(1) A HATCHLING. The Book Smugglers conduct “A Chat With Ann Leckie” about Provenance.
The Book Smugglers: Yeah, and there’s scope for that, there’s so many different worlds and so many different things and the set-up is already there, so…
Ann Leckie: I put in the glass bridges in Nilt, which you may have noticed. And this is not a spoiler per se but an easter egg – There’s a moment in Ancillary Justice when Breq says the tourists come to Nilt and they buy these rugs that they think are handmade by the nomads, but in fact they’re made in a factory and they’re overpriced in the giftshops. So there’s a moment in Provenance, where Ingray meets Zat, and Zat says that she went to Nilt, and she saved up extra to buy this wonderful handmade rug, that was in beautiful colors, that was made by the nomads on Nilt, and that’s a couple of people who got advanced copies. I got a direct message from one person like “Ohh she got cheated!” [laughs] I’m like that’s – that’s just a little tiny easter egg!
(2) CATCH THE NEXT WAVE. The evidence is piling up: “Scientists record a fourth set of gravitational waves”.
Last year, researchers confirmed the existence of gravitational waves with two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors. Shortly thereafter, they detected twoadditional gravitational wave-causing events that sent ripples through the universe. Well, we can now add a fourth to that list, as astronomers announced another set of waves. And for the first time, they observed the waves with a third detector — the Italy-based Virgo.
(3) CODICIL. Good luck to Delilah S. Dawson on her surgery:
https://twitter.com/DelilahSDawson/status/911227974715928576
(4) CROWDSOURCED SUCCESS. The Unbounders has announced that Farah Mendelsohn’s Heinlein book has funded.
(5) KEEP ON PITCHING. Francis Hamit reminds everyone about this appeal for books for s North Carolina school.
Here is a worthy cause: Hoke County High School has put out an online appeal for books; almost any books, for their school library. Hoke County, North Carolina, is a poor rural community where times have been hard and there has been no money for school library books since 2009. The appeal was specific, for writers to donate copies of their own books but we all have a pile of review or other books that have been consumed and can now be repurposed. (Time to attack the clutter people!). We put together three boxes of these yesterday. If you look at the Facebook page for Hoke County High School you will see that they encourage enlistments in the US military, so that’s another reason to donate books. Can’t stand to part with your hoard? Send money so they can buy books they really need.
Here is the address:
Hoke County High School
c/o Rebecca Sasala
505 Bethal Road
Raeford, NC 28376.
(6) NOWHERE NEAR REMULAC. ScreenAnarchy shares a French import: “MISSIONS: Watch This Exclusive Clip For French Sci-fi Series Coming to Shudder”.
Shudder, AMC Networks’ premium thriller, suspense and horror streaming service, will launch the first season of Missions, France’s critically praised OCS Signature sci-fi series, on September 28, 2017 across its territories. Shudder will also co-produce the second season, slated to air in 2018.
With the funding of an eccentric billionaire, the crew of a manned craft aims to be the first to land on Mars. Much to the dismay of all on board however, just before the culmination of their 10-month journey to the Red Planet, they are made aware of a video sent by a rival ship that has overtaken them and already landed on the planet thanks to a revolutionary engine. The bad news doesn’t end there however, as the tape contains a cryptic warning from the Americans pleading with the crew not to land as something far too dangerous is happening on the surface. After a chaotic landing on Mars, the crew finds a survivor — but he’s not from their rival mission. His name is Vladimir Komarov. He is Russian. And he is the first man who died in space…in 1967.
(7) THIRTY-EIGHT STORIES HATH SEPTEMBER: Jason, of Featured Futures, is back with the “Summation of Online Fiction: September 2017” with its list of recommended stories and honorable mentions.
With Compelling off, Apex doing a lot of reprints, and Tor.com worryingly publishing a single story, September would have been an extremely light month, but a double issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies and the return of a lost zine helped compensate, resulting in thirty-seven stories of 149K words (plus one I skipped). Regardless, it was a very light month in terms of the proportion of the good stuff (though there was plenty of readable stuff). I’m not sure what happened beyond it being one of those freaky streaky webzine things. Speaking of, the returning lost zine is Terraform.
