Okay, I see your point. Just wanted to establish that there is a significant amount of Dumbass around the guy, even if it is somewhat less than a majority of reporters these days. ("Columbia was travelling at nearly 18 times the speed of light!")
To mock him for one minor misstatement in the midst of great celebration and emotion would be the ultimate in elitist geek exclusion, and is just the mirror reverse of what happens to geeks in their youth. It is cruel.
Can we mock him for his coverage of China's launch back in October, where he dismissed the whole affair as insignificant and not worth taking note of because, after all, it was just a "cheap knockoff" and not the third nation of the scores on this Earth to launch a manned spacecraft?
I side with Z, except on the point of NASA's efficiency. NASA's middle name is "Efficiency", but sadly their first name is "Lacks".
Ack, I hardly meant to imply NASA was some sort of efficient thing, short of their early days. I know the NASA lately has had all the efficiency of.. uh.. something that really, really doesn't have much of it.
I've had something of an opinion for awhile that we tend to slip into periods of stagnation when the cynicism valve gets clogged up and people start focusing on the fact that everything sucks, rather than making any pretenses to dreaming. The past ten years or so has been a particularly bad one of those, and with the death knell for American manned spaceflight this past February it's gone up quite a bit.
People need to realize that what's been done in space so far is far from the limit. The problem is getting past that cynicism; people with any kind of vision are labelled as crackpots not worthy of notice just because they come up with something new or moderately difficult. Add onto that the "but but but TERRORISM!" fear these days, and you get a culture that's not in the mood to do a whole hell of a lot.:P
Really though, we're gonna be around for a lot longer than the next fifty years or so (I hope), but our stake here isn't permenant. People have this apres moi, le deluge mindset that's sorely limiting, and are rejecting the idea that they have any sort of obligation or responsibility to future generations. I'm inclined to think they do, and I'll gladly accept whatever variant of "leftist dumbass" people are going to throw at me for daring to think that.
We've got to get some presence off this rock if just for the sake of the species as a whole, because right now our eggs are all in one basket. I'm not dumb enough to think it's just a matter of saying "Okay, let's do it" and hurling millions of people out into the great beyond, but it's hardly the insurmountable task people believe it to be. The problem is that initial, admittedly huge investment. It will take a lot of time, money, and yes, even lives, to get something out of space programs, but the moment you stop thinking in terms of the next fiscal year and start thinking in terms of your grandchildren it becomes a lot more worthwhile. Once people actually start doing something Up There beyond probes and the ISS boondoggle, opportunities in just about every scientific field, coupled with industrial or power-generation possibilities, will more than pay us back for our efforts, making that initial investment seem paltry by comparison.
It's one of those things that's worth it if people can get the will to admit that very true fact.
Funny, I didn't think public forums were the place for pissing matches, but if you think you are up for one, that's fine, we can certainly have one. I've probably tangled with brighter beans than you and you've possibly tangled with nastier people than I.
Naw, but public forums are the place for debate. If you're going to through out the standard "waaah we haven't created a utopia yet so let's never do anything" schtick, then you should prepare to defend yourself when you're refuted. There's a difference between debate and a pissing contest, unless you really believe that all disagreement is that childish. If that's the case, then why bother voicing your opinion in the first place?
Let me start with this: If you have a problem with people IM'ing you, then perhaps you should follow suit with your apparent desire for privacy (indicated by your non-public email) and remove the link to your screen name. Of course, then, your fans and those with glowing praise for your posts here wouldn't be able to reach you at all. Because it seems you only respond to those who have something nice to say to you.
Nah, I respond to people who respond to me. You obviously went through the trouble of figuring out how to get on my case off of Slashdot, so presumably you kept enough of an eye on my comments to gather at least that much. This is assuming you didn't go off utterly halfcocked because you yourself couldn't stand someone daring to tell you you're wrong. Do you always refuse to defend your arguments in public when you make them, or is it just this time?
For people like me, on the other hand, you like to bring these things out into public - for some strange reason. Maybe you enjoy attention and/or abuse, either giving or receiving. Who knows?
Nope, but I do like debate and arguments, because I have a problem with peoples' passionate distaste for ever being exposed to or hearing points of view which disagree with them. While I expect to generally be confronted with ad-hominem attacks from people who can't really argue otherwise - hi! - I also run into the odd person who actually takes the time to think about what they say, and possibly consider they're wrong.
I also have a problem with peoples' thriving on a rampant, kneejerk hatred of any kind of new technology. Most of them pull the sort of claim you seem to be making - "we shouldn't think about doing this until we've solved all our problems on Earth first!" This simultaneously pulls out the fallacy that humanity can only perform one task at a time, and the fallacy that humanity operates as a zero-sum game. The second is merely wrong; the first is an absolutely idiotic assumption that we're little more than ants.
I'm sure we could average everything out to a nice, stangnant mediocrity, but I doubt you or most other people who are able to post here would enjoy giving up what you have in order to level the world's playing field long enough for us to get somewhere.
You seem to have at least a passing interest in not performing wasteful activities until everyone else has benefited, however. I notice you didn't respond to more direct questioning in response to your post that set this off, although I'm willing to accept that that's merely not noticing the ACs. I'm curious if you actually have answers as to What You're Doing About It, or if you're merely trying to retard others for doing things you're not interested in.
My post about the uselessness of space probes made my point. I didn't go into the past, because I don't see a need. I'm not horribly concerned about the "tens of thousands" who died making this world what it is now. Why? 'Cause I wasn't around at the time to think about it, and there's no point thinking about it now. Grief for the past is wasted grief.
So at what point does the past become something which you don't need to care about? Twenty years? Thirty? Ten? Those "thousands" whose deaths y
If you're going to take issue with something I say, you will take issue with it here rather than try to pick a fight with me in AIM. I know you're standing on shaky ground at best, but one of the points of slashdot is public discussion. If you can't take the heat...
