately lose the game if you are slow or unlucky, but once
you are past those two stages, and the game has begun, your only
choises are to, again, decide to lose, or else try to win, one way or
another (and there are multiple ways to win).
But getting back to my point, once someone wants to play Mexican Standoff
with you, you CANNOT NOT play.
David Bilek
>On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 01:46:21 GMT, David Bilek <dtb...@comcast.net>
>wrote:
>
>>European war memorials are, on the average, much more somber and even
>>despairing. US memorials tend to the triumphalist, with the latest
>>(the WWII memorial) being positively Nuremburgesque.
>>
>>The Vietnam memorial is downright exuberant compared to, say, La Mort
>>Homme of Verdun. And this thing is celebrating a great *victory*:
>
>Um. Having seen both first-hand, I wouldn't go that far. They're
>both pretty damned depressing -- but yeah, the one in Verdun is
>moreso.
>
I must admit that I didn't find the Vietnam Memorial depressing. It
makes its point, of course, but I don't feel much when looking at it.
I wasn't alive for the war so it probably doesn't have the same
visceral impact. On the other hand, I do find La Mort Homme
depressing as hell and I obviously wasn't around for World War I
either so that can't be the only explanation.
>It is, however, an extreme; the D-Day memorials in Normandy are more
>in the American tradition. (The French ones, not just the American
>ones; I know there are both.)
>
>Is the old Soviet eternal flame still burning in what used to be East
>Berlin? That one was pretty somber.
>
>(In 1971 I took a high school field trip to Europe that was organized
>by a guy with a real thing for war memorials; I saw a LOT of them, and
>caught more on subsequent trips, as well. Those from the 20th century
>do run much more downbeat than American ones. 19th-century ones, on
>the other hand, are often so pompous and militarist they're scary.)
>
I think that was the point. 20th century European war memorials run
much more downbeat than American ones, and much MUCH more downbeat
than 19th century European ones. Yes, that's it exactly.
Europe got the !*@*!@ kicked out of it by the 20th century and,
judging both from what I've seen from afar and while visiting Europe,
it hasn't recovered.
-David
JoatSimeon
>What end? If by "long peace" you mean absence of war between superpowers, this
is going to last for the foreseable future
-- well, since there's only one superpower for the foreseeable future it would
be difficult to have a war between 'em.
But the Cold War actually acted as a serious constraint on military action -by-
the major powers. Both by deterring them, and by providing a countervailing
force. Great powers didn't clash directly.
What we're getting now is a situation more like the post-1814 world, where
"strike for global domination" wars are off the table for the moment, and one
power has a general hegemony, but smaller conflicts are more possible precisely
_because_ they don't have a chance of escalating globally.
The cycle of world wars and preparation for same that ran from the 1890's
through 1991 is over; we're back to the era of 'cabinet warfare'.
World war won't be a factor again until some power -- possibly China -- is able
to contest American hegemony on a global scale.
JoatSimeon
>International law is as strong as it always was
-- which ain't saying much.
"International law" is a phrase which leads to a lot of misunderstanding.
People confuse it with the sort of law sovereign states have within their own
boundaries, and it's nothing of the sort.
(There are even people who believe the UN, Ghu help us, can "make laws").
Law in the commonly understood sense of the word is _enforceable_, through the
power of the State; that's its distinguishing characteristic.
_Between_ sovereign states there are treaties, conventions, and consensus modes
of operation, but no laws in that sense.
Nothing constrains a sovereign state to abide by treaties and so forth, except
fear of retaliation.
Nobody can make you abide by the Geneva Convention, for example, except the
victor after a war.
Which is why the only real war crime is losing -- compare and contrast Vladimir
"Butcher of the Chechens" Putin and Slobodan "Butcher of the Bosniaks"
Milosevic, the one on trial, the other an honored guest.
States do abide by such conventional standards, when they do, because they
calculate it's to their own advantage.
"International law" is more like "rules by which Mafia families relate to each
other" than "we have a law against armed robbery in Massachussetts."
International affairs is not ruled by law; it's an anarchy in the strict sense
of the term, ruled by force in various forms and the threat of it.
That doesn't mean that it's chaotic, just that there are no cops except
self-appointed ones.