Ralan.com declared it defunct a few months ago and, after waiting awhile to “make sure,” I declared it dead on April 27th and stopped looking at it. Recently, I happened to take another look and, naturally, they’d published another story on April 29th. But, other than excerpts, interviews, graphic stuff, etc., they did quit producing anything after that until August 24th. Since then, they have managed to publish a story coupled with an article every seven or eight days (two in August and three in September though, to keep the irony ironing, they don’t seem to be doing anything but another excerpt this week). So perhaps they’re back. Only one story was at all noteworthy but, since I gave Terraform‘s death an explicit notice, I feel like I ought to do the same for its rebirth. Now, on with the very short (or “little”) list…
(8) TODAY IN HISTORY
- September 28, 1951 — The original The Day The Earth Stood Still was released on this day.
(9) STAND-UP COMIC. As Vox Day prepares to launch his Alt*Hero comics line, he’s running the customary anti-SJW setups to fire up his customers. His mockery of Jack Kirby predictably upset people in the comics field.
I’ve been a little taken aback by the sheer vituperation of the SJWs triggered by the mere existence of the Alt*Hero concept, at least at this very early stage. And, I confess, I have been more than a little surprised by their apparent confusion between the late Marvel/DC artist Jack Kirby and the superheroes that he drew.>
Some responses — I think a bunch of comics type only just found out that he exists. They are not especially impressed…
As ever, the alt wrong confuse "triggered by" with "laughing our asses off at" https://t.co/jH7uV9N3wp
— Mitch Benn (@MitchBenn) September 28, 2017
https://twitter.com/RoseTintedVisor/status/913395549885403137
https://twitter.com/RoseTintedVisor/status/913396379099238400
jack kirby was a jew who designed and wrote characters that symbolized the fight against fascism and racism you enormous dumbass https://t.co/dFffua1RhW
— Goth Ms. Frizzle (@spookperson) September 28, 2017
https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/913533658840961025
(10) RETRENCHMENT. Nerd & Tie’s Trae Dorn reports some shrinkage in the convention calendar.
Dayton, OH based Time Lord Expo has officially been called off just two weeks before the con’s scheduled date. Convention organizer Patrick Baumgardner took to the con’s official Facebook page and announced the cancellation earlier today…
In a press release yesterday, Wizard World announced that they were “postponing” five of their remaining seven 2017 shows. While their Austin and Oklahoma City shows will still take place as scheduled, their events in Biloxi, Peoria, Springfield, Montgomery, and Winston-Salem won’t be taking place this year.
Now a normal person would refer to these events as “cancelled,” but I guess saying they’re “postponed” reads better from a PR perspective.
Considering the financial difficulties Wizard World has had over the last few years, it’s hard to be all that surprised…
(11) GHOST WRITER. Twain’s long gone, so NPR talked to his self-appointed co-authors: “A Modern Collaboration With Mark Twain In ‘Prince Oleomargarine'”.
This week Mark Twain has a new book out.
Yes, we know. He’s been dead for more than a century, but that hasn’t stopped him — or more accurately, his collaborators — from publishing a children’s book, called The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine. It’s based on 16 pages of notes, handwritten by Twain and discovered in an archive, in Berkeley, Calif.
Philip and Erin Stead took it from there; the Caldecott Award-winning author-illustrator duo picked up Twain’s trail and finished the story.
“It was never entirely clear to us if there was never an ending, or if Twain just never got around to writing it down,” Philip Stead says. “That said, we had to make a book, so we had to provide an ending to the story.”
(12) NOT BINDING. Margaret H. Willison of NPR discusses “In ‘Dear Fahrenheit 451,’ Loving Books Both Wisely And Well” —
The truest testament to the quality of Dear Fahrenheit 451, Annie Spence’s ingratiating collection of love letters and breakup notes to the books in her life, is that my enjoyment of it was, in the end, great enough to outweigh my fury that someone other than me had written it.
It’s lucky that she manages this feat, as anyone who loves books well enough to enjoy reading Spence’s letters is likely to relate so closely to her thoughts that they’ll struggle with that same sense of resentful ownership — particularly librarians. “What are you doing,” they will think, “writing out my life like it’s your own, Annie Spence? Who do you think you are? What makes you special?” Thankfully, Spence’s voice is ultimately so warm, funny, and specific that it answers the question handily — she’s special because she has a unique ability to capture the thoughts and feelings of book lovers, both professional and otherwise, on the page.
(13) THESE ARE THE JOKES, FOLKS. Martin Morse Wooster tells me: “I know Filers spend too much time staring at screens and need to go outside and soak up some crisp fall air. Why not go to a corn maze? In The Plains, Virginia, you can go to Pirates of the Corn-ibbean.’”
