305 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 12/12 Do Androids Look Up When They’re Dreaming Of Electronic Sheep?”

1. Meredith:

   “I’m not certain, but I think the only person who talked about people who were in the USA military was someone who started the comment by saying that they were a veteran. The rest were mostly criticisms of either civilian fetishism of war, or the lack of support for veterans. (All names redacted for reasons.)”

   I do believe it was me saying bad things about the american military and I will continue to do so. That is mostly tied to american foreign policy which is grotesque by any standard.

   I will also critizise the lack of support for veterans. That the military poisoned its own soldiers with depleted uranium and then refused to take responsibility for it. Inadequate care for PTSD and more. US is not the only country in this.

   But the destruction wrought upon other countries, with the whole middleast in flames and terrorism increased tenfold, makes that pale in comparison. American wars and foreign policy is a disaster for the rest of the world. Again, US is not alone in this.

2. Regarding e-readers:

   Make sure you try an e-paper reader before buying something with a glowing screen. For some people it makes no difference at all, but for some (like me) getting rid of your books and being stuck with nothing but glowing screens to read in would be a headache-inducing disaster.

3. @P J Evans: building collections on a Kobo device

   It is, of course, much easier to maintain a collection than to build it from scratch. That said, I believe you can add books to collections through the Search Results interface. If I were starting fresh, I’d load my library in chunks and take advantage of “most recent” sorting to add each new chunk to its proper collection.

   I don’t disagree with the larger point that this aspect of the interface could be improved, but there are ways to mitigate the badness.

   ETA @Kurt: “glowing screens”

   This is one reason I like the Kobo units. You can actually turn the light all the way off if you wish.

4. Re perceptions of the past – I remember hearing about someone in the film business back in the late seventies who reckoned he could date whether a film about the Middle Ages was made in 1967 or 1969. He did it by looking at the leading lady’s gowns and hairstyles, which projected into the past the fashion points valued by the modern designer.

5. Stevie on December 13, 2015 at 6:56 pm said:
   Peace

   I must concede that my teeth have taken some punishment down the years; gritting them isn’t a good idea, or so my dentist tells me.

   I have a rule of thumb; if it’s too late to even add some touches to make it look a bit more like the dress of the time, I smile and say something complimentary. Making criticisms at that point isn’t going to change anything other than the happiness of the person wearing it, and I try to avoid wanton cruelty of that kind.

   If there is a bit of time then I would suggest to the costumer some small scale changes to make it look even better than it is; the aim is not to make people feel miserable. It’s to make everybody happier…

   This is good advice, but I was confused about it until I realized what you must be responding to:

   Peace Is My Middle Name on December 13, 2015 at 6:36 pm said:

   I practice mildly amused patience when people insist that such-and-such looks totally authentic, because people have been saying exactly that for a couple of centuries. Come back in thirty years and see if it can still be said with a straight face.

   I’m afraid I did not make it clear, but my context was intended to be movies, book covers and illustrations, and other professional contexts.

   It’s been a recurrent phenomenon that such things are frequently lauded in their own time for their faithfulness to history, only to have later generations see how thoroughly they betray their own moments.

   I was not speaking of amateur efforts, where such critiquing is misplaced.

6. Mary Frances on December 13, 2015 at 7:44 pm said:
   Peace Is My Middle Name: I spent a time studying portrait photographs of the Victorian era, and I can remember the startling realization that some of them were supposed to be in historic dress.

   Oh, neat! Did you work with any of Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs? I used some of her images in an “Arthurian” course a while back, and thought they offered a fascinating glimpse into the way the Victorians perceived the Middle Ages . . .

   Nothing so grand, I’m afraid. I was looking at largely anonymous portraits of people by unknown photographers. A few of them were apparently actresses or models, and a few appeared to be wealthy women in frothy confections that were not immediately recognizably historical. Most were just people in what were probably their “good” clothes.

