It's interesting how Western society has decided that Odysseyus is the big hero of the Trojan War.
I guess it's for two reasons:
1) Western society is built on the notion that wisdom beats strength, and Odysseus was the one who came up with the Trojan Horse idea, so of course we see him as an intellectual hero rather than a sniveling wretch too craven to fight up-front like a man.
2) The author made Odysseus the main character of the sequel, although there's a lot of fanfic about the rest of the people involved (indeed, Virgil wrote a whole series of spinoff fanfics about a minor character!)
In fact, in that second one I find a common misconception (one that, in fact, I held myself.) People think of Odysseus's quest to return to Penelope as being some kind of romantic thing; he's got to get home to his wife! That's probably part of our attraction to the character.
But...the Classic Greeks didn't think like that. She wasn't his object of romantic affection; really, she was property, more like a slave than anything else. If there's romance involved it's Odysseus and Circe.
"I had occasion to fly over AMARC and saw the fruits of our Cold War labor..."
Yes, you flew in an airliner that's an evolution of technology first developed in the middle of the century, using navigation systems based on satellites first proposed and worked on in the middle of the century, and stuffed with microprocessors whose predecessors were invented to support the air-defense network built in the middle of the century. And you were able to make this flight because of satellite-based weather predictions--which satellites were, again, first built and orbited in the middle of the century.
Your original argument was that "[t]he aerospace industry of the late 50s featured fiasco after fiasco." You've backed off to "oh, well, all military spending is inherently foolish" and "technology can't solve everything" and similar platitudes.
"I see I’m about to get the Tang Argument, wherein every modern invention can be ascribed to NASA."
I should point out here that you're the only one who's brought up NASA so far.
I like how you just totally sailed by the successes I cited. So you honestly believe that weather satellites aren't a useful thing that we successfully developed?
And before you say "NASA built those"...no, they didn't. The weather satellite program was run by the Air Force and the NRO, and was exactly the kind of consistent and remarkable success that you believe never happened.
"The idiocy of Mutual Assured Destruction..."
...is an entirely-logical outcome of game theory. I guess you aren't up on your logic studies. I mean, I'm sure you've read the Wikipedia article about the Prisoner's Dilemma and therefore consider yourself an expert, but since you don't understand where MAD came from then you clearly have a long way to go.
Here, let's ask this: Why, in the context of global nuclear war, would a ballistic-missile defense system be destabilizing?
Dude...Corona? DMSP? Microprocessors? You're saying that these don't represent success stories, that they weren't successful efforts, that they didn't produce technology that's useful and being used today? (Or are you suggesting that the Russians had all these things first?)
You say you have the facts. Let's see some facts. Not "oh we had to play catchup" this, or "generalized fuckfuckery" that. Show me the facts.
If you want to point to Russian successes? Fine! That's not the same thing as suggesting that there were no American successes, that everything the Americans did was "generalized fuckfuckery".
Look, you've obviously got nothing here beyond the party-line Sovophile bullshit that the aerospace industry has had to deal with since Eisenhower's time. (And still has to deal with; viz. all the pantswetting over the PAK-FA, the S-400, the J-20, etcetera.)
Part of what we consider "freedom" in the past was, really, just ignorance. In the 1950s it might have been seen as unwarranted government interference to, say, put emissions limits on dioxins; but, in the 1950s, nobody really understood how bad dioxins were.
Perhaps we're nostalgaic for the ancient age of freedom, but maybe that's the nostalgia of a child who's been potty-trained.
Or hell, Windex and Clorox. Mix those two together and you've got fun on a bun. (Which always makes me laugh when these jackasses say that there's no way a bottle of clear liquid could be dangerous.)
It would be ironic, wouldn't it, if it turned out that fifty years of fighting institutionalized racism and bigotry has resulted in a government that's more intrusive and more overbearing than Orwell's worst nightmares.
If you shoot a gun at your face and miss, it doesn't mean that shooting guns at your face is safe. There's a difference between "un-necessary caution" and "didn't know any better".
