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

Just to follow up on what DaveL and Ken Brown have said... This:

Capt. Blackadder: Would this brilliant plan involve us climbing over the top of our trenches and walking slowly toward the enemy?

is simply incomplete. There was definitely some of that throughout the war, but even on the first day of the Somme, the canonical example, the British troops tried a number of different tactics, not all of which involved walking slowly across no-man's-land. Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson's The Somme goes into great detail on this issue (while not letting Haig get off scot-free).

I think someone calculated it and Bryan Adams himself would actually have been About 4 (Or is it 6? Somewhere close to there, anyhow) in the Summer of 69, and since he's the first to have mangled the song, I think that's just part of its natural "charm".

This presumes that the "69" in the title and the song refers to the year... Adams is, I believe, on record as saying that that's an incorrect assumption. (I leave it to your imagination as to what he says it really refers to.)

March of the Penguins was good, although I could have done with less anthropomorphization, and the narration was a little heavy-handed at times. At least Morgan Freeman was more bearable than dubbed-in comedic voices.

Hmm. I suspect March of the Penguins would make a good double feature with Grizzly Man.

What do you think of The Believer, Patrick?

The guy who runs a halal chicken cart is selling Italian sausage sandwiches? Did I read that right?

Ken, ever since that fake mob attacked and stopped the ballot recount in Florida, and it came out that they were funded by the Republican national organization, which hadn't even gone to the trouble of covering its tracks, I've figured they don't think they're ever going to fall out of power.

You've said that before, and it's never made any sense to me. They gambled that if they won that election, they'd have at least four years before anyone would be in a position to investigate them for it, and by that time no one would care. There's no plan to hold power forever required to make their actions make sense.

TNH: Napoleon Lajoie once stole first base while he was at bat.

I tried to track this down, with no success. Do you have a link? (Not that I don't believe you... I'm just curious as to the circumstances.) Was it on what would these days be considered a passed ball?

Scraps DeSelby once told me that one of the interesting fruits of Bill James' statistical analyses was the discovery that stolen bases aren't such a hot idea. I misspoke when I said base stealing fails more often than it succeeds; the actual principle is that Stolen bases only make a modest contribution to team runs. Each caught-stealing event has about three times the influence as a stolen base.

I thought that might be what you were referring to. Stolen bases are a great idea as long as you only get caught less than 1/3 of the time; and as a former Blue Jays fan who still has bad memories of Ricky Henderson in the 1989 ALCS, even though I know better it still feels like they have a disproportionate effect on the morale of the opposing team.

As for the DHR, if this is real baseball, then everybody fields and everybody bats. If the pitcher's good enough to play, he's good enough to bat.

I'll buy that argument when pitchers start taking batting practice. Or losing their jobs 'cause they can't hit.

TNH, a couple of quibbles:

Batters and baserunners can sneak forward to the next base when the pitcher isn't looking.

Baserunners can do this. I'd like to see a batter try it.

This is called stealing a base. It fails oftener than it succeeds

I don't think so. Given that even the umps who call players caught stealing the most often still only call about 40% of baserunners out, stealing a base is more likely to be successful than not. (Although I can't actually find stolen-base percentages online at the moment.)

And most importantly, There is a Designated Hitter Rule, which is Bad.

Precisely wrong. Watching pitchers flail away at bat, or try desperately to bunt in any conceivable circumstance... *that's* wrong.

Josh, go look in today's Particles.

Oh, I figured it out earlier (although even with all the hints I still managed to mis-decrypt _o_e at first). I was just making too many incorrect assumptions when I first started. Oh well.

Thanks for the instructions; I'd actually done the frequency analysis and substituted "e" for "t", but I (wrongly) guessed that given its frequency "f" stood for "t". Once I made that mistake, I wasn't likely to figure the rest out.

But before I tried those, I'd observe that the quotation is attributed to someone whose name is divided into two clusters of two and thirteen letters. At which point I'd know it.

I was trying to figure out the name, but other than Jo Walton I wasn't coming up with anyone I could think of who had a two-letter first name.

Well Dan, you at least figured it out... wanna give me that hint you were gonna give Xopher?

So is anyone going to take pity on us slow kids and tell us what the mug says?

I dunno. I've criticized Kos, I haven't been in the military, and so far, no lightning bolt. What exactly are you suggesting?

I wasn't suggesting anything, I was legitimately asking, because what I wrote seemed the most likely implication of Jim Macdonald's comment.

This seems to me as if the word "earned" belongs between "have" and "a."

So, what, those of us who haven't served in the military can't criticize Kos in this situation?

Oh, and you should check out Phil Carter's blog. He's got some interesting posts up about the issues surrounding contract workers in Iraq; apparently the government requires the civilian companies it's contracting with in the reconstruction to provide their own security (although the government pays for it). Apparently the civilian companies are looking for ex-special operations forces veterans, and are willing (and able) to pay far more than the Army. As a result, it's entirely possible that a number of veterans who might otherwise re-up with the military are signing on as private security.

Partly it was because five members of the regular US ground forces in Iraq were killed the same day, but got no attention paid to them. Kos is former U.S. military. It would bother him.

Except that the reason the killings in Fallujah got more press is not because contrac workers/mercenaries were killed, but because of what happened to their bodies afterwards. It's the same reason the killings in Mogadishu got covered the way they did.

And while your friend is entitled to his opinion, it's worth noting that from everything I've heard the men who were killed were providing security for a convoy of trucks delivering food to the Iraqis.

It puts me in mind of that thing where white boys dress up and pretend that they're members of some oppressed group, and subsequently profess to believe that this means they're somehow in touch with the soul of that people, and understand what it is to be them.

The thing it reminds me of is Restoration Hardware. They've got some great stuff there, but then you'll find things like a hand-cranked mixer with a little paean to what wonderful cakes the writer's grandmother used to make with a hand mixer just like it. Except that no one who has the choice uses a hand mixer when a Mixmaster or an electric mixer is available.

James, the matter of massed charges into heavy fire from a prepared position has been one of the features of WWI that's haunted me. By the end of the Civil War, every private on either side knew what that one got you. The European powers had plenty of observers at the Civil War. They also had War Colleges whose business it was to study such things. And what did they do when the Great War started? They launched Napoleonic-style attacks. It can't all have been Haig's stupidity, though he had plenty; the other nations did the same thing. And then, everybody did it again. And again.

Teresa, you might be interested in a book called The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914, by Jack L. Snyder. It's been a while since I read it, but from what I recall Snyder's argument was that the various militaries decided on offensive tactics and strategies as a means of institutional self-defense. Arguing for the offensive meant that professional armies still had a place in the world.

As for why they continued to make the same mistakes over and over again, that's a mystery to me as well. I think part of it stems from the fact that the decision-makers were famously isolated, but even in the Civil War, when the generals were at the front, it took years for the message that frontal attacks were doomed to sink in.

And there were people who understood what was happening even before the war. Pe9tain taught a more defensive posture, and emphasized the importance of overwhelming firepower, while he was a teacher at the Ecole Supe9rieure de la Guerre.

Comment statistics for Josh on the Making Light blog

Total: 42 comments. View all these comments on a single page.