7. I use a Kobo Aura and am generally pleased. LCD screens make my eyes water after a few hours of reading; e-paper does not. And the light is uniform and useful in low-light situations (like reading in bed with spouse trying to sleep), but as was said upthread, it can be turned entirely off. I don’t like the collections feature, but I rename books in Calibre to reflect series — “Wizard of Oz 01-The Wizard of Oz”, “Wizard of Oz 02-The Land of Oz” etc. — so I pretty much ignore that feature anyway. You can sort books by author, title, and date added, and constrain the search by all, reading, and unread.

   It also has a few games (chess, block-it, sudoku, and a few others), a sketchpad, and a very limited web interface, useful for reading email and not much else, as it’s constrained by the slow screen-refresh of e-paper.

   Sometimes the page-turn gets confused and starts going backwards; I think that’s probably caused by dirt on the screen. When I shut it off, clean the screen, and restart it, it’s generally fine. (Sometimes I have to do this a few times.)

8. @Hampus Eckerman:

   But the destruction wrought upon other countries, with the whole middleast in flames and terrorism increased tenfold, makes that pale in comparison. American wars and foreign policy is a disaster for the rest of the world. Again, US is not alone in this.

   This strikes me as a criticism of American elites and mass society more than America’s military as such. The US military does what its political masters tell it to do, to a first approximation. Your criticism is a criticism of President Obama, the corporate media and the “sensible center” of the US pundit and wonk sectors. And also – me! I have opposed US interventionism for 20 years, in writing and speech, a whole lot of writing really. Plus I marched twice. But I’m not a tax protester, haven’t gotten myself arrested, and haven’t emigrated. (I did look into the whole Canada thing. It turns out to be hard for a US citizen to immigrate to Canada!)

   And every one of these criticisms of yours is fair and just and right. What they aren’t is criticisms of “the US military” as such – unless we take it to the logical extreme of saying that each of the individual members could choose not to serve, to resign, to flawlessly master their forward panic in applicable spray-and-pray situations and otherwise be paragons in ways we are not ourselves faced with being.

   Maybe Greg Hullender heard “US foreign policy is teh suXX0rs” and it sounded like “What if they gave a war and nobody came, but somebody did so those people suck” and decided it was a criticism of “our military.” I think that unwarranted leap happens in a lot of people’s minds without malice, but it is deadly to real politics, because it has to be possible for a country to consider that maybe its foreign and military policy is a mistake and/or a crime and needs changing, and if one side must constantly hedge around the policy question with emotional reassurances then we can’t have that discussion effectively.

   But make no mistake, there are also knaves and rogues who prey on that mistaken impulse to deliberately mis-take criticism of policy as “hating the troops.” These people are trying to sabotage the policy discussion to their own benefit, and they are purely contemptible.

9. @Jim Henley

   And every one of these criticisms of yours is fair and just and right. What they aren’t is criticisms of “the US military” as such

   Well, yes and no.
   If by “the US military” one means all the individual soldiers, sailors, marines, air(wo)men etc., then it’s not a fair criticism.
   But if one means the leadership, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon, the Defense Dept., the entrenched interests of the military, the military-industrial complex etc., then yes, it is fair to condemn the military (along with other elite interests) for recent overseas adventures. The US military is under civilian authority but in our current environment, I really don’t think there is a one way street in setting policy that runs from the White House to the Pentagon to the generals, and never the other way around.

   Secondly, one may also mean by “US military” its policies and practices which have lead to the death and destruction of much civilian life. Maybe its unreasonable to hold individual personnel morally responsible but we must condemn the policies, practices, and actions.

10. Jim Henley:

    “This strikes me as a criticism of American elites and mass society more than America’s military as such.”

    It is a criticism of both. What I’m really against is, to use a well known phrase, is the military industrial complex. How corporations, military and politicians form an unholy triad that is bad for the rest of the world.

    But I don’t think it is to “take it to the logical extreme” to say that people shouldn’t enter the army. It is not an extreme. Most people do not join the military. It is joining that is the extreme.

11. @Amina: We’re not really disagreeing here.