Most of the research supporting seatbelts and airbags wasn't done until mid-century--but it does exist, and they do act to protect vehicle occupants from injury during an accident.
It's not so weird if you hate the thought of happy white people.
It is awfully cliche, though. I mean, the suburbs? Really? Beat that horse some more, the flesh hasn't completely fallen off yet. Oh, and tailfins on cars. Again.
I got a kick out of Daniel Abraham's "The Long Price Quartet".
I also liked David Drake's "Servant Of The Dragon", which is the best of a nine-book series which represents an interesting attempt to repeat the same story nine times. ...well, okay, that's not really the idea, but the basic structure of each book is almost completely the same, and "Dragon" is the best-written of the lot and well worth a read.
Walter Jon Williams's "Metropolitan", for all its technological trappings, is basically a fantasy novel. It's actually an early example of what we now call "urban fantasy".
"Rock Band (and Guitar Hero, for that matter) has done a very good job of bringing (guitar-based, anyway) music to the masses that they otherwise would never have heard."
And causing people to realize that they geniunely enjoy music that had always been seen as a hipster joke. I've lost count of the number of people who've said "I actually like Boston songs, what the hell is wrong with me"...
The reason that housing is seen as an investment is that if you could not make money through appreciation of property, then a better use of your money would be to rent a house and put your money in a mutual fund.
This would encourage the centralization of ownership, and the development of a large class of people who owned nothing but their cars and the clothes they stood in.
I do have to say that the 2008 crash is notable for being so obvious. It's like someone said "what is the exact thing we should not do? Okay, let's do exactly that!" It's almost comical in its simplicity. This is one of those things that people will read about fifty years from now, and be all "really? really, guys? I mean, you didn't know how stupid that was?"
But if it weren't for all those regulations, then people might be exploited by business owners. Or those business owners would cut corners and sell dangerous products, dump hazardous waste, do all kinds of nasty things.
I mean, it's clear--just by looking at the activities of the regulatory bureaucracy--that anyone who wants to own a business is a money-grubbing, lazy, greedy bastard who would sell his own mother to make a dollar.
Actually, even the "reports" didn't claim that he was using anyone as a shield. Brennan gets confused and babbles a bunch of different things. I'm figuring that what happened there was she stood up at the wrong time and the SeALs shot the shit out of her.
Dude...just stop. The only way to get banned here is to post someone else's personal information. It's obvious that you want them to ban you so you can be all "oh, I was too cool for them, so they had to ban me"
"In the case of Osama, we should do what we can to hold up that he died holding his wife as a human shield instead of shielding her…"
Considering the situation and the sources, I don't know if I'll believe anything reported about the incident other than "he was there, and when he left he had holes in him".
He was a bad man and we're better off that he's dead.
I don't know if I like the idea of people celebrating the fact.
On the one hand, if we're going to personalize political activity to that degree--martyrs, heroes, Big Bads--then we're playing right into the mindset that motivates the people we're fighting.
And on the other...the way some of these people are talking, you'd think it was them out there fast-roping into a building full of bad guys with machine guns, kicking in doors that might have a shotgun behind them, running through blacked-out buildings hoping that the guy behind them didn't aim too low? What the hell are people doing posting about it on Facebook like they personally pulled the trigger?
The problem with class analysis is that it's far too easy to answer criticisms with "well, that just shows we didn't define our classes properly! Redefine the classes and the problem goes away!" (Like the post above, where someone suggests that doctors are part of the working class.)
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Euripides: “Daughters of Troy”, the Spoilers of War”
It's interesting how Western society has decided that Odysseyus is the big hero of the Trojan War.
I guess it's for two reasons:
1) Western society is built on the notion that wisdom beats strength, and Odysseus was the one who came up with the Trojan Horse idea, so of course we see him as an intellectual hero rather than a sniveling wretch too craven to fight up-front like a man.
2) The author made Odysseus the main character of the sequel, although there's a lot of fanfic about the rest of the people involved (indeed, Virgil wrote a whole series of spinoff fanfics about a minor character!)