JoatSimeon
>The Americans are discussing *gay marriage*. What is it, if not social
progress ?
-- it's a change in mores. Social progress would be something more on the
nature of fulfilling the expectations of, oh, Clement Attlee's government.
JoatSimeon
>Religion is growing only at the gunpoint in the Muslim world. Otherwise,
godlessnes is on the rise.
-- nope, not at all.
The US, for example, has a higher percentage of active believers now than it
did in 1904 (and it was higher in 1904 than in 1804, IIRC.)
In fact, Americans are more religious than the British were in 1851, according
to the religious census of that year.
82% of the population here believe in the Virgin Birth. And less than a third
believe in evolution.
Americans are getting more and more religious, not least because the religious
ones have more children -- which is a primary reason American birth-rates are
so much higher than European ones, and rising rather than falling.
Meanwhile, the various religions of the Book procede on a broad invincible
front around the world -- the number of Christians in Africa has gone from less
than 9 million to over 400 million in the last century, for instance.
And the number in China (mostly American-style Evangelical Protestants) is
growing by many millions a year -- they're already something like 4% of the
total population, up from less than 1% a generation ago. Given a continuation
of present trends, they'll be over a 20% in the 2030's.
Secularism has proved to be a local, probably temporary habit among a few
European populations.
This is sort of distressing if one is an atheist -- I am -- but not surprising.
JoatSimeon
>I read another article about the death of Russia today. It's even worse than
I'd feared. Time to plan a visit. I don't expect a recognizable "Russia" will
exist for much longer.
-- well, I wouldn't go quite that far, but it's bad.
>How could one of the only two superpowers to ever exist destroy itself
-- killing off 60 million of their own people was a good start.
Lenin and Stalin between them, with an assist from Hitler, destroyed the
demographic vitality of the Slavic peoples of the USSR. They've never really
recovered from the Great Terror and WWII.
And that sort of thing has deep, long-lasting effects on popular culture and
basic collective self-image.
JoatSimeon
>Being a superpower is _expensive_. Raygun bankrupted them, I mean they
had to keep up, now didn't they?
-- The USSR at its peak had a GDP about the size of Italy's, if you use a
generous measuring stick.
Superpower status is only expensive if you can't afford it, and they couldn't
-- they were spending 25%+ of their GDP on their military.
The US, by way of contrast, rarely spent more than about 7-8% at the peak of
Cold War expenditures. And now spends about half that.
That's chump change; American taxation levels are about half those of most EU
members.
Nancy Lebovitz
>>In article <20041010155237...@mb-m18.aol.com>,
>>JoatSimeon <joats...@aol.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>In other words, they went off war because first, their experience of it was so
>>>bad and secondly because they could afford to do so as someone was looking out
>>>for them.
>>>
>>>For the US, by way of contrast, the past century has largely been a series of
>>>successes, bought at reasonable cost. You can see the psychological difference
>>>in the war memorials.
>>
>>Details?
>>
>
>European war memorials are, on the average, much more somber and even
>despairing. US memorials tend to the triumphalist, with the latest
>(the WWII memorial) being positively Nuremburgesque.
>
>The Vietnam memorial is downright exuberant compared to, say, La Mort
>Homme of Verdun. And this thing is celebrating a great *victory*:
>
>http://www.tnovosel.org/greatwargraphics/La%20Mort%20Homme-2.jpg
A matter of taste, I think. The Verdun monument is bleak, but imho
excessively dignified compared to war.
What I want is a monument that lists *all* the dead from a war--
military from all sides and as many of the civilians whose names can
be found. How about a tomb for the unknown civilian?
>
>For comparison, here's the WWII memorial in D.C. Scale it up about
>fifty times and you could march a whole lot of jackbooted soldiers
>around:
>
>http://www.wwiimemorial.com/construction/photos/2004-5memorial_plaza.jpg
I wouldn't exactly call it cheerful--and it's interesting for reducing
soldiers to ciphers (unless there's some detail I'm not picking up)
rather than choosing a single heroic image.
JoatSimeon
>I'm talking about their nation and their people. The population will be
halved in something like 40 years. And it'll keep going down from there.
