http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/05/crib-sheet-iron-sunrise.html

military power

TRX
May 26, 2013
50:
@14:
[Blish] all of his original work up until that time had generated a couple of box files worth of fan letters whilst all of his Star Trek Novelizations ..well, he was thinking about getting a second four drawer filing cabinet.
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Isaac Asimov mentioned something similar about writing the novelization for an obscure B-movie called "Fantastic Voyage." He also said that royalty checks continued to arrive for years afterward for some obscure reason.


TRX
May 26, 2013
52:
@32 and @33:
a war in Vietnam that lasts decades and kills tens of thousands of people, and they never wonder if maybe they should consider using the frickin' unstoppable mystical superweapon that they won the last war with.
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Armies focus diffuse power into small places. Atomic weapons focus even more power into even smaller places. You can capture a city, or wreck a city, for example. Like a hammer and a bigger hammer.

Neither hammer is particularly useful against a diffuse enemy, like guerrillas. You need a target. A guerrilla war is like trying to nail jelly to a tree. A hammer, no matter how large, isn't the right tool for that problem. You need something like duct tape. The problem is, we don't have a military equivalent to duct tape, so if your only tool is a hammer...

We could have dropped nukes on North Vietnam, but most of it was barely above stone age to start with. The military infrastructure of the Viet Cong wasn't in North Vietnam, it was in the USSR and PRC, and it wasn't practical to do anything about that.


TRX
May 28, 2013
134:
@94:
how far back a story could be understood. For example, imagine reading Halting State (or Rule 34!) during Victorian times...
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Or for an extreme example of the other way around, I saw an audiobook of the Epic of Gilgamesh go by on one of the newgroups a while back.

Four-thousand-odd years after someone inscribed it onto clay tablets, I can reach into the aether and have the voices of the djinni read it to me...

And as another aside, consider both clay tablets and papyrus are far more permanent storage methods than any digital media. Even "archive grade" optical media have a proposed lifespan two orders of magnitude less than papyrus.

All of the digital world relies on riding the economic tiger, replacing decaying storage media on the fly. If anything happens to upset that involved industrial process, it's gone forever...


TRX
May 29, 2013
157:
@149:
There's a bigger problem, which is that there's no conceivable way to pay to punish all the crimes committed. The consequence of having all crimes recorded but only a small fraction punished is to create a permissive crime culture. After all, if you're never going to be punished, why obey the law?
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No problem. States always evolve to greater restriction; in the not-too- distant future the USA and UK will be practically indistinguishable from the USSR during the Terror. Everyone will be guilty of something; "they" can just pick anything at random and use it to yank your chain. And ubiquitous surveillance beats having to process and file all those reports from informers... though those probably won't go away either.


TRX
May 30, 2013
162:
@156:
"they" are likely to be private agencies rather than governments
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In the USA that is already well entrenched. "Privatized" prisons are becoming increasingly common. Some states also outsource basic governmental functions like their motor vehicle registration systems. The Internal Revenue Service outsources some of its functions. A nearby city has fake cops; they're dressed and armed like policemen, but they work for a private security firm, and handle mostly traffic violations. And of course the military has oursourced a vast amount of its maintenance and logistics.

Of course, none of the government structure shrinks; the previous employees simply become a layer of supervisory insulation, while the chains of command and responsibility are broken at the junction.

I once read an SF story where all government functions had been split up and auctioned off to high bidders. Ugly, but even that would be preferable to the "body snatcher" organizations that hide behind official masks.


TRX
May 31, 2013
200:
@179:
as the legislature is still elected and there's still a broad franchise.
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You need much more than elections and a franchise. In the USA, even noncitizens can vote in some states; that's a pretty broad franchise. But you can only vote for people who are nominated by one of the two (or in limited cases, three or four) party congresses, which are technically not part of the government structure, not accountable to the public, and have their own invested internal power structures.

In the end, you are able to pick from a short list of people you didn't get to nominate and don't want. Which is really no choice at all...