Finished The Algebraist a couple of weeks ago. Don't usually buy hard-backs, since they take up more room than paperbacks, and their weight can be quite a strain when reading in the bath -- but I make an exception for Iain M Banks.
Read Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novel Endless Nights last week, read Alan Moore's & Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol II last night, and I'm waiting for Adam Warren's Dirty Pair graphic novel Run From the Future to arrive from Amazon. I put off getting the Adam Warren for a while, since I didn't find his new drawing style as attractive as his previous style, but I figure his writing won't have changed so radically, so it was time to give RFTF a fair shake.
Re-reading Guardians of Order's Big Eyes, Small Mouth, an anime genre role-playing game, writing up some house rules (shows I'm serious about it this time). Also their Demon City Shinjuku sourcebook, and Big Mecha, Cool Starships.
What I'm actively reading now is Mark Eberhart's Why Things Break: [awfully long subtitle] which is finally answering one of those questions I asked in school that no-one could ever answer without handwaving.
Since this is an even-numbered month, I shall be reading the next Patrick O'Brian Aubrey-Maturin novel on my list, The Reverse of the Medal, probably over the Christmas break. I'm pacing myself on O'Brian; I don't want to gobble him up too quickly. I will probably squeeze in a Flashman novel as well.
I've started Quicksilver but I'm afraid I haven't made much progress so far; it's a heavy book, inconvenient to read in the bath. I've also got Anna Funder's Stasiland on my to read pile.
And here I am learning Japanese. Ah, well, at least the kanji will be useful in the Chinese-dominated future.
I, for one, say "ni hao" to our future chinese overlords.
Patrick, you're tired. It's been a very emotional few months (/years), and today has been a crushing disappointment. So rest. Rest until you feel able. (And you will feel able, trust me.) Then take advantage of whatever opportunities will arise.
But until them, rest.
Oh, jeez, I just read that Kilgore Trout has killed off his alter ego, Kurt Vonnegut.
I know Vonnegut was a fictional character, but what a way to go....
Unlikely, I switched to the DVD edition ages ago. Maybe it was the ergot on the copy of Aristotle's Poetics I was leafing through earlier....
You know, I'm surprised Phil Dick hasn't had anything to say about all this. I mean, I know he writes mainstream stuff now, but this Bush43 scenario is awfully close to some of his old skiffy stuff.
Could it be that Phil Dick and Patrick Neilsen Hayden are actually the same person? Has anyone ever seen them together?
Patrick, thank you kindly for the gmail invite; I no longer feel like an outcast. Didn't manage to nab nelson@gmail.com, though. Shame.
Oh, if it's not too late, can I have a gmail account? Purely because I'm shallow enough to feel left out at not having one. And because the sooner I get one, the more likely that I'll be able to grab nelson at gmail.com. Or at least a nelson with a low number....
[Slight spoilers ahead. Skip a paragraph.]
I'm making my way slowly (because I want to savour them) through Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books, set during the Napoleonic Wars. Maturin is an intelligence agent (a "dedicated amateur" in Terry's words), and in the second or third book he is captured by French intelligence agents and tortured quite mercilessly. The book does not go into detail, and is the better for it, but it takes a few months for him to regain his health. Having later disposed of any French agents who can confirm his status as a spook, in "The Surgeon's Mate", Maturin travels to Paris to read his paper in natural philosophy, quite confident that as a civilian he will be ignored by the authorities. I haven't finished the book, but so far he and his travelling companion are unmolested.
As an aside, I choose to trust O'Brian's portrait of 19th century intelligence ops, so it strikes me that throughout human history, all over the globe, that people are as smart as people. If one group of people can run a sophisticated scam that can lead another group into folly, then so potentially can any group do so. If the British SIS can lead a complacent Abwehr around by the nose during WWII, then it strikes me as eminently reasonable that, say, Iranian intelligence could give the US a helpful push as it stumbled into the Iraqi quagmire, especially since Iranians can read and learn as easily as the rest of us.
But I really wanted to comment on the illusion of progress in the organisation of armed forces being touted hereabouts. As War Nerd points out, we actually have two types of army here in the 21st Century: the machine people (USA, Europe, and, er, that's it), and the rat people (the rest of the world). The civilised countries have to try and fight with all sorts of restrictions, because unrestrained our armies would cause terrible destruction and ruin whatever it was we thought we were trying to save. The gang warriors are essentially fighting the same kind of war that was fought by our tribal ancestors: throwing masses of soldiers at the enemy, promising them loot, land and women, or at least a chance to exercise catharsis by hurting and killing a bunch of strangers.
Our armies in USA and Europe are undoubtably more sophisticated than they were, but it's clear from the situation in Iraq that the tribal mode is always at hand if the sophisticated facade breaks down. The evolution of our armies is just that, a near-blind process of mutation and replication, not a clear shining path of progress towards a more perfect state that one day all armies of the world will attain.
The US Army is probably no more sophisticated in its organisation and philosophy than the Imperial Romans; in its present state it might even be less so. I would say that the Iraqis, by the same token, are no less sophisticated than the ancient Germans. I'm afraid that as long as Homo remains sapiens, this is what warfare will be like: a meandering path between sophistication and tribalism.
Chalabi sounds quite a character, Machiaveli quotes notwithstanding. Sounds as though he'd be quite at home running the gendarmes in WWII Casablanca. Maybe it's a shame that there are too many Major Strassers in Iraq, and not enough Rick Blaines.