-- yeah, but that's nothing unique to Russia.
Eg., China's population will start falling within the next 20 years on current
trends.
It's already only growing at about 0.45% per annum (the US grows at about 1%)
and that rate is falling fast.
In fact, the whole _world's_ population will start falling sometime between
2030 and 2050, on current trends.
By 2040, the median age in China will be 44, in Europe 53, and in the US 37 --
the latter being about the same as it is now.
The US is virtually unique in the developed world and increasingly constrasts
with the underdeveloped world as well(*) in having about replacement-level
fertility and an upward trend in birth-rates.
(*) the US now has a higher birth-rate than Algeria, Tunisia, Brazil, China,
Turkey, Iran, Sri Lanka, etc.
Figures from the CIA World Factbook, which I recommend, btw.
Nancy Lebovitz
JoatSimeon <joats...@aol.com> wrote:
>>From: Walter Bushell pr...@panix.com
>
>>Being a superpower is _expensive_. Raygun bankrupted them, I mean they
>had to keep up, now didn't they?
>
>-- The USSR at its peak had a GDP about the size of Italy's, if you use a
>generous measuring stick.
You mean Italy could have been a superpower for a while if it had spent
25% of its GDP on their military?
>
>Superpower status is only expensive if you can't afford it, and they couldn't
>-- they were spending 25%+ of their GDP on their military.
>
>The US, by way of contrast, rarely spent more than about 7-8% at the peak of
>Cold War expenditures. And now spends about half that.
>
>That's chump change; American taxation levels are about half those of most EU
>members.
JoatSimeon
>Do you mean that if they were sound, cheery, healthy people, they'd be having
more wars?
-- or at least be capable of them. War runs on altruism, and a transcendant
belief in something beyond the personal.
Who would seriously think that France or Germany could produce again the
stubborn sacrificial valor of, say, September 1914 again?
That willingness to put the collective good ahead of personal interests just
isn't there any more -- however badly they needed it.
Incidentally, this is why countries should be careful about drawing on this
sort of "spiritual capital". It takes a long time to regenerate, especially if
it's wasted.
>Details?
-- eagles, flags, invocations of victory. It's particularly striking if you
look at US and, say, German (or even French or British) WWI memorials standing
close to each other.
Of course, my favorite memorial to the World Wars is a dual inscription by a
doughboy in a bunker in NW France, near where I was born.
The first one is dated 1918, and gives name and hometown.
The second one dates from 1944, and reads: "I hope to God I never see this
***king bunker again."
>Indeed, but sometimes the climate *does* change.
-- yeah, but we're overdue for a sudden-onset ice age. C02 emissions may be
all that's saving us... 8-).
JoatSimeon
>The Vietnam memorial is downright exuberant compared to, say, La Mort
Homme of Verdun. And this thing is celebrating a great *victory*:
-- true, but remember that Verdun was a _phyrric_ victory.
The German general who planned it tapped his finger on the map and said: "Here
France shall bleed to death."
And that's about what happened. They've never been the same since. IIRC, more
Frenchmen died at Verdun in a month than we lost in Vietnam in 8 years, from a
population 5x larger.
>For comparison, here's the WWII memorial in D.C. Scale it up about fifty
times and you could march a whole lot of jackbooted soldiers around:
-- true. And there's the Marine Corps flag-raising monument.
JoatSimeon
>Is the old Soviet eternal flame still burning in what used to be East Berlin?
That one was pretty somber.
-- not surprising, since the Red Army lost nearly as many men taking Berlin
than we lost in the _whole of World War Two_.
Most Soviet war memorials are harshly triumphalist in tone -- giant allegorical
figures brandishing swords and so forth.
The one in Budapest used to be known to locals as "the Tomb of the Unknown
Rapist".
Nancy Lebovitz
JoatSimeon <joats...@aol.com> wrote:
>>From: na...@unix5.netaxs.com (Nancy Lebovitz)
>
>>Do you mean that if they were sound, cheery, healthy people, they'd be having
>more wars?
>
>-- or at least be capable of them. War runs on altruism, and a transcendant
>belief in something beyond the personal.
Are those necessarily good things?