Nut, hell, that's generally the kind of thinking I lean towards when you start talking really long term. It's nutty, but it's a good nutty.
It's great to hear of another Singularitarian, especially around here, though.:)
Re:india is going to be real strong: something to
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gotpaint, I'd mod your post up if I had the points to, but alas...
No issue is quite as one sided as you make it appear.
This is true. I wasn't simply replying to the AC's post (which wasn't flamebait; slashdot needs a "-1, Stupid" mod though) as much as that general tendency that I've seen directed towards not just India, but all the developing nations, and not just from Slashdot, but from nearly every forum or discussion-y site that I keep an eye on.
Manifest destiny is alive and well, only writ large. Your point on just how India's getting things together is a good one of course, but my point is that a frighteningly large number of people in the developed world would see any developing countries' improvements as affronts which need to be punished. The responses to China's space launch earlier in the year, the disaster at Brazil's rocket facility (people cheered the deaths of the technicians! Fucking cheered them, because their deaths were reducing pressure on "us!"), the list goes on.
I'm generalizing because it's a general trend, and not a very pleasant one, that's born out of the idea that somehow the fact that we've gotten into the condition we're in somehow denies others the right to that same goal. The fact that reasonable-sounding people can pull an Adam Yoshida, demand the destruction of entire cultures rather than risk being eclipsed, and recieve respectful attention both boggles and bothers me.
However, most Americans would cringe at the methods of their advancement tactic. India for example has those who are spectacularly wealthly, and enough "middle class" to possibly outnumber the entirety of the US, however, the disparity of wealth distribution is staggering creating a per capita income substanially lower than developed nations. This is exactly why these nations have been deemed as "developing nations." Millions still live in what the west would consider impoverished conditions and many more in conditions not so much better off. With rapid globalization, labor (technical or otherwise) has been diverted to the lowest bidder, namely India and China. By burning through human capital, India and nations similar to India are able to compete with larger nations. But at what human price?
For the most part this isn't terribly different from what the west went through, really. A few generations of technology were skipped when possible (and thank God for that!), and they have the advantage of more of an awareness of these sort of problems.
I freely admit that the US isn't the only country with a tremendous cultural inertia - after all, both them and my own Canada are mere children alongside countries like India and China, and I freely acknowledge the fact that they probably had eye surgery and monumental architecture while my own ancestors were busy painting themselves blue. India, China, and most of the other developing countries are going to have that same sluggishness towards reform going on.
However, my take on it is that it isn't going to be a permenant or possibly even a longterm state. I personally despise the sweatshop mentality, and agitate against it when I can, but I do know that it's going on in India and Brazil, just like China's at least partially riding their own production improvements through the laogai and similar institutions. However, I think it will be on its way out soon in India. Not next week or even next year, but certainly in a matter of a generation or so.
I want them to not have to suffer through that kind of thing, but if they have to I want them to get through it quickly, and two generations is an eyeblink by the standards of such things. Part of it might be my inner historian's taking the longer view of things than most people - I kinda like being able to think at least a little beyond the next election - but I do think that is a remarkably short time for a country to modernize in, and the fact that we're in a world that actually views "human rights" as somethi
I don't think India needs internet access in their villages. Before anything, they should help stop the rising birth rate. Just a thought.
Birthrates in most of the developing world have been dropping for some time, just like the plummet in the developed world over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their rate drop is happening at a better pace too, since a lot of the things which started lowering it in the first place - birth control, the precedents of industrialization, a growing middle class, etc - were already in place.
Don't expect an overnight drop to less than replacement level birthrates, of course. India's going to be crowded for awhile yet, but the rate at which that crowd's growing will level off in the next generation or two. These things take time, and in the scheme of things that's a pretty damn quick population plateau.
Oh, and I might as well repeat my tired old point that it's possible to support the decreasing birth rate and embrace technology at the same time. You know, countries being able to do multiple things at once? Technology being a stabilizing force for population levels? Everything's interrelated, man, open your eyes and take a look around at how we've been impacted.
This is not a zero sum game. With world trade both west and asia will end up getting richer.
I see people realize things like this so very rarely that when I do see it, I briefly have to figure out whether they really understand, or whether they're just being sarcastic. That depresses me.:P
Something which, of course, would immediately stop if we'd just abandon all pretenses to advancement and go back to the trees, I suppose.
Tens of thousands died in the industrialization process that got you probably just about everything in your home right now. I don't see you whining about how that wasn't worth it.
To create the conditions that bolstered the technologies that are allowing you to post this myopic, Luddite bullshit on Slashdot right now, nearly one hundred million people died in no fewer than three major wars.
What? From that mountaintop of a moral high ground you're preaching from, you couldn't see that?
Maybe, just maybe, you should save your attempts at profundity for an occaision where they don't reek of ignorance.
Second para should read "But ohhhh no, as soon as foreign countries... begin to pull ahead..."
Re:india is going to be real strong: something to
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its true, in a short while, it will compete against the likes of china and australia. how long before it can compete against the US and UK?
we americans should not allow this to happen.. we could lose our trade advantage
Don't want it to happen? Then do something about it. Fix up your own house instead of deciding to tear down the Joneses 'cause they're committing the crime of hubris by catching up.
Enough people here take the free market as a religion, the sole and primary characteristic of anything good, that I'd expect people to keep that in mind. They usually do in the business world. But ohhhh no, as soon as foreign countries - especially those "subhuman" ones lumped under the title of "Third World," as though Nicaragua, Brazil, Afghanistan and India all belong to a single, undifferentiated bloc of squalor - then they must be foulest evil fit only to be destroyed if they approach our sacrosanct grandeur.
