The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Oliver:

The thing that got me was the enterprise rising from the mists of Titan with Saturn proud in the sky, and a huge magnficent rush of pride: *we've been there*. Don't know if the rings were Cassini images or not, but that doesn't matter. That was the Enterprise in deep space, and at the same time it was the Enterprise where our robots are currently at work. Height of cool.

Of course Titan doesn't look like that, but still...

Dave@44: we had the 1992 Sheffield rally ...

From Profiles of the Future (and later incorporated into an essay
called Credo) -- here's both Stapledon, and the wonder of the child on
the sea shore in the face of the endless, and a hole lot of what what
Patrick said:

One thing seems certain. Our galaxy is now in the brief
springtime of its life—a springtime made glorious by such brilliant
blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our
own Sun. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent
youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of
the universe begin.
It will be a history illuminated only by the reds and infrareds of
dully glowing stars that would be almost invisible to our eyes; yet the
sombre hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be full of colour and
beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it. They will know
that before them lie, not the millions of years in which we measure
eras of geology, nor the billions of years which span the past lives of
the stars, but years to be counted literally in the trillions.

They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all
things, and to gather all knowledge. They will be like gods, because no
gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will
command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright
afterglow of creation; for we knew the universe when it was young.

While political lives may proverbially end in tears (#3), the most common formulation of the thought, on this side of the pond, is Enoch Powell's: "All political lives end in failure". (More fully, "All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs." -- from Joseph Chamberlain (Thames and Hudson, 1977), according to wikiquote). I think something is added by the specificity of failure (and that failure is in this way more tragic than tears, which are just sad).

Which comes off sounding much more nit-picky than I intended, for which apologies.

Re torture working in books -- Note that the true nature of torture as portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four: it was to make you say what O'Brien wanted. I remember hearing a very good lecture on this by Richard Rorty (one of his Clark lectures in 1987, which were part of the basis for contingency, irony, and solidarity). He argued that the purpose of torture was to render it no longer possible for the victim to make a coherent narrative out of her or his life -- to induce some sort of epistameic rupture, I guess. It impressed me at the time.
Note that Sullivan recently pointed the same thing out -- that the purpose of the specific soviet techniques now being used was to impose power on speech not to seek after truth.

many congrats

On the pulling-the-sword-out-of-hat -- it's also a way of underlining the Neville-as-shadow-Harry theme. When you absolutely have to cut the head off a big snake, pull a sword out of a hat

Didn't Auden later repudiate that poem, and leave it out of the collected verse, because in essence he found those lines too glib?

Not to say that a) they're not relevant or b) that poets necessarily understand their own truths in retrospect, and certainly not to say c) that this isn't disgusting or d) that these children are not being given every reason to grow up hating American troops.

Just asking about Auden (I don't know the details of the case).

I'm absolutely not saying that climate change isn't something to worry about, but it's worth noting that, in Europe at least, there is every sign that the increased fatalities due to hotter summers (such as the one we are currently having in the UK) will be greatly outweighed by the decrease in fatalities due to less cold winters. A recent report in the Guardian had the ratio at fourteen to one by 2020 (ie decreased mortality due to less intense winters was fourteen times increased mortality due to more intense summers).

I'm not saying that warmer winters make climate change OK; just that climate change is complex and multifactoral. As it happens, I think the net effects of climate change are likely to be extremely damaging. Most of the damage will be done in developing countries where the ability to adapt to changing weather patterns is much less. The poor, both in developed countries and in the world at large, are going to get nailed a lot harder than the not-poor.

None of which is any help to people in Fresno.

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