12. As for Paul Verhoeven seeing the extremely pro-military stance of the Heinlein novel as fascist, Verhoeven is a Dutch man born in 1938, which means he was a young child during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. So he knows what fascism looks like, because he experienced it.

    Besides, I’ve never met anybody in Western Europe who read Starship Troopers and was not put off by its extreme pro-military stance. The military is much less venerated in most of Europe than in the US to the point that the regular US veneration of its military looks a tad weird to us. And Heinlein not just cranks the veneration of the military up to eleven in Starship Troopers, he also seems to see it as the only valuable profession. So the world of Starship Troopers looks like a particularly nasty dystopia to Europeans, particularly those of Verhoeven’s generation. Frankly, I was stunned when I learned that not everybody think that Starship Troopers is a dystopia.

    And for the record, I dislike the film intensely. But I don’t care for the novel either, though for different reasons.

    Word, up to and including the last sentence. Also clicky.

13. Then I saw book covers and movies from the 1960s that had ladies with fashionable piled up hair and heavy false eylashes and lipstick and contemporary fashion model poses and fashionable girdle shapes under vaguely long dresses or silly hats to convey “medieval” or “fantasy” to modern eyes and a light bulb went off.

    I find that phenomenon hilarious, especially in Hammer films that are supposed to take place during the Victorian era. The ones from the 60s strike me as the MOST hilarious, because the high-fashion makeup and hair of that era was so stylized.

    It really works in original series Star Trek, though. By the time I was viewing it in contrast to the earth-toned 1970s, all the groovy styles seemed exotic and futuristic.

14. So I think the feel, at least from Filers, is that Kobo is the way to go. Looks like that’s the way I’m going – and I took a look at the store, looks nice enough and I’m happy to support a store that wants to be global like that, since borders continue to be a nuisance in my life.

15. Yeah, during the stop-loss period of keeping an active force adequate to the Iraq occupation, there was a reluctance on the part of militarist members of the political class to make veterans benefits “too good” out of fear it would create an incentive for people to leave the service.

    There’s a reason Wilfred Owen called it “The Old Lie”: there are people who go to war reluctantly, fully knowing the cost inherent in it, and accepting that there is a necessity in it; but they are not enough to fill the ranks of an all-volunteer army for an imperial power. So you entice them with the hunger for glory, for manhood, telling them that only by subjecting themselves to the brutality of training and the dangers and horrors and corruption of combat they will become Real Men. Or Real Citizens.

    But it’s a lie, of course it’s a lie. “War doesn’t make anybody great” as Yoda said. And it’s a cynical lie, because those who need warm bodies in harm’s way have no need of those same warm bodies once they have been harmed.

16. Oneiros, I should note that sometimes some formatting gets lost in Kobo; there’s a couple of books I own where the dropcaps turn into regular caps (but are definitely dropcaps when viewed in a different viewer) and although you can change display fonts in the viewer (which is nice), if the book has multiple distinct fonts it doesn’t always display them as distinct. (By which I mean, if one character speaks in san-serif and the rest of the book is serif, I’ve noticed that in at least one case it all displays as one or the other. Italics and bold always display correctly.) Also, smallcaps sometimes display as just all-smalls.

    Minor formatting issues, but if format is important to you, you should know. I don’t honestly know whether other platforms have these same issues or not.

17. There are many reasons to dislike the general draft, but there are also a few reasons to approve of it. Until about 2006 (IIRC), every adult male in Italy had to serve for a year in the military. They could opt to do a civil service year instead, but they could not avoid serving altogether.

    Most people hated it with a passion, including people who thought they were all for the military life: they were actually the ones that suffered the most, because they were not prepared for the particular mix of bureaucratic stupidity and mean viciousness that makes up – by all accounts I’ve heard – life in an army of conscripts. The ones that fared better where the ones that took it with some degree of humour.