About New York: There's an odd resonance going on in my head with Iraq. Something to do with the fact that the guys in uniforms, the guys supposedly trained for these kinds of bad stuff, are showing all the signs of panic and disorganisation, while the civilians are just trying to quietly get on with doing the obvious things....
I get that, except without the music (I get my music fix at work from a small FM radio). I wish there was some way of switching virtual memory in OSX off, as it's never been a feature I've found worth the grief. I'd much rather have the old OS9 message come up to tell me I'm trying to stuff the RAM, so I could just quit something before it gets all squirally.
Dave, you're being disingenuous. It's not at all cute in a man wearing a uniform, you know.
Monday morning quarterbacking? People have been critiquing this whole Iraq misadventure since 2002. Have you had wax in your ears?
I should have been a bit more careful in my language, I admit. Instead of "everyone" I should perhaps have written "anyone" or even "everyman", by which I mean to say that the unit in charge of Abu Ghraib at the time examined by the Taguba report seemed to show no discrimination in the subjects chosen for "softening-up". See here, for example. Certainly they did not observe the rule:
the innocent are still innocent until proven guilty.
People have been released from Abu Ghraib who have been tortured by US soldiers and intelligence personnel. If they've been released, then the machinery responsible for holding them in Abu Ghraib must have decided that they are clear of any guilt. If they weren't guilty of anything, then the torture committed against them was an act of evil. Also inefficient and incompetent. Also illegal by any authority worthy of the name.
Let me turn your opening question around, since I'm confident that you won't respect any answer I, fat-assed civilian that I am, might come up with:
Say the Canadians, Mexicans and Chinese decided to occupy the USA (say, they were looking for WMDs or wanted to facilitate a regime change or something hypothetical like that), and a squad of PLA grunts knocked on your door -- I beg your pardon, I mean kicked down your door -- searched your house and found your weapons cache. I'm guessing that you've got a weapon at home -- if not, say, they found your neighbour's weapon and ammo. In that case, what would you have them do with your wife and children? You're not at home, possibly still in Iraq, perhaps.
Would you think it a good plan of theirs to lock up your neighbour, his family, your wife, your kids, your neighbour on the other side, all of them in the state prison for several months, just to be safe? Would you be happy if a bunch of Canuck MPs at the prison where your wife was being held... well, I'll leave that to your imagination. Or I could just point you to Taguba's Finding of Fact 6.k.
Is that a good plan?
Dave, if half of the 3800 detainees are innocent of any crime, then that sounds like inefficiency at the very least. Either they've been swept up and locked away for no good reason and it's taken weeks and months to determine that, or they're just being released willy-nilly by reason of political expediency.
And we know that innocents have been tortured. Either they've been in 1a and 1b and subsequently released, in which case we know that not everybody in 1a and 1b is necessarily a very bad person; or they were elsewhere and subsequently released, in which case we know that the torture was not restricted to those in blocks 1a and 1b. Again, inefficiency.
What was the point of torturing everybody? Because one of them might have known something useful? How do you tell that "wheat" from the "chaff" of those who make stuff up just to get the torture to stop? And if that can be done, then why not apply the same magic intelligence sieve to the problem of who to arrest when you don't know who the arms cache belongs to? That way the righteous don't have to torture anybody.
Damn straight shit happens, the point is to try to stop it from happening. The tried-and-tested way of doing that is to examine the shit, however unpleasant a job that is, to find out exactly what kind it is. If there's tapeworm eggs in it, then we apply anti-worming pills; if it's weak and watery, then maybe some kaolin-and-morphine; if it's hard, compact and infrequent, then we add roughage to the diet. Maybe it'll fix itself if we ignore it, but chances are it will get worse if we do. And if the problem does clear up, then we have to keep examining it for a time to check if the treatment was effective.
Now, you say that everything's fine, nothing to see here. Well, you may not enjoy us examining your stools, and believe me, we don't like doing it, but we have to. It's a democracy, you have to put up with us checking for ourselves, because that's our job as citizens.
Mary Kay, even if you did it, you'd still be better than them. You only want to torture horribly one person (well, two including that one from 1987) who, I think we can agree, is guilty of all sorts of foulness. They've locked up and tortured hundreds (at least), a large proportion of whom were guilty of nothing more than being in a place raided by US Marines.
It's an interesting thing: Blair and Blunkett have been trying to periodically raise public awareness (or stoke the fires of public paranoia) by warning us all that it's inevitable that AQ will strike in Britain at some point. But the general reaction is, "Yeah, so?"
Not apathy, you understand, so much as a grim recognition that it's nothing new. The PIRA have been bombing the British mainland since the 70's, as Teresa says. We've been fighting terrorism for decades; when the American president suddenly declares war on terror, we're like "Where have you been, mate?" [For extra marks reparse the proceeding using the words Algerians & France, ETA & Spain, RAF (Red Army Faction) & Germany, etc, etc.]
What's such a crying shame is when the US administration ignores this wealth of experience, including how to occupy and secure a country where the populace is at best a mixture of fanatically supportive and militantly hostile. It's not as though we speak a foreign language over here. Not quite.
I dunno. The little bits I've heard and seen on British TV and radio (not necessarily unbiased, I'll allow) just made him sound and look like an idjit; if that was a prepared answer, then I agree it was in-character to appear to be an idjit, but why would he want to do that?
Unless... we're supposed to think that the reason he can't think of another mistake is because he has never made one? In which case he was let down by his delivery. He just sounded like a twit. Or an idjit.
Adam--
Yeah, but they do have those big mammals that are spitting image of Ganesh. Must be a Hindu miracle!
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| 2004 | 33 |
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