>
>Who would seriously think that France or Germany could produce again the
>stubborn sacrificial valor of, say, September 1914 again?
Why would anyone want them to?
I can understand wanting people to put everything they've got into
opposing a real evil, but afaik WWI was just head-butting.
>That willingness to put the collective good ahead of personal interests just
>isn't there any more -- however badly they needed it.
I suppose the question is whether it was actually a collective good
or a collective madness.
>
>Incidentally, this is why countries should be careful about drawing on this
>sort of "spiritual capital". It takes a long time to regenerate, especially if
>it's wasted.
See above.
JoatSimeon
>You mean Italy could have been a superpower for a while if it had spent 25% of
its GDP on their military?
-- you need area and population as well as raw GDP. It could have been/could
be a much more significant military power if it wanted to be.
Before 1939, Italy was a Great Power, if only marginally -- an old Hungarian
joke runs:
Q: Why did God create Italians?
A: So even the Austrians could beat _somebody_.
JoatSimeon
>Are those necessarily good things?
-- they're essentials to collective survival, in the long run.
>I can understand wanting people to put everything they've got into opposing a
real evil, but afaik WWI was just head-butting.
-- WWII certainly wasn't; and that time, the French just folded; their will to
fight at all levels evaporated after the first serious setbacks.
(They were also operationally outclassed, but that's another discussion.)
Whether consenting to be an exploited, impoverished German satellite in 1914
would have been better that fighting (which was essentially the choice) is a
different matter.
The French of 1914 certainly thought it was, and the Germans of the time, while
not as bad as those of 1939-45, did have exceedingly nasty plans for Europe.
The _capacity_ is what's at question here, not what it's used for.
The emotional/cultural underpinnings are the same whether you're fighting
Kaiser Willy or Hitler.
If you can't defend yourself, you can't be self-governing. The best you can
hope for is a kindly master.
Thomas
> >From: zen1...@zen.co.uk (phil hunt)
>
> >Until recently I assumed this would continue to be the case in the EU, but
> now I'm not so sure.
>
> -- well, the EU's boundaries now touch Russia's, and will soon touch Iran,
> Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia.
>
> Much happiness to y'all...
And barring the russian nuclear arsenal, all of those are utter
non-threaths.- Pundits and usenetters keep comparing the military
capabilities of the EU with the US and Poo-hooing the military strength
of europe on that basis, but since we are not going to be fighting the
US the appropriate scale is the millitary might of our potential
adversaries, which is an entirely diffrent matter.
Quite frankly I think that it is quite likely that one of the unions
less enlightened neighbours will sooner or later listen to one too many
commentators denouncing europe as the home of the pacifistic surrender
monkey and try to abitrate a dispute with a memberstate by force. At
which point the folly of their ways will be pointed out to them by a
large number of products from the european industrial complex.
(IE: Eurofighters, rafales and leopard IIs).
raycun
> >From: David Bilek dtb...@comcast.net
>
> >I'm talking about their nation and their people. The population will be
> halved in something like 40 years. And it'll keep going down from there.
>
> -- yeah, but that's nothing unique to Russia.
>
> Eg., China's population will start falling within the next 20 years on current
> trends.
>
> It's already only growing at about 0.45% per annum (the US grows at about 1%)
> and that rate is falling fast.
>
> In fact, the whole _world's_ population will start falling sometime between
> 2030 and 2050, on current trends.
>
> By 2040, the median age in China will be 44, in Europe 53, and in the US 37 --
> the latter being about the same as it is now.
Yeah, and by 1985 the population of the UK will have shrunk to 33 million.
http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002653.html#comments
Ray
Keith Soltys
>Meanwhile, the various religions of the Book procede on a broad invincible
>front around the world -- the number of Christians in Africa has gone from less
>than 9 million to over 400 million in the last century, for instance.
>
>And the number in China (mostly American-style Evangelical Protestants) is
>growing by many millions a year -- they're already something like 4% of the
>total population, up from less than 1% a generation ago. Given a continuation
>of present trends, they'll be over a 20% in the 2030's.
>
>Secularism has proved to be a local, probably temporary habit among a few
>European populations.
>
>This is sort of distressing if one is an atheist -- I am -- but not surprising.