The website is http://cornmazeintheplains.com. Here’s a review of this year’s theme:
The giant 5 Acre maze with the theme “Pirates of the Corn-ibbean”, has a pirate’s flag, parrot, and a chest full of treasure. The cornfield comes alive when it is filled with maze goers who enter the 2.5 miles of “cornfusing” pathways. They soon find themselves facing countless choices, while attempting to answer the trivia clues en route to the elusive victory bridge. Whether it is during the night or day, each maze wanderer is armed with a survival guide and flag on a mission to collect puzzle pieces of the maze design and test their trivia skills to help them find their way out. If one gets “udderly cornfused”, they can always wave their teams flag frantically, to signal the “corn cop” to come to their rescue.
Last’s year’s maze looked like this:
Martin adds, “I know in the UK the word for ‘corn’ is maize. So do they have maize mazes over there?
[Thanks to JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, Carl Slaughter, Nigel, Jason, and NickPheas for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Xtifr.]
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Maizel Tov!
Heh. I managed to poke a hornet’s nest there.
If I had the choice of contributing to a school where the military gave money so they could recruit, and one where they didn’t, it’s a no-brainer: give to the school that says no to the military.
And if schools are dependant on money from the military to function, or a career in the military is one of the only realistic ways out of poverty and to get an education, then I’d say the priorities of the country are ass-backwards. I can hardly find a more morally reprehensible way to finance a school, nor a more inefficient one.
Right now, the USA spends more money on its military than the next nine spenders combined. And like Hampus, it seems much more likely to be used as a tool of aggression than to be used to defend liberty or freedom.
I did my ten months as a conscripted medic in the Swedish army. It was expected of us, but no-one thanked us but our officers when we mustered out.
Greg Hullender on September 29, 2017 at 8:26 am said:
Well, I think it’s funny, but then, I’m the guy who tried to promote the name Syphilitic Puppies, since A. their leader was named VD, and B. while they clearly had some sort of mental impairment, and rabies does make you stupid and insane, it also kills fairly quickly; those guys were lingering for years, getting crazier and crazier, which is much more symptomatic of tertiary stage syphilis*. 🙂
(People kept complaining that I shouldn’t descend to name-calling, but honestly, I’ve never pretended to be a good person. I simply have better taste in literature than those idiots, and more sense when it comes to philosophy and politics.)
* Or mercury poisoning, but I couldn’t think of a good joke for that.
@Karl-Johan Norén
Snip
In the US, local schools do not rely on military spending at all. So the “choice” you envision doesn’t exist at the local level. Military veterans have developed skills that work well as educators, so you do find some of them as teachers, school librarians, etc.
Military research spending is certainly an influence at the university level, but it isn’t that significant and the research generally has tremendous applications in the civilian world. (i.e. computers)
Yes, we spend a lot of money on the military. And as techgrrl1972 observed, the result of that spending is that a lot of other countries don’t have to spend as much as they know that they can count on the US military. As she suggested, we are not perfect.
I will respectfully suggest that our military has a net positive influence in the world by a significant margin.
Regards,
Dann
Karl-Johan, I’d suggest thinking about this differently, although I agree with the criticisms of U.S. imperialism brought up above. Unfortunately, military recruitment disproportionately occurs in the poorest schools, and by withholding money within that context, you’re withholding money from kids who most need that money. To be honest, the whole system is a bit messed up. We should simply be adequately funding public schools, but the funding mechanisms are messed up and there isn’t the political will to change them for a lot of complicated reasons that really call for a book rather than a blog response. But, needless to say, they aren’t separate from the emphasis on militarism and the effective poverty draft that fills our ‘all volunteer’ army.
@Robert Wood
It would not require much in the way of Googling to determine that the military is not disproportionately recruiting the poor. While those at the upper end of incomes are disproportionately underrepresented, the educated middle class serves as the bulk of our military.
There was a period of time in the 00’s when there were more waivers granted for non-high school graduates. Outside of that period, our recruits are better educated than the population average. And in terms of income, we are doing the bulk of our recruiting from the middle class.
(These two studies don’t agree on all issues, but they do begin to provide some competing context. Multiple sources are always better. Google is your friend.)
Regards,
Dann
Your first source is the Heritage Foundation and the second source doesn’t challenge my assertion. Here’s a discussion of military recruitment that brings up the differences in recruitment in high schools. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/10/28/do-military-recruiters-belong-in-schools.html
@Dann: Okay, apparently the US military is given near-limitless access to US high schools for free. I can’t really see that as a plus.