    But the point is – the military was not a separate class. It was pretty much everybody. Part of the point in implementing the general draft was exactly that, of making the army an army of the Italian people, and not a separate body that might get ideas about being better at running things. We had lots of near examples of that, in France, Spain, Portugal and Greece. It’s hard to do a coup d’etat (or, as we called it then, significantly taking the word from Spanish, a golpe) when the troops you are ordering about are the general public. In fact the father of a friend of mine who was an officer in the Air Force used to say that the reason he had enrolled was precisely that he wanted to make sure there were some lefties in those tank turrets, willing to shoot their own generals, if need be.

    Of course drafting, training, housing and clothing and feeding and arming everybody was costly and not particularly efficient for the kind of military intervention the Italian Army was going to be involved in (that is, civil defence and peacekeeping missions, since our Constitution forbids war “as a way of resolving international disputes”, although, yes, indeed, we were there with the Coalition of the willing because the law is never much of an impediment to political will). So the draft was abolished, among cries of jubilations from everybody under 18.

    Mind you, not that this discouraged some Italian military from plotting the overthrowing of the Republic: but they never went within sniffing distance of being able to.

18. @Cassy B: Thanks for the advice. In my head those sound like minor quibbles, but then I remember something like Discworld which has a few very distinctive ways of formatting for certain characters…

    Still, I think it’s something I can live with if it means carrying something that weighs significantly less than a suitcase full of dead wood. I’ve already put up with the bizarre formatting issues on my tablet before now when I moved over a lot of my short story reading to it, so I think I can probably deal with anything the Kobo can throw at me.

19. I like my Kobo and about a quarter of what I read I read on it, but if at all possible I buy my ebooks from somewhere other than the Kobo store. Two reasons: drm and also the Kobo store has an extraordinarily terrible search engine.

20. Oneiros, they are small quibbles, but they sometimes come up, especially in fantasy novels, so, in the interests of full disclosure, I thought you should know before you bought.

    I recall a character in one of Jasper Fforde’s books who speaks exclusively in a very Olde Englishe (almost Fraktur) font; I doubt that would display as different (and hard-to-read) on my Kobo. But it’s not something that comes up often. Since Death in Pratchett speaks in ALLCAPS rather than small-caps. I doubt there’d be a problem with those books. Mostly it shows up in things like signs: rather than JOE’S BAR AND GRILL it becomes joe’s bar and grill.

    (Edit to add: this forum doesn’t support small-caps either, so the above defaulted to all-caps. Which is better than defaulting to all-smalls…)

    Which is fine, as soon as you realize that’s what’s happening. It’s entirely possible it’s simply an artifact of poor html formatting by the publisher. And, as I said, I have no idea whether or not Kindles or Nooks have the same issue.

21. Peace Is My Middle Name on December 13, 2015 at 6:36 pm said:

    I spent a time studying portrait photographs of the Victorian era, and I can remember the startling realization that some of them were supposed to be in historic dress.

    A Viking reenactor friend of mine was being puzzled by Victorian-era drawings of what they thought Viking clothing looked like (the Viking age in Britain was ~798 ad through 1066 ad). The outfits were more or less “correct” for what the Victorians knew at the time, but all the women depicted had bustles.

    That was the correct silhouette for a woman in the Victorian era, therefore all women throughout all time had bustles. Or at least so thought that one artist.

    I wish I knew where my friend had seen those drawings.

22. @ULTRAGOTHA:

    I was fascinated to watch the nineteenth century evolution of the idea of Norse women’s costume as original more or less honest attempts at accuracy got misunderstood by succeeding generations of copyists all copying each other. The most striking example is the round shoulder brooches which held the dress, which eventually were slipped down and morphed and enlarged into metal breast bowls (still a popular item on fictional barbariennes).

23. I think I’ve caught up with the thread but I’m still not sure of the key question: exactly which kind of e-readers are favored by the US military?

24. CF :

    I think I’ve caught up with the thread but I’m still not sure of the key question: exactly which kind of e-readers are favored by the US military?

    Don’t forget, Camestros – hexapodia is the key insight.