In fact, in that second one I find a common misconception (one that, in fact, I held myself.) People think of Odysseus's quest to return to Penelope as being some kind of romantic thing; he's got to get home to his wife! That's probably part of our attraction to the character.
But...the Classic Greeks didn't think like that. She wasn't his object of romantic affection; really, she was property, more like a slave than anything else. If there's romance involved it's Odysseus and Circe.
On “Nostalgia & Freedom”
"I had occasion to fly over AMARC and saw the fruits of our Cold War labor..."
Yes, you flew in an airliner that's an evolution of technology first developed in the middle of the century, using navigation systems based on satellites first proposed and worked on in the middle of the century, and stuffed with microprocessors whose predecessors were invented to support the air-defense network built in the middle of the century. And you were able to make this flight because of satellite-based weather predictions--which satellites were, again, first built and orbited in the middle of the century.
Your original argument was that "[t]he aerospace industry of the late 50s featured fiasco after fiasco." You've backed off to "oh, well, all military spending is inherently foolish" and "technology can't solve everything" and similar platitudes.
You're all done, hoss. All done.
"
"I see I’m about to get the Tang Argument, wherein every modern invention can be ascribed to NASA."
I should point out here that you're the only one who's brought up NASA so far.
I like how you just totally sailed by the successes I cited. So you honestly believe that weather satellites aren't a useful thing that we successfully developed?
And before you say "NASA built those"...no, they didn't. The weather satellite program was run by the Air Force and the NRO, and was exactly the kind of consistent and remarkable success that you believe never happened.
"The idiocy of Mutual Assured Destruction..."
...is an entirely-logical outcome of game theory. I guess you aren't up on your logic studies. I mean, I'm sure you've read the Wikipedia article about the Prisoner's Dilemma and therefore consider yourself an expert, but since you don't understand where MAD came from then you clearly have a long way to go.
Here, let's ask this: Why, in the context of global nuclear war, would a ballistic-missile defense system be destabilizing?
"
Dude...Corona? DMSP? Microprocessors? You're saying that these don't represent success stories, that they weren't successful efforts, that they didn't produce technology that's useful and being used today? (Or are you suggesting that the Russians had all these things first?)
You say you have the facts. Let's see some facts. Not "oh we had to play catchup" this, or "generalized fuckfuckery" that. Show me the facts.
If you want to point to Russian successes? Fine! That's not the same thing as suggesting that there were no American successes, that everything the Americans did was "generalized fuckfuckery".
Look, you've obviously got nothing here beyond the party-line Sovophile bullshit that the aerospace industry has had to deal with since Eisenhower's time. (And still has to deal with; viz. all the pantswetting over the PAK-FA, the S-400, the J-20, etcetera.)
"
To bring in a comment from up-thread:
Part of what we consider "freedom" in the past was, really, just ignorance. In the 1950s it might have been seen as unwarranted government interference to, say, put emissions limits on dioxins; but, in the 1950s, nobody really understood how bad dioxins were.
Perhaps we're nostalgaic for the ancient age of freedom, but maybe that's the nostalgia of a child who's been potty-trained.
"
Or hell, Windex and Clorox. Mix those two together and you've got fun on a bun. (Which always makes me laugh when these jackasses say that there's no way a bottle of clear liquid could be dangerous.)
"
You have no fucking idea what you are talking about. None. That was an embarrassing post even for you.
"
That's certainly true.
It would be ironic, wouldn't it, if it turned out that fifty years of fighting institutionalized racism and bigotry has resulted in a government that's more intrusive and more overbearing than Orwell's worst nightmares.
"
The aerospace industry is certainly nostalgaic for the back half of the 20th century. That's when we had all the money!
"
If you shoot a gun at your face and miss, it doesn't mean that shooting guns at your face is safe. There's a difference between "un-necessary caution" and "didn't know any better".
Most of the research supporting seatbelts and airbags wasn't done until mid-century--but it does exist, and they do act to protect vehicle occupants from injury during an accident.
"
It's not so weird if you hate the thought of happy white people.
It is awfully cliche, though. I mean, the suburbs? Really? Beat that horse some more, the flesh hasn't completely fallen off yet. Oh, and tailfins on cars. Again.