So what the hell is it with that? Is America's hegemony so shaky that you can't stand the thought of another major country getting its technology base built up without wetting yourselves in abject terror?
You don't like it? Then go improve your own country, culture, and economy. Then, maybe you'll have something worth boasting about should you stay on top because of it. Another country pulling ahead worries me a lot less than one country deciding to keep the rest of the world down to protect their precious egos.
If you can't hold an advantage on the world stage by continuing to produce better technology, by managing a better economy, et cedera, then you bloody well don't deserve to.
Pray explain what noise would make it audible before it physicaly arrives. It's Supersonic i.e, faster than sound!!
When an aircraft is travelling faster than sound - someone correct me if I'm wrong here, I'm definately not an aerospace techie - it leaves a large and rather powerful shockwave behind it which shakes up the atmosphere to an extent that some radars would be able to detect more easily. The sonic-supersonic transition, as well, is not a subtle event, which would be visible to the naked eye if you were in the right place at the right time.
As for advance warning, you're right, but if I was at war with a country and was told there were cruise missiles over my airspace, I'd probably consider getting out of my presidential penthouse suite on the twenty-fourth floor for a few hours.
Everyone in their country may not have access to running water and basic medical care but they are building a fscking Space Plane!
So countries that don't spend all their money on infrastructure are spending none of their money on it?
Give me a goddamn break. Every time a country that's just a backwards Darkiestan in the eyes of the slashbots comes up with something in technological terms, people bring this same old tired, idiotic argument that a non-western country can only ever perform one task at a time, that they don't have a "right" to do so because there's social problems in the country.
On my world - it's called "Earth," by the way - that idea usually gets dismissed as the utter bullshit that it is.
I doubt neglecting the Caliphates is as much a conscious decision as it is the fact that it simply doesn't occur to curriculum planners. From what I've seen a lot of US public education is focused exclusively on the US, a tiny bit on Europe, and there's the overriding assumption that everything else was out there waiting to be conquered, with no possibility for contributions of their own. The idea that there could be non-western nations out there which accomplished things without our help is anathema to a lot of people; an idea so ludicrous as to simply not occur.
We've gotten out of it in a lot of ways, but the high-imperialism idea of history being us and the Lesser Peoples Of No Consequence has a long way to go before it dies the death it deserves.
Hmm, I think I mentioned that having fiction as a source of information is probably bad, since it's by definition "made up".:)
Pretty much, yeah. I read "1632" when the Baen Free Library let it out, and it basically sent my inner historian hurling himself out the window at points. That and it seems way too Francis Fukiyama-ish for my likings.:P
It's kind of saddening to see that the Islam nations were once a world power, and the world power, apparently (by your other post), while the rest of the world was in a state of decline leading towards rebirth. But as a result of Western rebirth, it doesn't look like there's even an opportunity for the Middle East to have their own rebirth and emerge as a world power again. Their location just isn't nearly as economically and strategically important as it used to be, since we can sail right around them (or, more likely, we can nuke our way right around them, since we don't sail any more). I wonder if they're in a good position to take advantage of space travel to rise again, since they've failed to take advantage of oil to rise again (not entirely their fault, 20th Century western history isn't kind to the Middle East). It's entirely possible from the armchair in which I'm observing for Western civilization to decline enough for the Middle East to rise again, but even if Western civilization declines, where is the room for the Middle East to rise?
There has been a tend to try and diversify in a lot of Middle Eastern nations, especially over the past generation. What you're seeing these days is a spreading out of the economic and technological bases beyond just oil, especially as supplies run low, and a slow but steady democratization movement. When you get those, combined with the burning out of the fundamentalist movement - which is also happening, I think, just way too slowly - you'll get something interesting going on with them.
For the latter to be at all worthwhile, it'll probably have to take a couple of generations. A lot of people believe that one day in 1776 the United States went poof! and there was democracy in North America. It really wasn't the case, and the US didn't have a level of democracy it would accept today until sometime in the sixties. Shifts towards things like more liberal forms of government usually take generations, and our own is the result of about 700 years of gradual reform. I think it can be done faster these days, but not quite overnight.;)
A neat thing about the Western and Middle Eastern declines and resurgences that I've noticed is that they tend to feed off one another. When the Roman Empire's principate blew itself apart in the third century, they adopted the Persian style of governance - the absolute, semi-divine monarch, aloof from his people, with all the fancy, ostentatious regalia, ceremonies, robes, courts, etc that it implied. It wasn't very practical on the surface, but it created an image of the strong, superior ruler to people who'd been dissilusioned from the principes and brought a good measure of stability to the west again. The style persists to this day in European monarchical court ceremony, and hit its height in medieval kings. It's one of the many influences which came our way and kept Europe together when it could have really collapsed into something we'd still be crawling out of.
Nowadays you're seeing the reverse. Since the West is the cultural hegemon over most of the world, you see in Islamic states the tendency to shift to the new ideas as the old ones begin to fall apart. Use of western-style government (usually based on the British model), many economic practices, most military and some scientific practices.. Culture's staying somewhat independent where it matters, even if it takes on a western feel. But you're definately seeing a trend towards rather than away from freedom. It's slow, but it's there. It's kind of interesting to see the tradeoffs going back and forth - "we" took "th
All I know about what happens after that is some basic stuff about Mohammed and his journey to Mecca (or was it Medina?). Nothing about political, social, or technological shifts, and certainly nothing economic. Much later the middle east is considered a barrier in reaching the spice countries rather than an economic partner or player.
Actually, the fact that the Middle East was an economic player was the reason it was a barrier in reaching the spice countries. That region is smack dab in the centre of almost all the major trade lines of Afroeurasia; its economic life was something similar to Italian economic life during the medieval and renaissance period, writ very, very large. Europe wanted a short cut around the rich, powerful, and very well-located Islamic states, which was the main thing driving overseas expansion and maritime development.