Heard an interesting interview on the CBC this morning that discussed the rise
of evangelical movements in third-world countries. Brazil was mentioned - one
new evangelical church per day opening. Mostly of the converts are among the
poor, no surprise there.
Keith
@hotmail.com.invalid Eric D. Berge
<cha...@antipope.org> wrote:
>
>I will confess that a certain knee-jerk rejection of Piper's ideological
>underpinnings for the Paratime stories crept into my own next novel[*],
>and I can quite see why Eric might look at them and go "ick"
AOL to that, and I never thought to hear myself agreeing with Flint.
I reread "Space Viking" and "Kalvan" recently (favorites of mine when
I was young, back in the mid-70s), and was surprised at the depth of
of my distaste for some of the ideology therein - Viking, in
particular, has a bunch of drivel about how raiding primitive planets
is actually good for them, since it encourages them to develop; Piper
also spends some time laying out his open contempt for democracy in
the latter portions of that book, which winds up with an hereditary
aristocrat taking over the reins of power to set things right after an
unpleasant interlude of mob rule.
Sean O'Hara
>
> In fact, the whole _world's_ population will start falling sometime between
> 2030 and 2050, on current trends.
>
would exceed the planet's carrying capacity by 2000.
Population trend lines aren't much better than tarot cards.
--
Sean O'Hara | http://diogenes-sinope.blogspot.com
Steve: Oh yeah, the Prime Minister, eh? He sure has screwed up things
for Newfoundland. Life just hasn't been the same since he made sodomy
illegal.
-South Park
Mark Atwood
>
> The US, for example, has a higher percentage of active believers now than it
> did in 1904 (and it was higher in 1904 than in 1804, IIRC.)
That's a (small) cheat of a statement however, in that 1904 and 1804
were both low ebbs in religiousity. Such low ebbs tend to, about a
generation later, turn into "high ebbs", and thus the wheel turns.
Mark Atwood
>
> Heard an interesting interview on the CBC this morning that
> discussed the rise of evangelical movements in third-world
> countries. Brazil was mentioned - one new evangelical church per day
> opening. Mostly of the converts are among the poor, no surprise
> there.
That's how Christianity spreads, modulo the (relative to other world
religions) occatioanly cases were it was spread by the sword or by
gov't decree. It's a memecluster optimized to spread into the poor,
the fallen, the hopeless, those with despair.
Mark Atwood
>
> -- not surprising, since the Red Army lost nearly as many men taking Berlin
> than we lost in the _whole of World War Two_.
That's because Russian generals stupidly spend men the way American
generals spend breath. And the Soviet Experiment just made them more
so.
If the Russians would/could get a freaking clue, they wouldnt be world
leaders in self-losses.
But then, after doing it that way, you probably *cant* get your
officers and to get your men to do what is necessary to fight
differently.
Sean O'Hara
>
> European war memorials are, on the average, much more somber and even
> despairing. US memorials tend to the triumphalist, with the latest
> (the WWII memorial) being positively Nuremburgesque.
>
Soldier in Berlin, for example, was a twenty foot tower with a twenty
foot bronze soldier on top stretching a protective hand towards the
city -- and by "city" I mean *West* Berlin, because it was situated
along the border, facing the NATO side. The tower was flanked by two
tanks, 01 and 02, supposedly the first two to enter the city. (I say
"supposedly" because there was another memorial in East Berlin that
was also flanked by two more tanks labeled 01 and 02.)
Compare this to the Tomb of the Unknown in Arlington, which is only
triumphalist in that it's built on Robert E. Lee's lawn.
> The Vietnam memorial is downright exuberant compared to, say, La Mort
> Homme of Verdun. And this thing is celebrating a great *victory*:
>
That's like saying Bosch was practically painting fuzzy bunnies
compared to Dore.
> http://www.tnovosel.org/greatwargraphics/La%20Mort%20Homme-2.jpg
>
> For comparison, here's the WWII memorial in D.C. Scale it up about
> fifty times and you could march a whole lot of jackbooted soldiers
> around:
>
> http://www.wwiimemorial.com/construction/photos/2004-5memorial_plaza.jpg
>
Jackboots go equally well with somberness and triumphalism. The Soviet
Eternal Flame in Berlin, which LWE mentioned downthread as
particularly somber, was not only guarded by a squad of jackbooted
soldiers, but they *goosestepped* during the changing of the guard.
