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I anti-recommend them. Pournelle is a chickenhawk far-right reactionary who never served, and it shows through in his writing. The Falkenberg series involves at least one loving homage of a real historical slaughter in which (in Pournelle's retelling) the victims all deserve to die because they are foolish leftists. That "aw, liberals died, not a single tear was shed" thing is a recurring theme of the series. Pay attention next time you read them and notice how every villain is a shallow right-wing caricature of what Pournelle imagines leftist political ideology to be.

Another way of putting it: Pournelle was and is best buds with Newt "Colonialism was REALLY GOOD for the Congo, HONEST" Gingrich. Yes, that Newt. The same Newt who recently cozied up to neo-Confederates during his attempt at winning the Republican Presidential nomination. You want to guess exactly how much disgust Pournelle showed about that development? None at all. Just the opposite, he enthusiastically promoted his old pal and proclaimed that Newt was the ideal man for sticking it to all those evil liberals because they hated his effective opposition back when he was in Congress. (Jerry is apparently oblivious to the fact that Newt's "effective" opposition to evil libruls ended in a disaster of Newt's own making.)

That is the same political ideology which informs all of his "CoDominium" books. Once you've seen it, you can't un-see it; it ruins them.

As a Brit (and it might be that being a Brit is important here) I saw almost every scene of the film as properly taking the piss out of right wing attitudes. It was a proper laugh fest in an incredibly black humour sort of way.

Paul Verhoven does this with his characters all the time. They are deliberate caricatures. Every attitude that appears to be celebrated by the film came across as Mr Verhoven sneering. The whole film was a master work of sarcasm.

Just because the uniforms look European and the propaganda seems European doesn't mean that the film isn't directly comparing the US's nonsensical attitude towards violence and military-worshipping ...

The US is not military worshipping. Most US citizen believe in a strong national defense, although there is a lot of disagreement as to what such a defense should consist of. The notion that warfare somehow improves the nation is a quite alien concept in the US. That was a distinctly European notion in the WW2 timeframe you mention below.

What nonsensical attitude towards violence are you referring to? The movie was 1997. The recent military violence committed by the US included:
1994-5. Participating in NATO strikes designed to end ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Serbia.
1993. While participating in UN operations in famine ridden Somalia, attempting to capture a warlord attacking humanitarian relief works.
1991. Leading an international coalition operating under United Nations authority to kick Iraq out of Kuwait.

... to that of Europe during the second world war, a period in time Europe has left far behind it.

The genocide and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans proves otherwise.

What you describe is a caricature of the US, not the reality of the US.

The way I read the film was, it is presenting itself as one of those action flicks like, say, Top Gun, where the military allow the filmmakers to use a lot of kit, but there is a quid pro quo and the filmmakers have to turn out a piece that propagandizes for values the military approves. Except, of course, in this case the film Starship Troopers is made years from now in a fictional future.

This conceit is, iirc, cued by some advertising or whatnot at the start of the film (it's been a while since I saw it)

  So, anyway, if you watch it like this, as a somewhat crummy and unintentionally funny propaganda effort from the future, you will see, through the lenses of the ludicrous script, transparent attempts at indoctrination, bad acting, and so on, a portrayal of the sort of future society that could create such a film.

The satire comes in when you consider that such a society is only a mild caricature of that obtaining in some 'advanced' western nations right now, and that the film itself only slightly exaggerates the badness of similarly propagandistic war films from the last few decades.

It's also a bit misleading to suggest that we should excuse Card's political leanings and activism while we're still here in the time when he's doing it because decades and centuries after the fact of other injustices, we no longer believe the specific political learnings of other authors who contributed to those things are relevant to their work.

You're putting false words in my mouth. I never said we should excuse his beliefs, and I never said that you should freely give your money to him. I, in fact, explicitly said that I understand the belief that we shouldn't.

What I said was that you can't pretend that his work was about something it was not about, because he has political leanings outside of the context of that work that disgust you.

If you want to boycott him over that, then fine, but don't step into the land of seeing him as a caricature like so many people in partisan politics do. A man can hold both admirable and terrible beliefs at the same time or at different times in his life. Works that reflect the former admirable beliefs should not be unfairly tarnished with the latter terrible beliefs that never appeared within them.

That is not excusable. Wagner was a Nazi and a terrible man, but he was still a great composer, and refusal to support his beliefs should not extend to pretending his music was rubbish. The same applies to Card here.