25. Costume depictions often get extracted from context when used on the web (*Pinterest* *shudder*) so it’s useful as well as fun to figure out the “tells” for which artistic era a historic style has been filtered through. I haven’t seen the “vikings with bustles” image, but late 19th century reference works on historic costume are easily identifiable by the shape of the women’s shoulders. They all have that conical/shoulderless look that was the epitome of Victorian feminine posture.

    But my favorite for the “historic costume telephone game” is the interpretation I saw that had turned a medieval sideless surcoat into a fur-edged jacket. I.e., a reverse image of the actual structure of the garment.

    This isn’t meant to laugh at ignorant interpretations of past eras, mind you. As others have noted, all eras interpret the clothing of the past (or of other cultures) through their own lens. It’s fascinating exactly because a very small passage of time reveals those invisible assumptions about what clothing (and human beings) are expected to look like.

26. RDF on December 14, 2015 at 9:13 am said:

    Don’t forget, Camestros – hexapodia is the key insight.

    Ah! That would explain both the bustles and the wimples on those armored troop carrying kobos.

27. Camestros Felapton on December 14, 2015 at 10:27 am said:

    RDF on December 14, 2015 at 9:13 am said:

    Don’t forget, Camestros – hexapodia is the key insight.

    Ah! That would explain both the bustles and the wimples on those armored troop carrying kobos.

    Starship Troupers?

28. Peace Is My Middle Name on December 14, 2015 at 10:30 am said:

    RDF on December 14, 2015 at 9:13 am said:

    Don’t forget, Camestros – hexapodia is the key insight.

    Ah! That would explain both the bustles and the wimples on those armored troop carrying kobos.

    Starship Troupers?

    Much is revealed when we consider this earlier attempt by Vikings to film Heinlein:
    

    [Glasgow?]

29. So you entice them with the hunger for glory, for manhood, telling them that only by subjecting themselves to the brutality of training and the dangers and horrors and corruption of combat they will become Real Men. Or Real Citizens.

    I feel like we’re straying very far from sci-fi, but there are many, many reasons people join the military. For instance, if you join the US military, one can more easily become a US citizen. I don’t know how much of a motivation to join that is, but about 8% of the US Navy is foreign-born. Then there are benefits like the G.I. Bill, etc or simply the need for a respected job. Recruitment ads in the US often stress the military as job training, not killing folk. Which probably is fairly accurate.

    I do wish there was still a draft though.

30. What I’ve discovered I must have in an e-reader is page-turning animation. Dissolves and non-animated jumps are annoying, and slides have me looking at the top-left before the new words have arrived. Page-turning draws my eye to the moving corner, slowing me down enough that the words and my eyes land at the same time. The Kindle app was almost unreadable until I discovered the option for that.

31. Jamoche, the Kobo Aura does not have a page-turning animation. (I can’t speak to other Kobo models.) It just flicks to the next page when you swipe.

    I’m not sure if ANY e-ink readers have page-turning animations, because the refresh rate of e-ink is already considerably slower than that of LCDs. If you need a page-turning animation, you may need an LCD reader. (Actually, if anyone has seen a page-turning animation on an e-ink reader, I’d be interested to hear about it…)

32. Regarding Susan, others have pointed out Fred Clark’s take.

    I will note that I have seen at least two different people do fanfic stories which make Susan a Doctor Who companion. (Well, one wasn’t a story so much as a collection of paragraph-long vignettes.) It makes a disturbing level of sense when you think about it, given that she’s someone who has already seen the non-linearity of time first-hand…

33. @ Bruce Baugh

    Love all the kitty pics!

    Your tortie is colored a lot like my torbie female, and I haven’t seen a full tortie with that color pattern before!

    ETA: Yes, Vasha, love the ahot of Wicker. Hope he adjusts!

34. @JJ

    have seen enough evidence to convince me that a significant number of people who consider themselves “Pro-Life” fall into this category.

    However, not all of them do, and painting them as a homogenous group of people with one single view is not helpful. It would perhaps to be better simply to state that one has an issue with that segment of the group whose views on the subject are inconsistent and could be considered hypocritical.