But they don’t take advantage of that access equally. To note an example from my source, “Take the example of two similarly sized high schools in two Hartford suburbs: Avon and Bloomfield. Army recruiters visited Avon High, where only 5 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, four times during the 2011-12 school year. Yet at Bloomfield High, where nearly half the students qualify for such assistance, recruiters made more than 10 times as many visits.”
The US military needs all the recruits it can get. We’re in the second decade of an eternal war. We’ve got a ways to go. Regardless, more reading is a general positive, I’d imagine. I particularly like Hampus’ suggestion about donating pacifist SFF.
(9) VD always astounds. He posts pics of himself (much younger and buffer) and of Kirby, who was apparently tiny (hadn’t known that before) to show just how much he’d pound Kirby in a fight, not considering that a tiny person who would still physically fight a Nazi, even knowing that Nazi would likely win the fight, is pretty much the definition of a hero. On the very positive side, it looks like VD found the next land to… *ahem* conquer, having run rampant through techno-pop, proto alt-right “journalism”, computer gaming, and SFF publishing and awards. My condolences to comics fans.
Currently reading: I’m not quite half way through Bound in Blood. Still finding Jame scenes far more fun than Torisen’s, but that’s to be expected.
Well, Karl-Johan, since Sweden does it differently, I guess you’re entitled to your opinion. FWIW. I personally agree with Heinlein though — conscription is suboptimal, a volunteer force is better. So do I get to take a shot at Sweden for needing to conscript people to serve instead of having sufficient volunteers to do so?
I’ve always liked the meme of “Wouldn’t it be great if the Pentagon needed to run bake sales to buy stuff?”, but sadly, that’s not the world we live in.
Back to, the USA is by no means a perfect place. And lord knows my thoughts about the current state of our government can only be described as appalled. But serving in the military is an honorable career choice, and having recruiters show up for career days is no more or less valid than having AT&T or Apple show up. Frankly, having a kid serve is probably a better career choice than slinging burgers at McDonald’s. At least the military is rather more egalitarian and meritocratic than the rest of American business. You can acquire marketable skills and accrue financial credits for further education after you muster out.
YMMV, of course.
@Karl-Johan
You leave me scratching my head, KJ. You are (or were) in a country with universal service (a draft), yet you appear to be opposed to — you know — service. And then you criticize a country that does NOT have a draft, and deride it for doing what it needs to in order to avoid instituting a draft.
Does that really seem logically consistent to you?
As has already been pointed out, this doesn’t happen in the US.
This part is absolutely true. It is shameful that we don’t send more of our tax dollars to education. OTOH, service in the military allows a whole lot of people to GET an education. And this isn’t something that you can really appreciate, since you live in a country where EVERYBODY serves.
Yeah, why didn’t we just stay home in 1941 and leave the rest of the world alone?
@Peer
Everybody just cut it out with all the floury language! It goes against my grain to winnow through all this chaff just to harvest a few germs of wisdom.
@contrarius@peer I’m willing to grant that the punsters are offering, at least, a kernel of truth….
techgrrl1972:
That is … debatable — especially in view of the recent uses of the U.S. military.
I dunno; much more of this punishment and I’ll give up and go to @dog_rates and look at husk-ies….
I’m reading these comments about how service in the military provides access to education and opportunity and books, to those who otherwise might be too poor to access these resources. And then it is observed that the US spends vastly more on its military than the next 9 nations combined(!). And correspondents seem to agree that spending on public education in the US is insufficient to provide the services required. And I can’t help thinking that these things might not be connected.
Spend less on weapons and soldiery, and spend more on education and books. Then there might not be the requirement for book donations to schools, whether organised by soldiers or not.
Perhaps the reason nations other than the US choose to spend less on their military than the US is not that they are ‘relying on the US’, for protection, but have made their own threat and risk assessments and have funded their own military forces accordingly.
I have just finished re-reading ‘The Forever War’, and wonder if the point Joe Haldeman makes about how once economies and industry, become dependent on a war and the associated systems, cannot unwind themseves, so that the ‘project’ becomes a self-sustaining delusion. And how once force and violence is seen as the solution to all disputes, it becomes the lens though which all problems are seen. and so the vicious cycle continues.
Study War no More please
@Contrarius, 1941 was close to 3/4 of a century ago, so I don’t think that’s fair to bring up. I don’t think it is unreasonable for non-Americans to be nervous about our military. I’m American, and I’m nervous,
@Lenore —
I knew someone was going to say that. 😉
I recently had a disagreement on another sff forum with a Ukrainian. He was upset that the US apparently supports the current Ukrainian government, which he strongly dislikes. I asked him if he would have preferred us to let Putin go ahead and take over that country as he so clearly wanted to.