--
Sean O'Hara | http://diogenes-sinope.blogspot.com
Leela: Discussion is for the wise and the helpless, and I am neither.
-Doctor Who
Peter D. Tillman
Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> wrote:
> Keith Soltys <ksoltys@-NOSPAM-rogers.com> writes:
> >
> > Heard an interesting interview on the CBC this morning that
> > discussed the rise of evangelical movements in third-world
> > countries. Brazil was mentioned - one new evangelical church per day
> > opening. Mostly of the converts are among the poor, no surprise
> > there.
>
> That's how Christianity spreads, modulo the (relative to other world
> religions) occatioanly cases were it was spread by the sword or by
> gov't decree. It's a memecluster optimized to spread into the poor,
> the fallen, the hopeless, those with despair.
And, it's worth recalling, these folks get secular benefits too --
schools, food, self-help groups, and help in coping with being poor etc.
In the countries where Christainity is growing fastest, the Churches are
just about the only social safety net.
Incidentally, IB Mormonism is still the fastest-growing Christain sect
worldwide.
Cheers -- Pete Tillman
Thomas
> In article <20041011044058...@mb-m11.aol.com>,
> JoatSimeon <joats...@aol.com> wrote:
> >>From: Walter Bushell pr...@panix.com
>
> >>Being a superpower is _expensive_. Raygun bankrupted them, I mean they
> >had to keep up, now didn't they?
> >
> >-- The USSR at its peak had a GDP about the size of Italy's, if you use a
> >generous measuring stick.
>
> You mean Italy could have been a superpower for a while if it had spent
> 25% of its GDP on their military?
> >Superpower status is only expensive if you can't afford it, and they couldn't
> >-- they were spending 25%+ of their GDP on their military.
> >
> >The US, by way of contrast, rarely spent more than about 7-8% at the peak of
> >Cold War expenditures. And now spends about half that.
> >
> >That's chump change; American taxation levels are about half those of most EU
> >members.
Only for very liberal definitions of "half" US tax-income is 29.somthing
percent of gdp, while the preenlargment EU averaged out to 41.something
percent. It is a bit lower now since most of the new members have
extremely low taxes. For example Slovakia has a flat tax-rate of 19 %.
Sales, corporate, income: 19%.
Simple tallying of military expiditure also indicates that the Union
would grow one hell of a lot stronger in a military sense if we unified
our military structure. No need to spend a single extra cent, simply
redirecting the current EU spending to a single military organisation
rather than a dozen+ national militaries would result in much, much greater
force-projection capabilities. Reason we don't? Well, there are no real
threats to face down and it would require a shitload of work from our
politicos, who are buzy trying to fix the economy.
Which seques nicely to my new pet theory - Which I'll call the theory of
finite government competence: The political process appears to be able to
accomplish nearly anything, but the more things it tries to do the less
well they get done. I think that this is a result of simple overstrech:
Any given society only has so many highly skilled and honest people who
are willing to go into government and civil service. If the recruiting
system works they get hired/elected first* and as long as there is enough
to go around the state runs well. Some cultures and edcational systems
produce more honest and hardworking people for government service than
others, but trying to duplicate the achivements of scandinavia without
the cultural underpinnings or the educational system is a Bad Idea.
This is one reason the US is not as statist as the rest of the western
world, they've got the educated populance, but the cultural tendency
towards contempt and supicion of govenrment gives the US state sector
a serious recruiting problem. Basically most of the people who would
make great senators, presidents or department heads are buzy in the
private sector instead.
*If it does /not/ work: Congratulations! You are a third-world country.
David Bilek
>>From: David Bilek dtb...@comcast.net
>
>>The Vietnam memorial is downright exuberant compared to, say, La Mort
>Homme of Verdun. And this thing is celebrating a great *victory*:
>
>-- true, but remember that Verdun was a _phyrric_ victory.
>
>The German general who planned it tapped his finger on the map and said: "Here
>France shall bleed to death."