    Yes I should have said too many of the pro-life people I’ve interacted with as well as most of the GOP politicians seem to be pro-birth rather than pro-life as they are for decreasing welfare/pre-natal care/ACA/universal health care/other social services and that seems hypocritical to me if you claim every life is precious. I apologize to all for not being careful with my words. I’ve been poor and pregnant and had a miscarriage. I know the difference in the medical care I’ve gotten in the US depending on where I’ve fallen on the economic scale and it is appalling. This is a hot button topic for me. I should have taken more time before responding and will try to do so in the future.

    @Mike Glyer please forgive me.

35. @junego: Thanks. I took him to the vet today (just for them to see hm and open a file) and it was pretty awful. He hasn’t stopped trembling yet. I expect he’ll recover quicker than when he first arrived, though.

36. @ Mike Glyer, JJ, & Tasha

    My comment about certain people who claim to be pro-life was also probably not clear enough. I, like Tasha, meant my remarks directed to those who I consider have a hypocritical stance about the issue. Also, like Tasha, I’ve been on the receiving end of our system, especially how it treats single mothers and their children. I, too, have very strong feelings about the whole rigamarole, but will be more careful about how I frame things in future.

37. @ Vasha
    He has such a sweet face. Hope Angel warms up to him because that might help him feel more secure, too. All you can do is support him until he heals as much as he’s able to.

38. re: US military

    I was a big proponent for ending the draft in the 70s. I now think that was a mistake. The biggest, most advanced military in the world is no longer a “citizen military”, What I mean by that is, in part, what others have said about the rank and file military being taken from a broad swathe of the citizenry and then most of them returning to civilian life being a check on military-type coups, adventurism, etc by the elites.

    Having a professional military means the individuals in the organization can come to see themselves as separate from other citizens and can get caught up in (or be encouraged in) extreme tribalism. Citizens outside the military also see them as ‘other’ to a greater or lesser extent, which can make it easier to ignore the costs they pay for the wars the elites get them into, making them feel more isolated and tribal…

    I think we need something similar to what Anna described. A mandatory service stint for all sexes and all classes (with obvious exceptions) and insistence on a draft for our wars would help stop some of the aggression* and reduce the chance of some faction or element in society using the isolation of the military from their fellow citizens to destabalize the government. The extreme fundamentalists in the US have succeeded in infiltrating the military leadership and rank-and-file to a worrying degree with their interpretations of what the Constitution means and where the military’s loyalties should lie.

    *See the Vietnam War. My first husband was a Vietnam vet. He got off the plane after his tour was over and marched into the nearest Vietnam Veterans Against the War office and joined, as did a number of his fellow vets. If there was still a draft, I don’t think we would still be fighting in Afghanistan with almost no broad citizen unrest or protest.

39. @Junego: According to Wikipedia, there are two recessive genes involved. One softens the usual black to this gray/blue, and the other softens the orange to this cream. Mutie kitties!

    This is possibly too cynical, but looking at the actual history of things like Bush Jr’s Air National Guard time and the general divide in treatment given to elites versus masses versus underclasses now, I’m inclined to think that if we had the draft, it wouldn’t be anything like universal. It might even be as screwed up as our prison system.

40. @ Filers

    Again I want to thank everyone for their suggestions. You guys are great! Now I get to make some fun decisions. Amazon guarantees delivery if ordered within the week and my DIL always does the wrapping :-9

41. @ Bruce Baugh
    You’re right about the draft disproportionally impacting the least powerful in society. That was true for Vietnam and it would definitely be a problem whenever implemented. It is also true for the recruiting of our current military, although that is more “voluntary”. The issue is vastly more complex than my simplified “solution” because doing that alone wouldn’t fix all the problems. However, this professional military is more counterproductive to the health of our democracy, imo, than the unfairness of a draft (which could be mitigated to some extent by other measures).

42. I love my kindle Paperwhite. It’s easy to read, easy on my eyes, doesn’t have glare issues, holds over 1,000 books, and syncs with Amazon, Goodreads, FB, Twitter, and WordPress.