The US has obviously misused its military in some ways — but that doesn’t mean it’s a Bad Thing to have enough military power to dissuade folks we disagree with when the need arises. I don’t think we need to throw the baby out with the bath water.
Oh, no argument there. It’s probably always a good idea to be nervous about one’s military. OTOH, at the moment it seems like our military leaders are the adults in the room in terms of both security and civil rights, compared to the elected government officials we have right now.
@Contrarius, I agree – and it’s the elected officials I’m worried about. Not only the Republican ones, though they worry me more.
@Contrarius
Your idea that there should be a universal service for everybody is something that only people from a country which hasn’t had mandatory military or civilian service in a long time could like.
Because like Hampus and Karl-Johan, I grew up in a country that had mandatory military service (plus civilian service such as working in hospitals for pacifists or joining the THW volunteer disaster relief organisation) for young men and I remember very well how much the system was hated by young people, because it basically meant that the state was stealing away X months/years of your life. It’s forced labour, nothing more. Throughout my teens, I lived in terror that this forced service would be extended to women as well.
As long as military service is voluntary, I don’t mind it’s existence. Ever since the suspension of mandatory military service in 2011, the military is viewed as a regular employer in Germany. However, no one here would ever consider thanking soldiers for their service. And if you thank soldiers, why not nurses, teachers, firemen, police officers, librarians, etc…? After all, they do vital jobs as well.
Coincidentally, as a teacher I have had quite a few students who actually wanted to join the military. I always encouraged them with the caveat that there are risks, since the German army is actually involved in hot conflicts these days. All of the kids were aware of the risks BTW and wanted to do it anyway.
Regarding the US, the problem is not that it has an all volunteer military. However, the fact that schools are underfunded, that university education is extremely expensive in the US and that poorer people often have to join the military to afford a university education is a huge problem. It’s not conscription, but it’s not a 100% free choice either.
Coincidentally, Germany has a big defence industry (a lot bigger than many people realise, since companies don’t advertise the fact that they do defence work for fear of being targeted by anti-defence-industry activists), even though we only have a reasonably sized and funded military.
Cheryl S.: “I’m just here for the corn puns.”
*Passes the popcorn round.*
The comics industry has had long experience with people who make grandiose promises, crank out a little shit and fade away.
Aside from grifting a new group of het-up alt-right types with promises of glory days, there just won’t be much going on, and the comics industry at large won’t notice Beale.
People who come along and say “We’re going to make comics the way they used to be made when you were a kid and liked them!” disappear fast, even when they’re experienced industry pros. People who say “We’re making comics to piss off people you hate!” will disappear even faster.
And holy cow, that art is sad, and the writing’s empty.
I’m sure there are people on the right who could make good, exciting comics that would engage an audience with the actual material, and if the anti-SJW crowd put their support behind someone like that, they might get somewhere — there’s a market for “manly adventure” out there.
But if they’re putting their bucks behind Beale, they’d be better off burning it.
Dann:
Nah. The result of that is an enormous deficit for no gain at all, apart from perpetual war which causes a lot of enemies and refugees. No sane nation wants to spend money on that. The money EU countries spend is enough for defense, just not for offense and/or colonialism.
Money would be better placed to build wellfare so poor people don’t have to enlist to survive.
And saying that US military has a positive influence in the world when their invertentions has set the whole middleeast ablaze, created enormous amount of refugees which the european counties are affected by. The money and weapons spent on bribing local gangs in Iraq for protection or “creating local military” lead directly to the rise of IS. And now US is supporting Al Qaida with weapons in Syria. And apart from the unmitigated disasters in Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq, we have the support of the massive war crimes in Yemen. And the backing up of the dictatorships i Saudiarabia and Egypt. And so on.
When americans attack people for not giving more to military, I would like to point out the cost of the refugees that the military creates and how many refugees that Sweden has taken in. A lot more than US.
So man up and take in all the refugees that your military have created. ALL OF THEM. Then you have the right to talk.
Some closing remarks.
I’m not necessarily against a volunteer military, though I have come to the conclusion that if one is to have a military, a conscription system is generally a better basis to build it on from a democratic and non-belligerent standpoint.
What I am firmly against is making a fetish out of the military. And that is exactly what most of the USA is doing.
My brother went to jail 2 months for refusing military service, so there is that. Still, the reason many swedes prefer conscription is because we believe it will lessen the risks of entering unnecessary wars.
