JVP: Deadset, as we say down here.
There is, of course, the Marxist notion that the classes consist of those who sell only their labour, those who sell other goods and services, and those who rent out their accumulated assets. Then there would be an underclass that does none of those.
The problem with such a description, of course, is that it makes no necessary assumption about the market value of each type of activity, and hence of the wealth of those persons engaged in it.
Rebecca: I accept your definition of the peer review process with gratitude. How, then, might this process work to evaluate public policy in a democracy?
Who would be the peers? How would they go about their review, considering that they are reviewing not only "the correctness of data and the utility of techniques", but the bases and effects of public policy, questions which are not only matters of fact, but of judgement.
In a democracy, I submit either that the peers are the body of all concerned citizens and that the only available and valid method of review is reasoned debate from principles and evidence OR that "peer review" is not a useful technique for this purpose (depending upon definition of "peer review").
Personally, I like the sound of "peer review" as applied to political discourse since it entails the idea of general review and examination of public policy by equals, and I do not see how this precludes debate. But if the term is incorrectly applied thus, so be it.
Xopher: I happily accept your correction, although in another context I might debate it. Since we are considering the form of discourse that should inform political expression in a good democracy, it is a distinction that makes no difference. Do you, or do I, wish to live in a bad democracy, that is, one in which consent is uninformed? I submit, bad democracies are as bad as any other bad system.
Rebecca: Peer review. Is not general debate in a democracy a form of peer review, for are not all citizens peers, in the sense of having an equal right and opportunity to engage in it? (If they are not, can it be said to be a democracy at all?) And if that is so, what other form of peer review is there? And if it is the only such available form, would not sound governance require that it be conducted according to reasoning from evidence and fair debate, rather than by other means?
That of course does not imply that debate must be courtly, pleasant, ingratiating, insincerely respectful, or even passionless. Mannered, perhaps. Polite, in the sense of eschewing personalities and vituperation. Right up to the point where it is necessary to pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
The thing is this: ultimately I have faith in the ability of my fellow citizens to discern the right and consent to it, and believe that tested reason from evidence is alone sufficient to secure this. I confess other means have their attractions. But to the extent that they depart from reasoned debate, either they will not secure long-term consent, or else democracy itself is unsound as a method of governance.
Avram: I regret I do not agree. Consent is informed, or it is meaningless. Indeed, consent secured by misinformation (and other illegitimate means) is the very stock-in-trade of tyranny.
As for its value, you seem to have placed yourself in an extremely difficult logical position by trying to say that what happens when consent is withdrawn is important, but that consent isn't. It would also appear to fly in the face of the idea cited by Patrick, and quoted by you with approval: that the very definition of democracy is "a mechanism for achieving government by the consent of the governed." If it is, then this consent is, and must be, valuable. Vital, in fact.
Avram: I just have read it again. I believe he said that democracy is government by the consent of the governed. If that is so, does not "consent" imply "informed consent"? Conversely, what is this consent worth if it is not informed? By what means can it be informed if not by rational debate, that is, reasoning from evidence, this reasoning to be tested by adversarial examination?
And if this is the only efficacious means of producing informed consent, what is the effect of attempting to employ other means? Yes, there is a sense of personal satisfaction, but it is, in my experience, transitory. The other effects are that debate is degraded to precisely the extent that means other than cool reason from evidence are used. And that is the outcome that the opposition most desires.
Of course, the opposition often won't engage in debate. If democracy is a sound method of governance, that means they lose. If it isn't a sound method of governance, we've all lost, and it doesn't matter anyway.
Avram: I won't.
Patrick: Debate has rules, though none of them requires either side to be "pleasant" to each other, in the sense of a supine wishywashy niceness, and I was not proposing that they should. I say that debate requires neutral reasoning from evidence. That's what I mean by "first principles".
You appear to agree that democracy requires consensus. Of what value is that consensus if it is not informed? And how can it be informed by other means than by debate, involving reasoning from evidence?
So much for strategy. The second objection is tactical: any other method than coolly reasoned debate removes the contest to ground of the enemy's choosing. They want heat, not light, the more the better. I can't believe that it's good tactics to do exactly what your enemy most wants you to do.
Lucy: as I read him, Alan is saying that Stalin, usually taken to be an example of an extreme leftist, was a great polariser of political discourse, and therefore that it is incorrect to attribute all such polarisation to the right. This seems to me to be meaningful. Debateable, but meaningful.
Please note, the question of whether Stalin actually was a leftist, as we would now understand the term (if indeed there is any consensus on what it actually means) is not germane. Any convinced Marxist or Socialist revolutionary would have done to make the point. Che Guevara, perhaps.