    No matter what ereader one chooses it’s important to start categories/folders from day one. Always put each book purchased/gifted into appropriate category(ies) as soon as you buy them. If you use Goodreads or some other online place recreate your shelves before you add your first book.

    If you have triggers I recommend creating categories for those and as soon as a book you are reading has one of your triggers immediately add it to your trigger folder/category. Or even better create categories for the basic triggers/content notes so when recommending books you can check if someone mentions x.

    Categories were not available when I first used kindle apps. My books are a mess. Every now and then I’ll spend 4-8 hours working on organization. I wish they would use at least the store categories.

43. One problem with a draft is, the USA doesn’t need a military that size. And if you make it a “service” draft – where some people maintain the national parks or whatever – and somehow finesse the disemployment effects of that*, you still have a separate warrior caste: the people who join the shooting services.

    I also don’t believe a military draft would in itself make the US less warlike – under the draft we still got into Korea, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic (once or twice, I forget how many). It was children of the draftee era – older boomers – who dragged us into Iraq.

    The benefit of a specifically military draft is that people who have had to put up with life in the actual services with actual officers of varying quality and rules and regulations of varying sense, seem historically to be much less prone to lionize the military: they know it as a human institution from the inside, not an imagined exemplar of efficiency and heroism seen only from outside.

    —————————–
    *You want mischief? Imagine the use national-service type draft could be put to in the ongoing war against public-employee unions.

44. junego:

    The extreme fundamentalists in the US have succeeded in infiltrating the military leadership and rank-and-file to a worrying degree with their interpretations of what the Constitution means and where the military’s loyalties should lie.

    This rather thick slathering of rhetoric almost completely obscures a reality about the nature of people who have historically joined the US military when there was no draft, which has always included a share of Southerners with evangelical Protestant beliefs.

    “Infiltrate”? Time for one of those cool headcloths….

45. @Mike Glyer: I think junego is talking about this kind of thing.

46. Jim Henley on December 14, 2015 at 5:27 pm said:

    One problem with a draft is, the USA doesn’t need a military that size.

    I’d add also:
    * The increasing technical demands of modern armed forces
    * The role of the military in peace-keeping roles
    Both imply a greater investment in training any given solider/marine/sailor/etc. Even with people in reserve forces that means there is a higher cost per individual and more sense in retaining fewer people for longer who have made a longer term commitment.

    I wouldn’t think a draft for police officers would be a good idea and I think some of the same reasons apply for the military.

    Alternatively you could only draft the children of the hereditary rich – which seems to be UK policy for one specific family.

47. Jim Henley: You do realize that the linked article doesn’t actually discuss “infiltrating the military leadership and rank-and-file to a worrying degree with their interpretations of what the Constitution means and where the military’s loyalties should lie”?

    It discusses an Air Force Academy order that an “instructor should NOT announce their religious belief in class, to people he/she did not know, to people she/he had just met, to people over whom the instructor had a power relationship…”

48. I’m not totally opposed to 2-4 years of civil/military/community service for all at 18 (both genders). If, and only if, I thought it could be administered fairly. I’d be in favor of the same pay rate no matter the assigned job and full health benefits. Those going to college could get a waiver allowing them to finish college before doing their service time and put in community service which could take advantage of their education.

    I have major concerns with the ability to administer this fairly. Our government hasn’t impressed me with their administration prowess.

49. Tasha Turner: I have major concerns with the ability to administer this fairly. Our government hasn’t impressed me with their administration prowess.

    The underlying reason for this is that Big Business and Rich People have pretty much owned the U.S. legislative and political process for decades now, and there are loopholes everywhere in our system to benefit the rich and powerful.

    There is very little about the U.S. which could be considered “fair” these days.

50. Jim Henley: To continue my thought — every year the Federal government notifies civilian employees about the Hatch Act, and admonishes them not to violate it. This is necessary because every year there are employees who, in the interest of furthering their political causes, do stuff they’re not supposed to. So is the proportionate response to this to treat it as correcting an abuse, or as evidence someone may overthrow the government?

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