The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Dan Blum:

With regard to the "What actually sells books" link, I would like to note that I think publishers' publicity efforts are still important in creating the index cases - the people who recommend the books to others.

For example, I like Dave Duncan's books (and was pleased to see that Tor will be publishing his new duology, by the way). I've given some as gifts and recommended them to people who have bought and read them, and probably recommended them to yet other people, etc. So, nothing the publishers did got them to buy the books directly. However, I started reading Duncan because of a review in Locus, which was there because the publisher sent a review copy, so that has had an indirect effect on them.

Whether advertisements for books, as opposed to review copies, do much of anything, I couldn't say.

I am doing this partly because I am on the program committee for Minicon Fortean (Minicon 40) and we want a few program items linked with Fort. One obvious possibilty is SF stories inspired by Fort's books. All I can think of so far is Heinlein's "Goldfish Bowl", but I just started this project.

Dave Langford has a review of two Eric Frank Russell novels which fit the bill, and he mentions a few other Fortean works in passing.

Oh, and I just finished slogging through an old copy of The Cat who Walks Through Walls, and have come to appreciate how much I dislike Heinlein.

While I haven't read Cat myself, I'd venture to say, based on what I've heard, that it isn't Heinlein's best work, nor yet his 20th-best.

I'm not currently in the middle of a book myself. Most recently I've re-read some of my standard comfort reads (Bujold, Dave Duncan, etc.), plus the first two volumes of The Complete Peanuts. On deck are Wolfe's Innocents Aboard and The Knight (and The Wizard, once I get a copy).

For no particular reason I note that PNH is the code for Pochentong Airport in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Thus illustrating the dangers of monogrammed luggage.

LAG, however, is an airport code - for La Guaira, Venezuela.

For the many voices of Steve Brust, I'd suggest Agyar, The Phoenix Guard, and one of the Vlad series--maybe Teckla--before you decide whether you like his work.

I would not recommend Teckla as the place to start reading the Vlad books. I think either Jhereg or Taltos would be better, or perhaps Yendi.

I would also add The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars to the list of Brust to try before you give up.

I wonder if it [nastiness in The Spanish Ulcer] was partly a "swarthy" vs "whiter" issue, the same way that Latin Americans, Hispanic peoples (dare I say even Arabs?) are seen in more modern times?

I've not gotten that impression, although I can't say for certain. I think the difference stems from the fact that in most of the areas Napoleon conquered, there simply wasn't much organized resistance (after he conquered it, that is). In Spain, there was, which started an escalating cycle of nastiness on the parts of both the guerrillas (wasn't this the war that gave us the word "guerrilla?") and the French troops.

I'd say that the Napoleonic Wars were probably the high-water mark for good behavior by European armies, on average.
Except for "south of the Pyrenees", where the hideous brutality of the 8-year Peninsular War (where an army was harrassed by guerilla insurgents, & there were atrocities on both sides) gave rise to Goya's "Disasters of War" prints & the famous painting of an execution squad called "The Third of May".
The prints are still very strong meat indeed. The painting, stripped of its romantic lighting & colour, fits quite well into film & photo images of 20th century execution squads.

I didn't say the situation was good, just that it was about the best it's ever been, on average. (I also did note the Spanish situation, but not very clearly. I should get more sleep before posting.)

I suppose this could depend on how you define "soldier" - there's a valid distinction to be made between, say, warriors in a pre-state tribal society and specialized soldiers in historical times.

Actually I think the big distinction I missed was between soldiers and raiders - in many societies there have been traditions of small gangs of armed men pillaging civilians just for the sake of it, but that's an end in itself, not a negative consequence of organized warfare.

Of course, this is highly unlikely to make the slightest bit of difference to the civilians involved.

I think that many of the worst atrocities prior to the 20th century involved combinations of the two types of behavior, with raiders becoming armies - the Mongols, for example.

Standing armies reduced the pillage and rapine, because the institution of discipline (the triangle and the noose, for the most part) allowed a commander to impose his will far more readily than could be done to a raggle-taggle band of farmers and free-booters, raiders and rapscallions, who flocked to the colors in the age of ad hoc militias and feudal levies.

That's certainly true of the most recent transition to well-disciplined standing armies, starting in the 17th century (or so), but my reference, which was admittedly very unclear, was to the first such transitions, back in the early Iron Age sometime (certainly by the days of the Roman Republic). I'm not sure the effects were the same, then (I'm not sure they weren't, either - I need to read more in this area).

In response to Avram:

I am not an expert on military history, but my impression is that major bad behavior (pillage and rape, primarily) by soldiers started with the rise of standing armies. If you go back far enough your army was just your adult male population (only landowners in some cases, etc.), and generally weren't formed up as an army for very long.

Once more places had standing (or at least long-serving) armies the bad behavior became more prevalent, probably for a variety of reasons (boredom, brutalization, lack of pay, etc.). The more disciplined the army, the better the behavior, generally speaking, although I'd have to do some research to see how much that mattered in ancient times (I'm not that familiar with the depredations or lack of them on the part of the Roman armies, for example, except in a few specific cases).

The Thirty Years' War was something of a low point for this sort of thing in Europe. After that armies got more professional (many armies in that war were more or less giant groups of mercenaries) and more generals made an effort to prevent them from harming civilians (with numerous exceptions).