So, you're be-Fudd-led about the identity of the poster?

I always thought that Elmer Fudd was a cartoon caricature of Barney Frank. Am I wrong?

In fact, perhaps it is time to repost this on Slashdot for today's fresh audience of developers, lest our classics be forgotten:

The Rise of Worse is Better

I and just about every designer of Common Lisp and CLOS has had extreme exposure to the MIT/Stanford style of design. The essence of this style can be captured by the phrase ``the right thing.'' To such a designer it is important to get all of the following characteristics right:

• Simplicity-the design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the interface to be simple than the implementation.
• Correctness-the design must be correct in all observable aspects. Incorrectness is simply not allowed.
• Consistency-the design must not be inconsistent. A design is allowed to be slightly less simple and less complete to avoid inconsistency. Consistency is as important as correctness.
• Completeness-the design must cover as many important situations as is practical. All reasonably expected cases must be covered. Simplicity is not allowed to overly reduce completeness.

I believe most people would agree that these are good characteristics. I will call the use of this philosophy of design the ``MIT approach.'' Common Lisp (with CLOS) and Scheme represent the MIT approach to design and implementation.

The worse-is-better philosophy is only slightly different:

• Simplicity-the design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the implementation to be simple than the interface. Simplicity is the most important consideration in a design.
• Correctness-the design must be correct in all observable aspects. It is slightly better to be simple than correct.
• Consistency-the design must not be overly inconsistent. Consistency can be sacrificed for simplicity in some cases, but it is better to drop those parts of the design that deal with less common circumstances than to introduce either implementational complexity or inconsistency.
• Completeness-the design must cover as many important situations as is practical. All reasonably expected cases should be covered. Completeness can be sacrificed in favor of any other quality. In fact, completeness must sacrificed whenever implementation simplicity is jeopardized. Consistency can be sacrificed to achieve completeness if simplicity is retained; especially worthless is consistency of interface.

Early Unix and C are examples of the use of this school of design, and I will call the use of this design strategy the ``New Jersey approach.'' I have intentionally caricatured the worse-is-better philosophy to convince you that it is obviously a bad philosophy and that the New Jersey approach is a bad approach.

However, I believe that worse-is-better, even in its strawman form, has better survival characteristics than the-right-thing, and that the New Jersey approach when used for software is a better approach than the MIT approach.

Let me start out by retelling a story that shows that the MIT/New-Jersey distinction is valid and that proponents of each philosophy actually believe their philosophy is better.

Two famous people, one from MIT and another from Berkeley (but working on Unix) once met to discuss operating system issues. The person from MIT was knowledgeable about ITS (the MIT AI Lab operating system) and had been reading the Unix sources. He was interested in how Unix solved the PC loser-ing problem. The PC loser-ing problem occurs when a user program invokes a system routine to perform a lengthy operation that might have significant state, such as IO buffers. If an interrupt occurs during the operation, the state of the user program must be saved. Because the invocation of the system routine is usually a single instruction, the PC of the user program does not adequately capture the state of the process. The system routine must either back out or press forward. The r

IOW, the two schools that did not reduce the entire postmodern movement to a caricature of nihilism are the guilty pseudo-intellectuals. Hmmm.

Nihilism is so weird that it doesn't even spill over into US politics; it's no better, of course.

Pragmatism pertains to the process of "takin' care of business". So... whose business are your American intellectuals catering to, and why is this considered a substitute for reflection?

American intellectuals generally hold similar views to European intellectuals (viz the progressives in the Democratic party). But the US isn't governed by intellectuals, it is governed by businessmen and lawyers who cater to the interest of business.

IOW, the two schools that did not reduce the entire postmodern movement to a caricature of nihilism are the guilty pseudo-intellectuals. Hmmm.

Pragmatism pertains to the process of "takin' care of business". So... whose business are your American intellectuals catering to, and why is this considered a substitute for reflection?

Just look at all the muslim countries. Alcohol is prohibited.

Have you actually travelled in "all the Muslim countries"? Alcohol is widely available in the majority of Muslim countries, especially ones that have contributed immigrants to France (Algeria may be the sole exception).

Stupid theocracies run by fanatics.

Of the Muslim countries that have contributed immigrants to France, Morocco is a kingdom whose king has an uneasy relationship with fanatical clerics and wishes they would go away, while the West African countries are by and large secular kleptocracies, and Algeria came out of a civil war by privileging neither Islamist nor leftist parties.