To take up the point he was making: for my part, I, too, am sad to see attitudes hardening. Debate is ground into my soul as the only way in which rational discourse between people who disagree can be brought about. Debate, with all its silly politenesses, its conventions and its insistance on reason from evidence. And (pace, Patrick) it can't take place when the exchange consists of expressions of contempt and disgust, not only for the attitudes, but for the presence and persons of the other side.
You can say, they did it first. Perhaps they did. Must we do it, too?
If democracy assumes anything, it is that consensus can be achieved by rational debate from first principles, though this may be slow in coming. Any assumption that this cannot be done, and that is is therefore necessary to out-shout, overbully, and vituperate more effectively than the other side, is nothing less than the counsel of despair.
I congratulate Julia on never raising her hand to her child, and agree wholeheartedly that this would undoubtedly be the ideal outcome: a polite, civilised and charitable young lady with a developed code of moral and ethical standards, achieved without physical coercion.
For my part, I regret I did not manage to meet those high ideals. I have spanked my son, in the manner above, about twice.
On the other hand, my Quaker friend described him as the "gentlest and politest young man I know", so something must have gone right. This, incidentally, is not to crow. I did not do right, and Julia does not do wrong. I suppose that what I am saying is that there are no recipes for producing decent human beings.
On the other hand, I've known, and you've known, children who have no boundaries to their behaviour, children who have no conception that other people exist and have rights, children who have never in their lives known effective sanction against any action they take. Those children are unhappy children and they make inadequate adults or worse.
Certainly children should not be beaten; I say again, in case it wasn't heard the first time: certainly children should not be beaten. But civilised behaviour is, by definition, not natural. It must be learned, and learning involves not only praise and reward for proper action. It also involves correction of improper action, and that correction must be enforced, not merely recommended.
There are times when that enforcement includes physical means: restraint; sanction; withdrawal; exclusion; punishment. Punishment does not ever mean "beating with an implement". It may include, in certain specific circumstances, an open hand to the seat of the pants. The circumstances I mean include egregiousness and immediacy.
Here is a good example of the failure of the "slippery slope" argument, rightly rejected elsewhere in this forum. The acceptance that in certain extreme circumstances it is proper to withhold the means of life and to allow the dying to die is not tantamount to killing the afflicted. A palm to the seat of the pants is not tantamount to assault and battery on a child.
The Russians produced a couple of interesting aircraft preWW2 that used ground-effect lift to allow extreme low-speed low-altitude passes. If there was any sort of a headwind - say, 10 knots - they were capable of very slow groundspeeds indeed - on the order of 10 mph. This almost made them helicopters, which have the advantage for air-insertion operations of delivering the troops concentrated on a specific point rather than scattering them more or less at the whim of the wind. Yet the aircraft could perform as fixed-wing, with the advantages of greater range and payload with robust flying characteristics.
That is to say, the plane flew low and slow into the wind over flat ground, and the troops, some in vehicles, er, jumped out. Without parachutes.
Regrettably, no. Not counting the enormous numbers of M3s and M4s (many, many variants) used by the British army, most British tanks were petrol engined, including the Churchill, Cromwell and Comet and the earlier "cruiser" tanks, most of which were a waste of good tinfoil. The Matilda II I can't find.
The German Panzers were all petrol-engined - I, II, III, IV, Tiger I, and Panther, with all their variants. The Tiger II used an electric drive unit, which was powered by a petrol engine. (Sorry, for the US and Canada read "gasoline" for "petrol" throughout.)
Russian tanks were diesel-powered, at least all I can research.
How it was explained to me was that Russian tanks had diesel engines, and German tanks had petrol (gasolene) engines, and hence smelt different.
Skinner proposed to the US government a guidance system for missiles that used trained pigeons to compare ground features to a map. Don't know how far that got.
There were, of course, the dogs that the Russians, demonstrating their famous understanding of psychology, trained to run under tracked vehicles. Not hard, if you always put their food under one. Now you take the doggie to the battlefield, callously strap an antitank mine on it, and wait for the Germans.
One little hitch. The doomed pooches had been trained to run under Russian tanks. Poetic justice, really.
Here's where one of my favourite hobbyhorses comes out of the turn and straightens out for the run to the post.
See, fantasy isn't a genre. You can't write a set of genre tags for it. Fabulation? All fiction fabulates. The very process of fictive narrative demands it. Presence of magic? In that case, Peake's "Gormenghast" trilogy isn't fantasy. Estrangement from reality? In that case, any text using, say, obvious caricature or non-sequential plotting or numinous language would be fantasy. Like, f'r instance "Cold Comfort Farm" or "Catch 22" or even "Pickwick Papers". Clearly, this isn't right.