On “Are you watching ‘A Game of Thrones’ yet?”
Tell me about it. Unfortunately, he seems to be very much driven by his muse, and she's apparently done giving him ideas about Aiah and Constantine.
"
...aaaaand there you have it, two recs in a row for Abraham :D
"
I got a kick out of Daniel Abraham's "The Long Price Quartet".
I also liked David Drake's "Servant Of The Dragon", which is the best of a nine-book series which represents an interesting attempt to repeat the same story nine times. ...well, okay, that's not really the idea, but the basic structure of each book is almost completely the same, and "Dragon" is the best-written of the lot and well worth a read.
Walter Jon Williams's "Metropolitan", for all its technological trappings, is basically a fantasy novel. It's actually an early example of what we now call "urban fantasy".
On “Two Neglected Greats”
"Rock Band (and Guitar Hero, for that matter) has done a very good job of bringing (guitar-based, anyway) music to the masses that they otherwise would never have heard."
And causing people to realize that they geniunely enjoy music that had always been seen as a hipster joke. I've lost count of the number of people who've said "I actually like Boston songs, what the hell is wrong with me"...
On “Abandoned By Superman”
"Had Kal-El landed in the USSR, I have no doubt that he would have adopted their value system to some extent or another. Certainly not ours. "
Check out "Red Sun", which explores exactly that idea.
On “Keynes vs. Hayek, Round 2”
The reason that housing is seen as an investment is that if you could not make money through appreciation of property, then a better use of your money would be to rent a house and put your money in a mutual fund.
This would encourage the centralization of ownership, and the development of a large class of people who owned nothing but their cars and the clothes they stood in.
"
I do have to say that the 2008 crash is notable for being so obvious. It's like someone said "what is the exact thing we should not do? Okay, let's do exactly that!" It's almost comical in its simplicity. This is one of those things that people will read about fifty years from now, and be all "really? really, guys? I mean, you didn't know how stupid that was?"
"
But if it weren't for all those regulations, then people might be exploited by business owners. Or those business owners would cut corners and sell dangerous products, dump hazardous waste, do all kinds of nasty things.
I mean, it's clear--just by looking at the activities of the regulatory bureaucracy--that anyone who wants to own a business is a money-grubbing, lazy, greedy bastard who would sell his own mother to make a dollar.
On “The Dead”
Actually, even the "reports" didn't claim that he was using anyone as a shield. Brennan gets confused and babbles a bunch of different things. I'm figuring that what happened there was she stood up at the wrong time and the SeALs shot the shit out of her.
On “Good.”
Dude...just stop. The only way to get banned here is to post someone else's personal information. It's obvious that you want them to ban you so you can be all "oh, I was too cool for them, so they had to ban me"
On “Regulating the Crash”
"The people responsible for enforcing the laws were unable or unwilling to enforce the laws!"
"Well, the solution to that is more and better laws!"
:confused:
Like he said: If the regulators don't regulate, then what does it matter how many regulations there are?
On “The Dead”
"In the case of Osama, we should do what we can to hold up that he died holding his wife as a human shield instead of shielding her…"
Considering the situation and the sources, I don't know if I'll believe anything reported about the incident other than "he was there, and when he left he had holes in him".
"
He was a bad man and we're better off that he's dead.
I don't know if I like the idea of people celebrating the fact.
On the one hand, if we're going to personalize political activity to that degree--martyrs, heroes, Big Bads--then we're playing right into the mindset that motivates the people we're fighting.
And on the other...the way some of these people are talking, you'd think it was them out there fast-roping into a building full of bad guys with machine guns, kicking in doors that might have a shotgun behind them, running through blacked-out buildings hoping that the guy behind them didn't aim too low? What the hell are people doing posting about it on Facebook like they personally pulled the trigger?
On “His Master’s Voice”
The problem with class analysis is that it's far too easy to answer criticisms with "well, that just shows we didn't define our classes properly! Redefine the classes and the problem goes away!" (Like the post above, where someone suggests that doctors are part of the working class.)
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.