To put it into more modern terms.. Imagine that North and South America each had stuff the other wanted a great deal, but neither had much in the way of overseas travel, not knowing much of the geography quite yet. Now, imagine you've got a powerful kingdom with a strong navy sitting right on the land running from Mexico to Columbia. Think of what that would do to the trade methods in the area, especially with regards to things like tariffs. The middleman would - and in the case of the caliphates, did - make a fortune!
You might just want, BTW, wanna check something other than fiction for evidence and stuff. Baen in particular has a liking of historical fiction that can at times be rather shoddy to say the least. I did a few minutes' looking around, and this looks like a decent collection of sources on Islamic history if you're bored enough to take a looksee.
Hmm, I admit I don't know much history of the Middle east from about 600AD 'till the renaissance, but I seem to recall that Persia (never called Persia!) spent a lot of time fighting Rome as a nation in decline, and then Rome started to decline.
Now look what you did, you've gotten me onto one of my longwinded ramble topics.
One of the problems people have with keeping the kingdoms in this area straight is that they tend to share the same name. Iran is simply the last in a sequence of little-related governments which have occupied the same area for several thousand years.
Persia as we know it - Iran - and the ancient/classical Persia share little more than their name between the two. The area known classically as the Persian Empire stretched from roughly the Indus River into the middle east, generally as far east as Iraq in Roman times, but during Greek times as far as modern Turkey and Egypt. That original Persian Empire began showing up in the mid-500s BC under Cyrus the Great, overthrowing what was left of the Babylonian kingdoms, a sequence of generally short-lived and ephemeral affairs running back almost, but not quite, into deepest antiquity.
(Even then, the ruling Achaemenid dynasty (which the kingdom was also named after) were from Media, a different region and culture within the area!)
Now, this particular Persian empire went down because of a young fellow named Alexander (y'might have heard of him) in the 330s-320s BC, and the whole region was ruled by a sort of pseudo-Greek monarchy for awhile. They were an attempt to impose a Hellenistic (NOT Hellenic, which is the democratic style most people know, but an absolute and militarist monarchy instead) veneer over the old Persian-style monarchy, and didn't do terribly much other than create a period of instability in the area for several generations as Alexander's "successors," and later their own successors, warred and plotted with one another. They were just starting to burn themselves out when the Romans came onto the scene in the west - and someone else in the east.
When people think of the particular Persian empire which tangled with Rome, they're thinking of the Arsacid monarchy, known at the time as Parthia. The Parthians hail from, well, Parthia, in the Iranian plateau, first started to chew at the Seleucid Empire's fragmented holdings around 250 BC and built up their own empire on top of the Hellenistic ones for the next century, before finally starting to tangle with the Romans in the first century BC. It was this Persian empire, the Parthians, which first started slapping the Romans around at battles such as Carrhae, Marc Antony's embarassing campaign in the east, and so on.
The Parthians soon tore themselves apart in dynastic squabbling, as well as having the major economic cities of the east torn apart in the great Roman invasions under the emperor Trajan. By 224 BC, a fellow named Ardashir came once again out of the east - in this case, if memory serves me, actually from the region of Persis/Farsis, proceeded to overthrow the Parthian empire, introduced several reforms in economics, military, and government, and became the first ruler of a very powerful, revitalized kingdom known today as the Sassanid or Sassanian Empire. This one is the Persian Empire you're thinking of, and fought a number of embarassingly successful campaigns against Rome, cumulating in the disaster of 260 when Shapur I actually captured the Emperor Valerian in battle. This empire continued along, doing very well for itself and being one of the great powers of the world, until the great Islamic wars of expansion blew out of Arabia. Pretty much nobody could stand against these guys, and the Sassanids were no exception, their last gasp being the Battle of Nehawand in 642 AD where their last great army was destroyed.
It's only by this date that an actual Islamic Persia exists, but it's still just the latest in a long string of Persias. The one now called Iran
It's utterly true. The Indian constitution tries to dismantle the caste system. However, the caste system still is a huge problem in India. The government should try to solve that problem rather than make cryogenic rockets, in my opinion.
...Because, of course, the Indian government is a single, monolithic, insectlike entity, and is only able to perform one single task at any given time to the absolute exclusion of all other functions.
Shouldn't roads and irrigation be more important. Hospitals. Schools.
Do so many people really believe that if a country isn't spending all their money on development, they might as well not be spending any?
...Come on, people, it's not like it's a one-or-the-other decision. It's possible to build roads and computers at the same time, leaps of black-and-white "logic" aside.:P
I seem to have come off with far better luck in regards to teachers than about ninety-eight percent of the North American population, but a few stood out on top of that. The main ones I remember are my two history teachers, one of whom taught tenth grade (classical) and twelfth grade (20th-century) history, the other teaching eleventh which was pretty much the inbetween.
The first guy had an unusually interactive teaching style, where he'd try to do as little speaking as possible. Instead he questioned the students a lot, asking them to explain or justify a given statement until they could either argue about it inside and out, or knew they were so off-base that they should try again sometime. He took the lectures more like a kind of storytelling, and was obviously deep into it, and his enthusiasm managed to infect the class. I remember one day when he was out of class for the day because of a dentist's appointment, and a couple of the school's more stoner-ier, slacker types who didn't care about anything were actually griping about missing one of his classes.
He also taught by example a lot, and had an unnerving habit of bringing one knicknack or another from the area he was talking about (be it ancient history or modern) as examples. Had plenty of things like that and used them too.. The gladius hanging over his desk went into a big spiel on the Roman military; we spent a few classes with his scale model of the Rosetta Stone learning how to translate heiroglyphs and stuff.