I'd say that the Napoleonic Wars were probably the high-water mark for good behavior by European armies, on average. Wellington was particularly known as a strict disciplinarian and was quite willing to hang soldiers who bothered civilians in defiance of orders. (The most famous British military-local civilian encounter of the period involved marriage.)

After that things got better in some respects and worse in others - you see less casual pillage and rape by soldiers (in the more professional armies), but more planned brutality against civilians (e.g. bombing).

As for torture, I don't know. Going back to the Napoleonic Wars again, I would say that torturing military prisoners was probably very uncommon amongst the professional armies. Certainly they wouldn't have done it for purported intelligence reasons (given the reluctance in many quarters just to send out spies and the like). On the other hand, I wouldn't care to speculate about what, say, the Spanish guerrilas might have done without some research.

But I wonder if fascism seems like a reasonable option because fixings our screwups (restoring our national pride in a real way) seems impossible?

I think that's what leads people to embrace it - it doesn't require any work. It doesn't require you to fix anything, or even make the painful acknowledgement that you (your country, your government, etc.) has done something wrong. It just reassures you that everything is just fine, and as a corollary that anyone who says that things aren't just fine is wrong and must be punished.

I'm thinking that there is a parallel here to the sort of religious belief that Teresa has mentioned recently, the sort that doesn't require you to do anything difficult.

On a unrelated note, am I the only one who wonders why a high school has a military liasion officer? Is this a Rio Rancho district thing? Is this a Southwestern thing? Is it a since-I-graduated-high-school (1985) thing? Is it just the person who runs ROTC and they have a funny name for it?

It took the Renaissance and modern times to come up with ideologies in which might made unfettered right on a human face forever.

I was right with you until this last sentence. Certainly Legalism, as expounded by Han Fei Tzu and praticed by Shih Huang Ti (and others) would qualify as such an ideology ("therefore virtue has its origin in punishment"). Over in the West, I don't know that anyone had a philosophical basis for totalitarian-style rule, but I'd argue that certain Roman emperors (among others) were pretty close to it.

Your original point in re the use of "medieval" was of course spot on.

Empire State University, in the SUNY system, gives credit for earlier college courses, life experience, and 30 points toward a degree for passing a GRE.

Actually it seems to be called Empire State College, which is just as well, as otherwise they'd have to figure out how many credits to award for inventing rockets and interdimensional portals, ruling Latveria, etc.

Professional wargame, or the kind you can buy in a games store? (There's some overlap, but not very much, and of course none at all for the kind of live-action wargame referred to above.)

For the latter, there have certainly been games which cover guerilla warfare. How successfully they do so is hard to say (especially for me, as I haven't played any of them). For the former, I don't know. Most professional wargames I have heard about focused more on NATO vs. Warsaw Pact conflicts and the like, but then most of my information comes from the 1980s.

I'd just like to say that I advocate unlimited idolatry and masturbation.

What, at the same time?

Have read e.e. cummings' "The Enormous Room" - throws some interesting light on his background, along with being a good book & true story of unfamiliar wartime imprisonment (1914-1918 war). It was quite normally capitalized. Maybe is early work. Maybe he kept such innovation for poetic publications.

I have an extremely vague recollection of reading somewhere that writing your name in lower case was supposed to indicate that you were a descendant of the British royal family through an illegitimate line.

What it's supposed to mean when you write everything that way, except that your Shift key is broken, I have no idea.

Except this one has no proverb. I feel cheated.

I'd bet good money that this is just a lie, even if we read "2001" for "2002," and that Rice was in fact briefed on this at some point.

The reason why she might lie about it is that if she had been aware of the possibility before 9/11, and didn't do anything about it, well obviously that's a failure of some kind on her part. Now, I don't know that I'd consider it a huge failure - I'd need to know a lot more details than I do about intelligence analysis of terrorism up to 2001, scenario projection, etc. to say anything very meaningful. It's possible that it would a perfectly understandable, if tragic, oversight or misemphasis or whatnot. (It might also have been a huge failure requiring penance by resignation at the very least.)

Anyway, it'd have been a mistake, and one of the salient characteristics of the Bushites is that they don't make mistakes.

Now, of course not even having been briefed on the possibility is ridiculous and if true means that there is something very wrong in how Rice and the NSC staff and the intelligence community interact. However, that's a process issue, or possibly failure on the part of staffers, y'see. The other salient characteristic of the Bushites is that their top-level people are not in fact responsible for what happens in their baliwicks, so even if everyone on the NSC staff dropped the ball, that's not Rice's fault at all.

I'm amazed that terrorists haven't already been doing just that - not pretending to be psychics, but just calling up and reporting bombs on planes, hidden in cities, etc. It's cheap, is highly unlikely to get you arrested or killed, and could cause quite a bit of disruption - even after the 50th threat that turned out to be false, I don't think law enforcement agencies could really afford to ignore the 51st, just in case.

Or maybe terrorists are doing that, and we're not hearing about it, which would imply that psychics are taken more seriously...

Something I should know but don't (and am too lazy to go look up just now) - do per-pupil expenditure numbers generally include salaries for teachers and administrators? If they do, I note that the DC area is considerably more expensive to live in than Utah (or at least than the Salt Lake City area, but I can't imagine that the rest of the state is pricier).

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