I think 70% of swedes are in support of conscription, even if we hate it. Volunteer army didn’t work, because people didn’t volunteer.
Yeesh, hominy puns can youse guys make anyway?
@Cora —
Nonsense. It is true that the draft ended before I would have been old enough to serve, but not by much. And the Viet Nam War ended just a couple of years before my brother would have been eligible.
Here’s the thing that Karl-Johan seems to ignore, though: you can’t have both voluntary military service and a ban on (or boycott of supporters for) voluntary recruitment. The recruits have to come from somewhere.
It absolutely SHOULD extend to women; there’s no excuse at all for a men-only draft. And you shouldn’t think of it as forced labor — you should think of it as giving back to your community.
Actually, in this country we DO often thank employees of the fields you mentioned. But only the military and police expressly sign up to stand in front of a bullet.
But you bring up another good point: many people overestimate the risks involved in occupations like policing and the military. Here’s the 2015 list for occupations with the highest risk of on-the-job death in the US:
10. landscaping/lawn care supervisors
9. electrical power line installation and repair
8. farmers and ranchers
7. professional drivers (sales and truck)
6. structural iron and steel workers
5. trash collectors
4. roofers
3. pilots and flight engineers
2. commercial fishermen
1. loggers
Notice that neither the military nor the police make the Top Ten. OTOH, we depend on both the military and the police at our worst moments and in the most existential of ways.
Absolutely true!
Nothing in life is a 100% free choice.
@Hampus —
Again — WWII. Sure, that was a long time ago — but guess what: when you really need a big military, you really need it QUICK. When a crisis like that comes along, there is no lead time to build up something from scratch.
And yes, I absolutely agree that there’s a huge potential for misuse — but that doesn’t mean there is no good purpose for it.
@Karl-Johan —
Right. IMHO a country with a unversal draft is less likely to run headlong into avoidable wars.
Countries often owe their very existences to their military. Without librarians (mentioned by Cora) we might be uneducated Americans, but without our military we’d be British. Or German. Or Japanese.
This is the first sentence of a book by a Hugo-shortlisted author. Can you identify the author?
‘If you were told that reading this book could send you to hell, would you keep reading?’
So the answer: Ada Palmer. It is the first sentence of her scholarly work Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, Lucretius being the sort of writer for whom that sort of question might arise.
(I know ‘Campbell-winning’ trumps ‘Hugo-shortlisted’, but that would have been too much of a giveaway.)
@Contrarius
I’ve heard that theory, and it makes sense, except then there’s the Vietnam War. Admittedly, we started out somewhat slowly, but we made up for it later.
If people are going to fetishize folks who put their lives on the line in service of their country/state/etc., I think firefighters would be a much better choice – they don’t shoot people.
@Kathodus —
OTOH, there were lots of loopholes to the draft at that time. Just look at Good Old Donald.
And Coast Guard. I always thought I’d join the Coast Guard if I ever served in the military. Although I was never fond of “wars of aggression”, I could definitely see defending my own borders.
Modern militaries are too high tech for conscripts to be of much use. By the time you’ve got them trained they’re already leaving. As much as the Daily Whale likes to bleat about a return of national service the U.K. Armed forces are just not interested. We do face a manpower squeeze but that’s beeen at least as much due to 10 years of austerity in budgets as anything.
Scotland has historically provided more than its share of recruits, for similar reasons to the US examples. For many it provides skills and experience that they just couldn’t get otherwise.
With Russian eyes firmly on the Baltic states for any signs of weakness this is no time to be downplaying defence.
Maybe not the best way of describing the US military intervention in WW2.
@Camestros
+1000
@Camestros —
LOL.
Depends on your perspective. And remember, part of the problem with the US getting into WWII was that we did NOT have a large military at the time. In fact: “At the time, the U.S. simply did not have enough forces or equipment to mount a large-scale attack against the Axis Powers. The U.S. Army went into World War II with an end-strength of just 189,000, ranked about seventeenth in effectiveness among the armies of the world, just behind Romania, wrote Cristopher R. Gable in the U.S. Army Center of Military History publication: “The U.S. Army GHQ Maneuvers of 1941.””
https://www.army.mil/article/139620/americas_entry_into_world_war_ii_remembered_73_years_later
We were supplying money and materiél in 1940, started the first peacetime draft in 1940, provided occupation forces and escorts in 1941, and started limited combat missions within a few days after Pearl Harbor.
If you want a quicker response, there has to be a larger extant military ready to make that response.