He also made the examples for other stuff he was teaching both funny and effective. For talking about the Battle of Thermopylae, he stood in the doorway with a yardstick and dared the front row of the classroom to try and dislodge him without getting whacked with the thing. In another class he was talking about nuclear fission by standing in the doorway and throwing a rubber ball (meant to represent a neutron) into the class (with the people meant to represent fissionables). When the ball didn't hit anyone despite bouncing around, he went on.. "Now, that's how things usually work - to make a really big bang you have to compress the mass together, make it harder for the neutrons to mi - EVERYONE HUG PATRICK!" Insert massive tackling of me, as well as being hit with said rubber ball three times on one toss. Eesh.
The other guy was far more traditional, possibly in the 1890's-teacher-traditional - strictly organized lectures that seemed timed to a stopwatch, a class schedule that never wavered and God help you if you were goofing off in his class. However, his enthusiasm for his subject was still catching and got most of the students. He was like the history teacher AC mentioned in a way - if you didn't try in his class you didn't exist to him, but show any kind of effort and he'd go out of his way to help. The best thing I got out of his class (aside from massive training in university-style lectures) was the question, "Why?"
The main thing he wanted to teach is that there is a reason behind everything, and a reason behind that reason, and so on and so forth until you're either far enough back that it doesn't matter or actually find the original relevant cause. You didn't know something in his opinion until you could explain why it was as it was. It made a huge difference between absorbing facts and actually understanding them; although I knew that difference beforehand I didn't quite realize how important it was until that year.
The US did not have a large military (relatively speaking) during the depression.
Perhaps the army was small (as it tended to be back then), but the USN was appropriately huge. Consider the fact that it was "limited" by treaty to parity with Britain's, whose shipbuilding policy for some time had been to match the combined sizes of the next two largest European fleets, and then exceed that by a little bit.
135,000 tonnes of carriers in the 1930s was a lot more than it is today..
Actually, Russia and Japan signed a nonagression pact, with the US only entering the war against Japan on 8 August, 1945 (2 days after Hiroshima.)
Random bit of trivia here. A lotta folks think that the Soviets were being cowardly by waiting until the war was almost over and doing a land grab. Found out not too long ago that they'd actually made an agreement with the rest of the Allies to jump on Japan's back three months to the day after Germany fell.
I think it is sad that a country with so many social and financial problems keeps clinging to their cold war mindset. Does russia really need nuclear subs anyway? I would seem to think that money spent on their military program could maybe be better spent bringing the country back together.
Probably more than the US needs its fourteen (sixteen?) carriers and scads of boomers. As North Americans, we've got a bit of an ivory tower complex going. Nobody alive on this continent today, going back I'd say three or maybe four generations, has any recollections of what it's like to have their homeland be on the wrong end of a conflict. Civil War veterans would have had fits if they'd seen what some parts of the world are going through today, or have gone through in the past century.
Keep in mind that Russia is a very large country and is not entirely surrounded by friendly neighbours. Territorial disputes up and down the east (China, for example, still has a claim on Russia's Irkutsk region, which it said was taken from it under duress), the scads of civil problems in southern European Russia, and so forth.. It's a very hostile part of the world. This is also a country, remember, that has been attacked roughly once per generation for the past seven hundred years. It's not the friendliest position one can be in, considering their only real option otherwise would be to do something drastic like give up Siberia to the Urals.
As for the Cold War mindset, things like that die hard, as anyone living in a NATO country would know. They weren't bent on world conquest like the propaganda stated - any more than the US was bent on world conquest, like Soviet propaganda stated. Because of that, and the whole slapped-every-few-decades thing they put up with, a large military helps a good number of people there feel secure. A lot of the people in the military (not all, mind you, but a lot) are in there simply because they think they're Doing The Right Thing. Or they're getting three meals a day, depending on the situation.
I don't think it's inexcusable for Russia to have a modern and/or large military. Ineffecient, yes; but as someone else said the US having a large military during the Depression was almost as bad. However, there's a fairly good chance that if they cut back too much on - or removed altogether - their armed forces, someone foreign or domestic could come along to make their lives a lot worse.
People have their problems, and sometimes some folks are unfortunate enough to pay the price for it like the Kursk's crew did, but in the end it's in the same interest as any other nation's: making sure they've got a country to come home to at the end of the day.
I think there is a definate worry about creating perfect humans from genetics.
Oh yeah. Of course the population of the United States will agree on what defines "perfection" when the seven hundred (or whatever) people at the top of the government haven't had general agreement amongst themselves since Pearl Harbor.
Oh, and people actually believe the government is capable of trying to enforce it.. geeze. Yeah. Three hundred million people are going to gladly go along with that with no problem. Especially considering they're well-armed enough to conquer Russia in midwinter.
Get a grip, people. It's not the creeping death that everyone seems to think it'll be. Once you strip off the reactionary what-if BS it's just another new technology. As someone said the last time Katz posted some FUD about this, s/human genome project/nuclear power/g. Hell, people once thought margarine was going to Bring Society Down.
Slashdot Mirror
Can we mock him for his coverage of China's launch back in October, where he dismissed the whole affair as insignificant and not worth taking note of because, after all, it was just a "cheap knockoff" and not the third nation of the scores on this Earth to launch a manned spacecraft?
Ack, I hardly meant to imply NASA was some sort of efficient thing, short of their early days. I know the NASA lately has had all the efficiency of.. uh.. something that really, really doesn't have much of it.
I've had something of an opinion for awhile that we tend to slip into periods of stagnation when the cynicism valve gets clogged up and people start focusing on the fact that everything sucks, rather than making any pretenses to dreaming. The past ten years or so has been a particularly bad one of those, and with the death knell for American manned spaceflight this past February it's gone up quite a bit.