>
>And that's about what happened. They've never been the same since. IIRC, more
>Frenchmen died at Verdun in a month than we lost in Vietnam in 8 years, from a
>population 5x larger.
>
Didn't the British lose more casualties in the first day of the Somme
than we lost in 8 years in Vietnam? I can't imagine how you can
suffer about 60,000 casualties in a few hours and keep sending men
into the grinder.
-David
wth...@godzilla.acpub.duke.edu
> In article <d2cjm098v8aq5tiqa...@4ax.com>,
> David Bilek <dtb...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> Being a superpower is _expensive_. Raygun bankrupted them, I mean they
> had to keep up, now didn't they?
>
According to Khruschev, no. He warned Brezhnev that
massive military expenditure would bankrupt the
USSR, but B and company were hardly likely to listen,
since that policy was essentially what caused Khruschev's
downfall.
In particular, he was against the formation of a huge
soviet surface navy. IIRC by '75 the soviet surface navy
was the world's largest (second largest, anyway) and can
anyone think of anything this huge fleet accomplished?
Aside from helping to bankrupt the USSR, of course.
William Hyde
EOS Department
Duke University
wth...@godzilla.acpub.duke.edu
>
> European war memorials are, on the average, much more somber and even
> despairing. US memorials tend to the triumphalist, with the latest
> (the WWII memorial) being positively Nuremburgesque.
>
> The Vietnam memorial is downright exuberant compared to, say, La Mort
> Homme of Verdun. And this thing is celebrating a great *victory*:
A victory in which the French lost several times more dead than
the Americans did in Vietnam. And from a far smaller population.
Google says 166,000 dead and missing for the French at
Verdun.
Peter D. Tillman
joats...@aol.com (JoatSimeon) wrote:
> >From: David Bilek dtb...@comcast.net
>
> >I'm talking about their nation and their people. The population will be
> halved in something like 40 years. And it'll keep going down from there.
>
> -- yeah, but that's nothing unique to Russia.
Well, what's unique to Russia is the decline in life expectancy --- now
down to 58 yrs for a Russian male at birth. He'd live longer if he were
born in Bangladesh. SFAIK, this sort of drop in life expectancy, and
public health, is unprecedented for an industrial country. Plus, they're
in full AIDS denial!
Figures from M. Specter's 10-11-04 NYer article, which doesn't seem to
be online? [Googles] Ah,
<http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?041011fa_fact1>
What a pathetic website. No search feature! Slow as molasses. And full
of annoying popups. Gah.
>
> Eg., China's population will start falling within the next 20 years on current
> trends.
>
> It's already only growing at about 0.45% per annum (the US grows at about 1%)
> and that rate is falling fast.
>
> In fact, the whole _world's_ population will start falling sometime between
> 2030 and 2050, on current trends.
>
> By 2040, the median age in China will be 44, in Europe 53, and in the US 37 --
> the latter being about the same as it is now.
Huh. China's internal pop growth is likely to recover, as Chinese move
into the depopulated parts of the old USSR -- esp. eastern Siberia --
and as the Chinese govt. drops the "one child" policy. We can hope that
the Russian govt. is smart enough [1] to realise that encouraging
immigration is in their own interest, but it seems more likely that
there will be a new Russo-Chinese war in the next few decades, with
Russia losing a big chunk, if not all, of their remnant Far Eastern
empire.
>
> The US is virtually unique in the developed world and increasingly constrasts
> with the underdeveloped world as well(*) in having about replacement-level
> fertility and an upward trend in birth-rates.
>
> (*) the US now has a higher birth-rate than Algeria, Tunisia, Brazil, China,
> Turkey, Iran, Sri Lanka, etc.
>
> Figures from the CIA World Factbook, which I recommend, btw.
Is this online? URL? And how reliable is their work?
[1] Has the Russian/Soviet govt *ever* made the smart choice at a major
decision point? Where 'smart' = better for the Russian polity as a
whole, as opposed to better for the current ruler (and even *there*,
they usually guess wrong). A remarkable country.
Cheers -- Pete Tillman
--
Against stupidity, the Gods themselves rage in vain.