Certainly the inability of some French immigrants to integrate (and for second generations to feel torn between two cultures) is a valid concern, but if you want to take any productive steps toward that problem, you have to understand the situation first. Your understanding of the Muslim world is a caricature.

this is almost interesting enough to get me to closely reread the constitution. But what perhaps is also along that vein is that the declaration of independence describes the foundation of human rights that are irrespective of whether you live under the US government or not, or in it's territory.

There needs to like be, a new secret society/government dedicated to the protection of human rights universally. One that uses torture and murder and any means necessary to achieve that goal against those organizations like the US government, that demonstrate both the ability, and the will, to violate "inalienable human rights" on as large a scale as we are beginning to see. (I'm personally a tinfoil hatter caricature that feels persecuted even more than the snowden revelations have exposed thus far. And I think I could make a pretty clear case to a judge. But I don't think there is any judge that isn't under the thumb of the US Secret Police.

Hey, moron, reread my post.

As I pointed out, almost everything the government pays out is 'debt' in one form or another, as in, things it owes people by law. You managed to complete ignore the entire fucking post, and have started yammering about the 14th amendment yet.

The 14th amendment requires that we pay all debt. (Well, not really, but, as I said, I won't argue that.) I will, again, point out as part of the debt we have to pay it gives examples of pensions and bounties. It does not say we have to repay 'bonds', it says we have to repay 'debts'. All of them. Bonds, pensions, bounties, back pay, social security, medicare owed to doctors, all debts.

You, while yammering that we have to repay all debts, have managed to completely fucking ignore is that almost everything is debt.

All those things are, equally, debt, and they have to be paid on time. By law. (And, you assert, by the constitution, to which I say 'Whatever.')

We cannot decide not to pay social security debts because we have bond repayment debts coming up tomorrow. (In fact, under your logic, it would be unconstitutional to try to do that.)

The laws about automatic spending can not be constitutional if the congress does not appropriate funding for it. Otherwise during a budget impass, none of the government would shut down at all.

This is a large part of why, under the budget shutdown, only 13% of the spending stopped, you idiot. Thank you for pretty much proving my point.

You seem to think the government is somehow deciding to spend money in real time, that it pays money and gets things in return.

Uh, no. Like all businesses, it hires people and they work for free for two week (Or however long) and then they get paid. Those people are owed their wages. Those wages are debts the government owes them.

Likewise, the government does not go out and buy bridges. It enters a contract with a company to build a bridge, and then when the bridge is done, the government owes that money.

(I won't argue social security in this post, because that is much more complicated, but people really are owed social security benefits under the law. But even without social security, we're still screwed.)

If we stop raising the debt ceiling, we still owe all that money, and, as you keep insisting, government debts shall not be questioned.

You can yammer about 'Not creating debt' all you want, but the fact is the government has billions and billions of outstanding debt that isn't bonds, right now, already existing, and the government must pay them, which means at some point, many debts payment are going to be missed, including bond repayment.

This is even accepting the dubious preposition it is legal for the president to 'choose' not to make new debt in violation of the laws saying he has to. The constitution says all debts are valid, but it does not logically follow from that 'And thus if the president thinks the government won't pay debts when they come up, he has the power to ignore current law and not create them.'! There's nothing in that amendment about the government not having the power to create debt, or the president to override the creation of debt.

But even in that rather surreal world which gives the president nearly unlimited power, the US would slide over a frozen debt ceiling almost immediately due to fucking payroll, even if the president instantly laid everyone off in violation of the law. (Because, duh, even laid off people get paid for the time they already put in.)

If the debt limit wasn'T increased, it would be a duty of the president to chose which spending continued within the bounds of the capabilities of what is availible.

No, it's not. It's the duty of the president to do what the laws and constitution say.

In the actual world, if Congress has allocated $40 million for a library in Dover, the president (That is, the e

Or as a cartoon character. I refuse to be a caricature for their amusement.

Like i said, your drivel is negated by the 14th amendment. Your explaination of why you think it is not is also negated. The laws about automatic spending can not be constitutional if the congress does not appropriate funding for it. Otherwise during a budget impass, none of the government would shut down at all. A law binding social security payments can not remain constitution without the means to pay it.