People need to realize that what's been done in space so far is far from the limit. The problem is getting past that cynicism; people with any kind of vision are labelled as crackpots not worthy of notice just because they come up with something new or moderately difficult. Add onto that the "but but but TERRORISM!" fear these days, and you get a culture that's not in the mood to do a whole hell of a lot. :P
Really though, we're gonna be around for a lot longer than the next fifty years or so (I hope), but our stake here isn't permenant. People have this apres moi, le deluge mindset that's sorely limiting, and are rejecting the idea that they have any sort of obligation or responsibility to future generations. I'm inclined to think they do, and I'll gladly accept whatever variant of "leftist dumbass" people are going to throw at me for daring to think that.
We've got to get some presence off this rock if just for the sake of the species as a whole, because right now our eggs are all in one basket. I'm not dumb enough to think it's just a matter of saying "Okay, let's do it" and hurling millions of people out into the great beyond, but it's hardly the insurmountable task people believe it to be. The problem is that initial, admittedly huge investment. It will take a lot of time, money, and yes, even lives, to get something out of space programs, but the moment you stop thinking in terms of the next fiscal year and start thinking in terms of your grandchildren it becomes a lot more worthwhile. Once people actually start doing something Up There beyond probes and the ISS boondoggle, opportunities in just about every scientific field, coupled with industrial or power-generation possibilities, will more than pay us back for our efforts, making that initial investment seem paltry by comparison.
It's one of those things that's worth it if people can get the will to admit that very true fact.
Naw, but public forums are the place for debate. If you're going to through out the standard "waaah we haven't created a utopia yet so let's never do anything" schtick, then you should prepare to defend yourself when you're refuted. There's a difference between debate and a pissing contest, unless you really believe that all disagreement is that childish. If that's the case, then why bother voicing your opinion in the first place?
Let me start with this: If you have a problem with people IM'ing you, then perhaps you should follow suit with your apparent desire for privacy (indicated by your non-public email) and remove the link to your screen name. Of course, then, your fans and those with glowing praise for your posts here wouldn't be able to reach you at all. Because it seems you only respond to those who have something nice to say to you.
Nah, I respond to people who respond to me. You obviously went through the trouble of figuring out how to get on my case off of Slashdot, so presumably you kept enough of an eye on my comments to gather at least that much. This is assuming you didn't go off utterly halfcocked because you yourself couldn't stand someone daring to tell you you're wrong. Do you always refuse to defend your arguments in public when you make them, or is it just this time?
For people like me, on the other hand, you like to bring these things out into public - for some strange reason. Maybe you enjoy attention and/or abuse, either giving or receiving. Who knows?
Nope, but I do like debate and arguments, because I have a problem with peoples' passionate distaste for ever being exposed to or hearing points of view which disagree with them. While I expect to generally be confronted with ad-hominem attacks from people who can't really argue otherwise - hi! - I also run into the odd person who actually takes the time to think about what they say, and possibly consider they're wrong.
I also have a problem with peoples' thriving on a rampant, kneejerk hatred of any kind of new technology. Most of them pull the sort of claim you seem to be making - "we shouldn't think about doing this until we've solved all our problems on Earth first!" This simultaneously pulls out the fallacy that humanity can only perform one task at a time, and the fallacy that humanity operates as a zero-sum game. The second is merely wrong; the first is an absolutely idiotic assumption that we're little more than ants.
I'm sure we could average everything out to a nice, stangnant mediocrity, but I doubt you or most other people who are able to post here would enjoy giving up what you have in order to level the world's playing field long enough for us to get somewhere.
You seem to have at least a passing interest in not performing wasteful activities until everyone else has benefited, however. I notice you didn't respond to more direct questioning in response to your post that set this off, although I'm willing to accept that that's merely not noticing the ACs. I'm curious if you actually have answers as to What You're Doing About It, or if you're merely trying to retard others for doing things you're not interested in.
My post about the uselessness of space probes made my point. I didn't go into the past, because I don't see a need. I'm not horribly concerned about the "tens of thousands" who died making this world what it is now. Why? 'Cause I wasn't around at the time to think about it, and there's no point thinking about it now. Grief for the past is wasted grief.
So at what point does the past become something which you don't need to care about? Twenty years? Thirty? Ten? Those "thousands" whose deaths y
It's great to hear of another Singularitarian, especially around here, though. :)
No issue is quite as one sided as you make it appear.
This is true. I wasn't simply replying to the AC's post (which wasn't flamebait; slashdot needs a "-1, Stupid" mod though) as much as that general tendency that I've seen directed towards not just India, but all the developing nations, and not just from Slashdot, but from nearly every forum or discussion-y site that I keep an eye on.
Manifest destiny is alive and well, only writ large. Your point on just how India's getting things together is a good one of course, but my point is that a frighteningly large number of people in the developed world would see any developing countries' improvements as affronts which need to be punished. The responses to China's space launch earlier in the year, the disaster at Brazil's rocket facility (people cheered the deaths of the technicians! Fucking cheered them, because their deaths were reducing pressure on "us!"), the list goes on.
I'm generalizing because it's a general trend, and not a very pleasant one, that's born out of the idea that somehow the fact that we've gotten into the condition we're in somehow denies others the right to that same goal. The fact that reasonable-sounding people can pull an Adam Yoshida, demand the destruction of entire cultures rather than risk being eclipsed, and recieve respectful attention both boggles and bothers me.
However, most Americans would cringe at the methods of their advancement tactic. India for example has those who are spectacularly wealthly, and enough "middle class" to possibly outnumber the entirety of the US, however, the disparity of wealth distribution is staggering creating a per capita income substanially lower than developed nations. This is exactly why these nations have been deemed as "developing nations." Millions still live in what the west would consider impoverished conditions and many more in conditions not so much better off. With rapid globalization, labor (technical or otherwise) has been diverted to the lowest bidder, namely India and China. By burning through human capital, India and nations similar to India are able to compete with larger nations. But at what human price?