As a response to “What I am firmly against is making a fetish out of the military,” this seems to suggest that there are only two approaches: Fetishing the military or not having one.
Because, after all, we didn’t have large standing armies just waiting around before our notable battles with the British. And before WWII, our army was smaller than Portugal’s. So as arguments for spending huge amounts of money on a standing military, bringing up times we didn’t have one and still won important wars is not all that convincing.
Since we started having a large, standing military, we’ve had fun in Korea and Vietnam, and lots of fun in the Middle East and elsewhere, killing millions, and whether we’ve gotten terribly good results out of it is debatable.
But even so, if we argue that there’s a need for a hefty standing military, that still doesn’t require being fetishistic about it, and it still leaves open the question of how much is enough for preparedness. Had we spent more on rebuilding Afghanistan around 1990 and less on being able to destroy things, we might be looking at a very different scenario today.
I tend to think, long term, building better schools has better and more lasting effects than building better warplanes, both at home and abroad.
That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have any military at all. But it does mean that there’s a question of proportion.
After all, once we’d helped our last major enemy collapse, we could have helped stabilize the world. But we think about guns more than schools, so instead we participated in building up new enemies.
A bigger part was that we didn’t really want to go.
There has to be the willingness to go, too. Which there wasn’t, in 1939.
But quicker responses aren’t necessarily better responses, especially if what you’re doing is spending money building a really big hammer so that when someone gets out of line you can smash them, instead of using some of that money making it less likely you’ll need a hammer at all.
World War II could have been drastically lessened by different diplomatic decisions at the end of World War I, so is the solution “Better have a gigantic military ready to go” or “Let’s not let Germany get so desperate they’ll turn to a Hitler”?
Probably a mix of both, in practical terms, but somehow we get real excited about one of the options that we mess up the other far too often.
@Kurt —
Not really. I’m mostly just saying that militaries are important enough that it’s understandable if they get fetishized.
And just think of the millions of lives that could have been saved if we had gotten into the war more quickly.
Again — no argument that it’s very easy to misuse a large military.
That unwillingness to go beyond our borders was part of the reason why we didn’t have a large standing military. They acted in concert.
As above, I’m not arguing against this at all.
@Contrariua
Germany declaring war kinda forced the US’s hand, while it’s likely they’d have entered the European war anyway it might have taken longer without that.
And still not a great idea to do so.
Except that we didn’t want to.
Plus, of course, think of the millions of lives that can be saved or improved if you spend that money on other things. It’s not a single-question litmus test. Every dollar you spend on the military is a dollar you don’t spend somewhere else.
If you do spend all that money on a military, there will always be people looking for ways to use it. It’s right there, waiting to be used, after all.
If you don’t, you’ve got money to spend on other things, which can have their own beneficial effects. But we don’t often get to ask “Just think about all the lives saved by doing constructive things instead of preparing to do destructive ones,” because given that choice we almost always favor destruction.
Maybe we should try to balance things out a little more, and see how many lives we can save through other means. There’s a lot of dead families in the Middle East that might be alive today if we’d used our finances in different ways.
@Kurt —
We started the draft in 1940 — we started organizing for involvement long before we actually got involved. We couldn’t have gotten involved to a significant extent much earlier than we did, because we didn’t have the capability. And again, “we didn’t want to” is part of the reason why we couldn’t.
Absolutely.
Not necessarily. Wars and military in general have always been an important engine of progress — which can end up making money for the economy as a whole.
Absolutely. You’ll get no argument from me on this. It’s always going to be a perilous balancing act.
Right. The national will wasn’t there. So blaming it more on the lack of something we didn’t want seems like pointing in the wrong direction.
Also, of course, having the national will to jump into foreign military adventures hasn’t proved to be an overall lifesaver either, so mixed blessings on that front.
What you seem to be arguing is that it’s worth having a military for when you need it. This doesn’t seem to be anything people are arguing against.
I don’t think people are really failing to understand that there are reasons that people fall into fetishizing the military. They’re disagreeing with the results of it.
@Kurt —
Basically I’m saying that we got caught flat-footed. We didn’t want a big military, so we didn’t have one — and then when it would suddenly have been a very good thing to have a large military handy, there wasn’t one available. We had to suddenly throw all our resources into building one, all while millions of people were dying.
Definitely mixed blessings. But you have to also factor in the “what would have happened if this military force didn’t exist” calculations.