Debt, as in what the 14th requires the US to pay is debt paid. Not creating debt that has not occured yet because a law says it should be created. Despite social security being funded differently the the rest of the government (it can pull from it trust fund without incuring additional debt unlike other spending), any law mandating payments would be unconstitutional if the funds weren't availible and congress didn't authorize funding.

You simply cannot pass a law that takes away the constitutional roles of congress or the president and have that law supercede the constitution. All laws regarding spending have to be interpreted through the constitution else they ae become unconstitutional. If the debt limit wasn'T increased, it would be a duty of the president to chose which spending continued within the bounds of the capabilities of what is availible. If legal obligation exceed the abilities, the president would have no choice but to view spending in excess of our ability to pay as unconstitutional if only for the duration of the inability to pay.

Or in words an ad hominem slinging partisan hack like you who tried to insult without effect rather then argue the logic of your pisition can understand. If the ability to fund the spending is not there, regardless of any law, the funds absolutely cannot be spent constitutionally and like any other law that the constitution doesn't allow, would become unconstitutional. Ehat you seem to want to argue is that if a law regulating speech like inviting a riot is ever enforced in a way that is unconstitutional, it must be enforced because there are ways it can be enforced that is constitutionsl and that is completely wrong.

Like i said, your drivel is negated by the 14th amendment. The spending in excess of what we are capable of would have to stop in order to remain constitutional.

Funny thing is, Sarah Palin knew Obama would be a disaster for "traditional America". Now, you are free to hate "traditional America" if you wish (particularly if you strongly identify with Obama's political tribe rather than the nation) - but you cannot say that Sarah Palin did not spot him a mile away. Incidentally, you may be laboring under the "media version" of Sarah Palin (eg. attributing Tina Fey's caricature of Palin to Palin herself). If you are, then please remind yourself to look up the statements from the authentic source rather than the ridiculous statements made by someone else for laughs but often falsely attributed to the real thing.

As Palin said, "How's that hopey changey thang workin out for ya?". The US debt is 17 trillion and after the fiasco where Harry Reid shut down the government (by refusing to vote in the Senate of the 14 bills the House passed to fund the Government) there is now no apparent limit to the spending that the Executive can do (despite the US Constitution explicitly prohibiting the Executive from raising taxes like the ObamaCare mandate). The week after the shutdown US spending went up by 0.328 Trillion. With ObamaCare the economy is about to take another 2.6 Trillion hit on top of the 17 trillion debt. US citizens cannot pay this back, particularly at the rate Obama is spending (now that the Tea Party failed to constrain his spending by prompting the Constitutional law that would do this). Plus there is the lowest participation by women in the workforce in 28 years. Then you have unbelievably high youth unemployment (particularly among blacks). Then you have the US military getting ripped apart (NSA spying has been used to dismiss 9 commanders of brigadier or higher rank). Meanwhile, the DHS is being outfitted with the same military gear that the US Army had to pacify Iraq (but of course, the DHS is controlled by political elites, not the representatives of the citizens, and is not constrained by the same Constitutional limits as the Army is). Then we have the mobs of black youths that have been targetting and killing otehr races, and the media does not report this.

The writing is clearly on the wall for the US Constitutional system. Palin predicted that Obama's character would lead to this disasterous kind of "change". You can slam Palin if you want - but it turns out she was far more right than the stuck up political analysts and media "lapdogs" (openly partisan media no longer acting as watchdogs) infesting the US these days.

You know, sometimes after I make a post, I can psychically predict sumdumass's response, and this time I predict, drumroll please, that he will attempt to argue that the 14th's amendment is relevant here, despite the fact I pointed out it doesn't matter.

So, I will preemptively respond by conceding that point, for the purpose of this argument. The 14th amendment does apply here.

So now sumdumass will have to address my actual point, in that almost all government spending is to repay debts, so anyone who thinks the 14th somehow means 'bondholders get paid first' is an idiot. There's nothing special about their debt vs. everyone else's under the constitution or the law. It doesn't say 'US bonds shall not be questioned'. It says the debt can't.

In fact, let's look at the actual wording of that part of the 14th:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

...holy fuck, look at that. 'including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion,'

And before you try to argue that some specific thing isn't listed there, as I also psychically(1) predict you will do, please notice that 'bonds' are not in that list either. The list is not inclusive. I was just pointing out the amendment lists two specific examples of public debts, and neither of them is bonds...one is a retirement system, and one is wages!