For the most part this isn't terribly different from what the west went through, really. A few generations of technology were skipped when possible (and thank God for that!), and they have the advantage of more of an awareness of these sort of problems.
I freely admit that the US isn't the only country with a tremendous cultural inertia - after all, both them and my own Canada are mere children alongside countries like India and China, and I freely acknowledge the fact that they probably had eye surgery and monumental architecture while my own ancestors were busy painting themselves blue. India, China, and most of the other developing countries are going to have that same sluggishness towards reform going on.
However, my take on it is that it isn't going to be a permenant or possibly even a longterm state. I personally despise the sweatshop mentality, and agitate against it when I can, but I do know that it's going on in India and Brazil, just like China's at least partially riding their own production improvements through the laogai and similar institutions. However, I think it will be on its way out soon in India. Not next week or even next year, but certainly in a matter of a generation or so.
I want them to not have to suffer through that kind of thing, but if they have to I want them to get through it quickly, and two generations is an eyeblink by the standards of such things. Part of it might be my inner historian's taking the longer view of things than most people - I kinda like being able to think at least a little beyond the next election - but I do think that is a remarkably short time for a country to modernize in, and the fact that we're in a world that actually views "human rights" as somethi
Birthrates in most of the developing world have been dropping for some time, just like the plummet in the developed world over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their rate drop is happening at a better pace too, since a lot of the things which started lowering it in the first place - birth control, the precedents of industrialization, a growing middle class, etc - were already in place.
Don't expect an overnight drop to less than replacement level birthrates, of course. India's going to be crowded for awhile yet, but the rate at which that crowd's growing will level off in the next generation or two. These things take time, and in the scheme of things that's a pretty damn quick population plateau.
Oh, and I might as well repeat my tired old point that it's possible to support the decreasing birth rate and embrace technology at the same time. You know, countries being able to do multiple things at once? Technology being a stabilizing force for population levels? Everything's interrelated, man, open your eyes and take a look around at how we've been impacted.
I see people realize things like this so very rarely that when I do see it, I briefly have to figure out whether they really understand, or whether they're just being sarcastic. That depresses me. :P
Something which, of course, would immediately stop if we'd just abandon all pretenses to advancement and go back to the trees, I suppose.
Tens of thousands died in the industrialization process that got you probably just about everything in your home right now. I don't see you whining about how that wasn't worth it.
To create the conditions that bolstered the technologies that are allowing you to post this myopic, Luddite bullshit on Slashdot right now, nearly one hundred million people died in no fewer than three major wars.
What? From that mountaintop of a moral high ground you're preaching from, you couldn't see that?
Maybe, just maybe, you should save your attempts at profundity for an occaision where they don't reek of ignorance.
Second para should read "But ohhhh no, as soon as foreign countries ... begin to pull ahead..."
we americans should not allow this to happen.. we could lose our trade advantage
Don't want it to happen? Then do something about it. Fix up your own house instead of deciding to tear down the Joneses 'cause they're committing the crime of hubris by catching up.
Enough people here take the free market as a religion, the sole and primary characteristic of anything good, that I'd expect people to keep that in mind. They usually do in the business world. But ohhhh no, as soon as foreign countries - especially those "subhuman" ones lumped under the title of "Third World," as though Nicaragua, Brazil, Afghanistan and India all belong to a single, undifferentiated bloc of squalor - then they must be foulest evil fit only to be destroyed if they approach our sacrosanct grandeur.
So what the hell is it with that? Is America's hegemony so shaky that you can't stand the thought of another major country getting its technology base built up without wetting yourselves in abject terror?
You don't like it? Then go improve your own country, culture, and economy. Then, maybe you'll have something worth boasting about should you stay on top because of it. Another country pulling ahead worries me a lot less than one country deciding to keep the rest of the world down to protect their precious egos.
If you can't hold an advantage on the world stage by continuing to produce better technology, by managing a better economy, et cedera, then you bloody well don't deserve to.
When an aircraft is travelling faster than sound - someone correct me if I'm wrong here, I'm definately not an aerospace techie - it leaves a large and rather powerful shockwave behind it which shakes up the atmosphere to an extent that some radars would be able to detect more easily. The sonic-supersonic transition, as well, is not a subtle event, which would be visible to the naked eye if you were in the right place at the right time.
As for advance warning, you're right, but if I was at war with a country and was told there were cruise missiles over my airspace, I'd probably consider getting out of my presidential penthouse suite on the twenty-fourth floor for a few hours.
So countries that don't spend all their money on infrastructure are spending none of their money on it?
Give me a goddamn break. Every time a country that's just a backwards Darkiestan in the eyes of the slashbots comes up with something in technological terms, people bring this same old tired, idiotic argument that a non-western country can only ever perform one task at a time, that they don't have a "right" to do so because there's social problems in the country.
On my world - it's called "Earth," by the way - that idea usually gets dismissed as the utter bullshit that it is.
We've gotten out of it in a lot of ways, but the high-imperialism idea of history being us and the Lesser Peoples Of No Consequence has a long way to go before it dies the death it deserves.
Pretty much, yeah. I read "1632" when the Baen Free Library let it out, and it basically sent my inner historian hurling himself out the window at points. That and it seems way too Francis Fukiyama-ish for my likings. :P
It's kind of saddening to see that the Islam nations were once a world power, and the world power, apparently (by your other post), while the rest of the world was in a state of decline leading towards rebirth. But as a result of Western rebirth, it doesn't look like there's even an opportunity for the Middle East to have their own rebirth and emerge as a world power again. Their location just isn't nearly as economically and strategically important as it used to be, since we can sail right around them (or, more likely, we can nuke our way right around them, since we don't sail any more). I wonder if they're in a good position to take advantage of space travel to rise again, since they've failed to take advantage of oil to rise again (not entirely their fault, 20th Century western history isn't kind to the Middle East). It's entirely possible from the armchair in which I'm observing for Western civilization to decline enough for the Middle East to rise again, but even if Western civilization declines, where is the room for the Middle East to rise?