Fantasy is actually the default case. Mimetic fiction is the genre, because it has a genre tag: the action, setting and characters of the narrative must mimic observed reality, though it is true that the reality may be partly internal. (If the reality becomes entirely internal, we're back in the realms of fantasy again.)
Painting the moon. Jack Vance, in "The Face" (fourth of the Demon Princes series) has his villain engrave a great pattern on the single large moon of a planet on which a man lives who has grossly insulted him. The pattern is the villain's own face in caricature, so that the revenge would consist of his enemy forever having his ugly mug leering over his garden wall.
The Demon Princes become progressively more human as the series goes on. IMHO, they're all good, but the last two are great.
Final eps of "Blackadder" - "Blackadder Goes Forth". One of the most hilarious, and blackest of all comedies, and the only one I can ever recall watching the end, and weeping, after having been roaring with laughter three minutes before.
It was enough to make me go and read the history, and to say this: that wasn't the war to end war, but it ended some things that were best ended. The idea that war is a profession suitable for a gentleman, for instance.
"This is not the sense he wrote it in."
You haven't the least idea in what "sense" he wrote it, unless you're his sockpuppet. I quoted the words he used, and their meaning is abundantly plain. Your attempt to force some other meaning on them, rather than admit that they are indefensible, is bootless. What follows in your last post (God, would that it were!) is obvious ground-shifting and obfuscation. My understanding of physics, or yours, or anyone else's, is simply irrelevant.
The words beginning "No, it's not a droolingly," etc, are an example of a rhetorical trick without substance by which you falsely impute extreme views to your opponent and then attack them, rather than refuting the actual premise. This, too, is transparently dishonest.
Discipline, guys. Stick to a simple truth and hammer away at it. Don't get sidetracked and baited and decoyed.
Vox said "Women do not write hard science fiction today because so few can hack the physics", but this is untrue, because a close technical knowledge of physics (beyond that which is available to any intelligent person) is not a requirement for writing science fiction. This fact is so obvious that anyone who can say such a thing with a straight face has clearly shown themselves to be incompetent to judge science fiction at all.
The words that follow that quote (beginning "so they either write romance novels in space...") are a jeering, slighting reflection on women's writing in general, one that implies gross misogyny. They are also an attack on any style of science fiction that does not fit with whatever group of texts the fellow designates as "hard science fiction".
These expressions reflect in the first case ignorance and in the second prejudice. That's the point.
Therefore, excursions into comparative gender difference in any field are irrelevant. The question of who has degrees or publications in what fields, and what this means, is irrelevant. Don't let Nick blindside you with capitalised nonsense about what the debate is about. He's merely shifting ground.
I understand that the words complained of are these:
"Women do not write hard science fiction today because so few can hack the physics."
This statement contains an assumption: that to write "hard" science fiction, one must be a physicist. One, moreover, who is abreast not merely of the possibilities suggested by, let us say, interesting extrapolations of theory, but possessed of specific technical expertise of the level that would be gained during the acquisition of a doctorate in physics. That Vox Dei thinks this is true is made clear by his later:
"If only 13 percent of Physics PhDs are female, as Physics Today claimed, then I don't see why it should be controversial to state that few women are capable of writing hard SF."
Of course this idea is nonsense. If Vox Dei actually thinks that science fiction is about physics, he's plain, flat wrong. The idea is manifestly absurd. Articles in physics journals are about physics. Science fiction, like all fiction, is about people. Specifically, it is about how people adapt themselves and their societies to technological change and advances in scientific knowledge. An understanding of the human condition and character, and an ability to think critically about history is far more important for this purpose than detailed understanding of physics at the technical level. The science should not conflict with what is known; it need do no more than that.
But there is a far worse logical squib involved here. The Nebula awards are severally given in recognition of the merit of a specific work. Vox Dei says - tendentiously - that he was making a statistical statement about a class of writers - women. Of what possible relevance to the Nebulas is such a statement, even if true, unless it is to demonstrate that Vox Dei is prejudiced against a whole class of writers?
For that, of course, is the real issue - the man's misogyny. I cannot say, on the evidence available, that his obvious prejudices have affected his judgement. I do say that as an active member of SFWA myself, I shall be scrutinising the Nebula ballot with even more than usual care.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 23 |
| 2004 | 21 |
Total: 44 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Dave Luckett:
Show all comments by Dave Luckett.