1) It is very easy to psychically predict sumdumass's responses to things. He will pick a completely irrelevant thing said and argue as if it's important. Notice I didn't say an incorrect irrelevant thing...if sumdumass were to start accurately nitpicking responses, people would go 'By gum, you're right!' No, sumdumass will find something that is, indeed, completely correct, but completely irrelevant to the point, and argue about that, like he just did with the 14th amendment. That way other people will argue back over the pointless thing, and the original point will completely lost.

Don't fall for it. Ask yourself 'If sumdumass was right, would my point still stand? Yes, I know he's wrong, but if weren't, would my actual point be correct anyway?' If the answer is 'Yes', then just concede his idiotic position and repeat your actual point as if he's right. He'll keep trying to argue the point and come across as a complete idiot.

(For example, see his followup post, where he will try to argue somehow that 'public debt' only means bonds, despite the fact the 14th amendment just explained that 'bounties' and 'pensions' count as it!)

I know it is a problem for most of you on the left when the constitution gets in your way, but constitutionally, he is obligated to honor the debts before any spending by law. that means even if congress passed a law saying all money appropriated either by entitlement law or whatever must be spent on anything other then the debt, it would be unconstitutional to do so.

Hey, look, it's the complete dumbass who has no reading comprehension but constantly pops up to defend whatever fucking stupid thing the right believes.

You just repeated exactly what I said...that the president must pay any currently outstanding debt. I just additionally pointed out that if there's an outstanding debt, he has to pay it, period, he can't save the money for a more important debt that's going to happen later.

And, despite what is going on in your fevered imagination, he is, in fact, required by law to pay social security, for example. If the president could just decide not to pay social security, I have a feeling some Republican president would have actually tried that at some point, don't you?

You did notice I used the word 'obligations' in my post, right? What the hell do you think that means? The government owes that money to people on social security. The government owes defense contractors. The government owes its employees their wages. Those are debts. They must be paid, on the schedule laid out in law. (Only if the executive has money, presumably.)

You, along with the right, have decided that the only 'debts' are 'issued bonds'. Or, rather, you idiots have spent absolutely no time thinking about this.

If someone comes and works on your house for an agreed on amount, and you haven't paid them yet, you are in debt to them. Um, duh. If you are a company, and pay employees your wages on Friday, and it's Thursday, the wages you owe for the week so far are debts and will be reflected as such on your balance sheet. Um, double-duh.

Bonds, are, rather obviously, just one of the many ways to be in debt...if they were the only way, uh, no human being would be personally in debt, because human beings usually don't issue bonds. We should try that with banks. 'No, I don't owe you any money. To owe money is to be in debt, and according to the Republicans the only sort of debt that exists is bonds. I have never issued you or anyone else any bonds, thus I am not in debt.'(1)

Now, you say we must pay debts because of the 14th amendment, and I don't think the 14th is that relevant, and assert that's just basic law, but whatever, that's rather moot. The point is, 95% of money that exits the Federal government is to pay obligations, aka debts, created by the law. (And the other 5% is to pay obligations created by entities under the executive's control that he could stop, but are still obligations once created...but he could stop making more obligations.)

The President is required, by law (And possibly by the constitution, whatever.), to pay all those debts, not to just the ones to bondholders.

1) Hilariously, this logic makes the entire debt ceiling rather pointless, because if 'bonds' are the only 'debt', the president could just get loans some other way, like via credit cards and other unsecured bank loans. Heh. Actually, money owed to the social security trust isn't 'real' bonds (We call them bonds, but they are not, really.), so we're already a good deal under the debt ceiling if you only count 'bonds'.

Of course, Keen is actually not debunking economics, he is debunking a left wing caricature of economics.

The left wing has a caricature of economics too? I thought only right wing economics were a caricature!

Well, I guess I should have figured it out in 2008 when we elected a Democrat who is economically far to the right of that traitor Reagan. Thanks for the wake-up call, I guess.

You mean vocal minority? The most vocal part of any organization will almost assuredly be a minority of that organization. The Tea Party is no different.

Do you judge Christians by the Evangelicals, or liberals by eco-terrorists?

No, but I judge Catholics by the actions of the Pope and the church leadership they support. And guess what? I judge political parties by the actions and rhetoric of their leadership as well. The Tea Party doesn't just have a few nutters--it's covered in batshit from top to bottom.

Of course, Keen is actually not debunking economics, he is debunking a left wing caricature of economics.