I disagree about people disagreeing. 😉
Not all that long. The draft was enacted in September, began in October, and we were at war 14 months later. The draft actually had to be extended in summer of 1941, because those first terms were ending, and we weren’t at war yet but we clearly might have needed to be soon.
It’s not as if we started the draft in late 1940 and no one was ready to fight until December 7th of the following year. It was a part of the process of deciding we wanted to go to war and getting ready for it. Had we been attacked sooner, we’d have gone sooner, and we’d have managed.
It’s a foundational part, one that seems to have more primacy.
The argument that we should have had a large standing army during the Depression has various merits, though not that many are about preparedness.
And WWII still isn’t a strong argument in favor of having large standing armies; it’s more an argument that we can (or could, back then) tool up pretty fast when we wanted to.
I’m not sure it’s a great argument for fetishizing large standing armies either — or an argument for having the will to go to war at the drop of a hat, since that’s a key element of such preparedness.
I mean, I know you’re Contrarius, but at some point this has to relate back to the initial point, right? Which was about fetishizing large militaries being understandable because otherwise we might be British or German or Japanese, none of which were actually prevented by having large standing armies.
Not really. We got attacked over a year after we instituted a draft — our soldiers were actually threatening to desert because they’d been drafted, their terms were coming to an end, there wasn’t a war but we still wanted to keep them.
We were ramping up. One can make an argument that we could have been farther along, but “flat-footed” just isn’t the case.
You have to factor in a lot of calculations, but since there is rarely going to be no military force whatsoever, arguing that if there was no army at all we’d be British isn’t really a major part of the calculations. Especially since, at the start of the Revolution, we had no army at all, and we’re not British.
Since then, we’ve had an army of one size or another, and the calculation seems to be far more about “how big should it be” than “should it exist at all”?
Instead, we seem to deal with questions like “Is the military overly fetishized” with “But what if there hasn’t been one,” and that just doesn’t seem to address the question.
@Kurt —
Yeah, more than a year. Think of all the people who were dying during that year.
Right. And that’s part of what we’re debating about right now. Back in the 30s, lots of people didn’t want to become involved in the problems of other countries. So we didn’t have a big military. So we had to scramble when it became really really important to have a big military. Compare that to this thread, in which some people express their belief that we shouldn’t have a big military and shouldn’t become involved in the problems of other countries. See the result if such beliefs are followed? A sudden need to scramble the next time it becomes really really important to have a big military. And while we’re scrambling, people are dying.
Again — more than a year, and millions died during that time. What if next time it’s us being attacked instead of Europe?
Again, I’m not really saying that militaries SHOULD be fetishized — just that I think it’s understandable when they get fetishized. When a strong military can make the difference between existing and not existing as a country, that tends to make an impression.
Actually, it was. By the END of WWII, we had a huge military — the Army alone peaked at more than 8 million. If we hadn’t had that, we wouldn’t have won. And again, the delay necessitated by building up that military cost millions of lives.
Seen today alongside California Highway 99:
Raisin Hill
Haunted Cornfield
That’s not all that long.
That’s not a measurement of time. Think of all the people who died while we had a large standing army. Strangely, also not a measurement of time.
Which is an argument for not letting things get to the point of needing to have a large military, but you keep waving that aside to go “What about dead people?” but ignoring the millions that have died when we have had a large military, as if somehow theoretically-saved lives weigh more than actually-lost ones.
Gotta have a large army, because millions seem to die either way. Not a winning argument.
Nor is equating “We shouldn’t go around destabilizing regions and causing lots of death” easily equatable to “we shouldn’t become involved in the problems of other countries.” Often, we seem to be causing the problems of other countries, but somehow, thinking of all the people who die as a result doesn’t matter so much when they’re not European.
This is a nonsense argument. Because we weren’t interested in getting involved in a war in Europe, we didn’t prepare as soon as if we had been interested. What if it was a different war? Well, we probably wouldn’t have reacted like we did to a war in Europe, then.
Maybe there’s a level somewhere between the size of Portugal’s army in 1939 and the size of our army today that’s flexible and functional, but no, think of the dead of WWII, over and over, think of those dead and no other dead, ignore reason and function and expense and results and only balance the question of “all” or “nothing.”
It’s a lousy argument.
And there’s a wide range between being reasonably prepared and fetishizing the military but you seem to keep equating the two.
Which is not the same as having a large standing army, so no, having a large standing army did not prevent us from being conquered. Ramping up to a large army did.
I don’t think you’re making much sense any more, and I think I’ve long ago made my point to any who care to hear it, so I’ll spare them further repetition.