-- Friedrich von Schiller
James Angove
news:6sjlm0thgh7k3m8rc...@4ax.com:
>
> Didn't the British lose more casualties in the first day of the Somme
> than we lost in 8 years in Vietnam? I can't imagine how you can
> suffer about 60,000 casualties in a few hours and keep sending men
> into the grinder.
>
According to Wikipedia, casualties the first day were 57,470 casualties,
with 19,240 dead. Not to quite as bad as Vietnam in a day, but close
enough for government work..
Wikipedia gives total British deaths of 419,654 for the duration of the
battle. Since its starting to bug me not to list everybody else as well:
(I just tabed this out after coping it from the wikipedia. If it doesn't
work on your newsreader, sorry)
Australia 26,880
Britain & Ireland 355,000+
Canada & Newfoundland 26,000
New Zealand 7,408
South Africa 3,000+
French 204,253
Germany 465,000 – 600,000
The error bars on those German figures are really large, but I can't find
a better count.
--
James Angove
Peter D. Tillman
And me three, especially wrt _Space Viking_ and related works. Truly
repellant ideology, presented as if the author thought it was
self-evident.
Sorry to hear this is true of _Lord Kalvan_ too (crosses off reread
list).
Heck, maybe EF can give Piper an ideology-transplant for the next
reprint <GG>. Cracking good yarns, made unreadable by outdated ideology,
sigh.
Cheers -- Pete Tillman
--
"There seems to have been considerable damage here."
-- Emperor Hirohito, on seeing Hiroshima, 1945 [WSJ 3-31-99]
David Cowie
> In article <20041011044538...@mb-m11.aol.com>,
> joats...@aol.com (JoatSimeon) wrote:
>
(big snip)
>>
>> Figures from the CIA World Factbook, which I recommend, btw.
>
> Is this online? URL? And how reliable is their work?
>
Here it is: http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/
--
David Cowie
Containment Failure + 7970:39
David Bilek
>David Bilek <dtb...@comcast.net> writes:
>
>>
>> European war memorials are, on the average, much more somber and even
>> despairing. US memorials tend to the triumphalist, with the latest
>> (the WWII memorial) being positively Nuremburgesque.
>>
>> The Vietnam memorial is downright exuberant compared to, say, La Mort
>> Homme of Verdun. And this thing is celebrating a great *victory*:
>
> A victory in which the French lost several times more dead than
> the Americans did in Vietnam. And from a far smaller population.
>
Well, yes. If you've been reading the thread then you should know
that is the whole point. That European experience with war in the
20th century beat them down in a way that Americans have not
experienced.
-David
wth...@godzilla.acpub.duke.edu
> David Bilek <dtb...@comcast.net> wrote in
> news:6sjlm0thgh7k3m8rc...@4ax.com:
>
> >
> > Didn't the British lose more casualties in the first day of the Somme
> > than we lost in 8 years in Vietnam? I can't imagine how you can
> > suffer about 60,000 casualties in a few hours and keep sending men
> > into the grinder.
> >
>
> According to Wikipedia, casualties the first day were 57,470 casualties,
> with 19,240 dead. Not to quite as bad as Vietnam in a day, but close
> enough for government work..
>
> Wikipedia gives total British deaths of 419,654 for the duration of the
> battle.
Those are total casualties, not deaths. IIRC the British
Empire's total deaths for the war were about 700,000.
Since its starting to bug me not to list everybody else as well:
>
> (I just tabed this out after coping it from the wikipedia. If it doesn't
> work on your newsreader, sorry)
>
> Australia 26,880
> Britain & Ireland 355,000+
> Canada & Newfoundland 26,000
> New Zealand 7,408
> South Africa 3,000+
> French 204,253
> Germany 465,000 - 600,000
>
> The error bars on those German figures are really large, but I can't find
> a better count.
Could be that a different defintion of "wounded" was
employed by the two sides at this point.
wth...@godzilla.acpub.duke.edu
Agreed. But I wasn't quite sure that some of the posters
knew the actual disparity in casualties. But I note that
someone else posted it, anyway.
I tend to respond to things like this because in real life
I run into an astonishing number of well educated people
who have no idea as to the scale of things in WWI. Call
it a reflex.