There has been a tend to try and diversify in a lot of Middle Eastern nations, especially over the past generation. What you're seeing these days is a spreading out of the economic and technological bases beyond just oil, especially as supplies run low, and a slow but steady democratization movement. When you get those, combined with the burning out of the fundamentalist movement - which is also happening, I think, just way too slowly - you'll get something interesting going on with them.
For the latter to be at all worthwhile, it'll probably have to take a couple of generations. A lot of people believe that one day in 1776 the United States went poof! and there was democracy in North America. It really wasn't the case, and the US didn't have a level of democracy it would accept today until sometime in the sixties. Shifts towards things like more liberal forms of government usually take generations, and our own is the result of about 700 years of gradual reform. I think it can be done faster these days, but not quite overnight. ;)
A neat thing about the Western and Middle Eastern declines and resurgences that I've noticed is that they tend to feed off one another. When the Roman Empire's principate blew itself apart in the third century, they adopted the Persian style of governance - the absolute, semi-divine monarch, aloof from his people, with all the fancy, ostentatious regalia, ceremonies, robes, courts, etc that it implied. It wasn't very practical on the surface, but it created an image of the strong, superior ruler to people who'd been dissilusioned from the principes and brought a good measure of stability to the west again. The style persists to this day in European monarchical court ceremony, and hit its height in medieval kings. It's one of the many influences which came our way and kept Europe together when it could have really collapsed into something we'd still be crawling out of.
Nowadays you're seeing the reverse. Since the West is the cultural hegemon over most of the world, you see in Islamic states the tendency to shift to the new ideas as the old ones begin to fall apart. Use of western-style government (usually based on the British model), many economic practices, most military and some scientific practices.. Culture's staying somewhat independent where it matters, even if it takes on a western feel. But you're definately seeing a trend towards rather than away from freedom. It's slow, but it's there. It's kind of interesting to see the tradeoffs going back and forth - "we" took "th
Actually, the fact that the Middle East was an economic player was the reason it was a barrier in reaching the spice countries. That region is smack dab in the centre of almost all the major trade lines of Afroeurasia; its economic life was something similar to Italian economic life during the medieval and renaissance period, writ very, very large. Europe wanted a short cut around the rich, powerful, and very well-located Islamic states, which was the main thing driving overseas expansion and maritime development.
To put it into more modern terms.. Imagine that North and South America each had stuff the other wanted a great deal, but neither had much in the way of overseas travel, not knowing much of the geography quite yet. Now, imagine you've got a powerful kingdom with a strong navy sitting right on the land running from Mexico to Columbia. Think of what that would do to the trade methods in the area, especially with regards to things like tariffs. The middleman would - and in the case of the caliphates, did - make a fortune!
You might just want, BTW, wanna check something other than fiction for evidence and stuff. Baen in particular has a liking of historical fiction that can at times be rather shoddy to say the least. I did a few minutes' looking around, and this looks like a decent collection of sources on Islamic history if you're bored enough to take a looksee.
Hmm, I admit I don't know much history of the Middle east from about 600AD 'till the renaissance, but I seem to recall that Persia (never called Persia!) spent a lot of time fighting Rome as a nation in decline, and then Rome started to decline.
Now look what you did, you've gotten me onto one of my longwinded ramble topics.
One of the problems people have with keeping the kingdoms in this area straight is that they tend to share the same name. Iran is simply the last in a sequence of little-related governments which have occupied the same area for several thousand years.
Persia as we know it - Iran - and the ancient/classical Persia share little more than their name between the two. The area known classically as the Persian Empire stretched from roughly the Indus River into the middle east, generally as far east as Iraq in Roman times, but during Greek times as far as modern Turkey and Egypt. That original Persian Empire began showing up in the mid-500s BC under Cyrus the Great, overthrowing what was left of the Babylonian kingdoms, a sequence of generally short-lived and ephemeral affairs running back almost, but not quite, into deepest antiquity.
(Even then, the ruling Achaemenid dynasty (which the kingdom was also named after) were from Media, a different region and culture within the area!)
Now, this particular Persian empire went down because of a young fellow named Alexander (y'might have heard of him) in the 330s-320s BC, and the whole region was ruled by a sort of pseudo-Greek monarchy for awhile. They were an attempt to impose a Hellenistic (NOT Hellenic, which is the democratic style most people know, but an absolute and militarist monarchy instead) veneer over the old Persian-style monarchy, and didn't do terribly much other than create a period of instability in the area for several generations as Alexander's "successors," and later their own successors, warred and plotted with one another. They were just starting to burn themselves out when the Romans came onto the scene in the west - and someone else in the east.
When people think of the particular Persian empire which tangled with Rome, they're thinking of the Arsacid monarchy, known at the time as Parthia. The Parthians hail from, well, Parthia, in the Iranian plateau, first started to chew at the Seleucid Empire's fragmented holdings around 250 BC and built up their own empire on top of the Hellenistic ones for the next century, before finally starting to tangle with the Romans in the first century BC. It was this Persian empire, the Parthians, which first started slapping the Romans around at battles such as Carrhae, Marc Antony's embarassing campaign in the east, and so on.
The Parthians soon tore themselves apart in dynastic squabbling, as well as having the major economic cities of the east torn apart in the great Roman invasions under the emperor Trajan. By 224 BC, a fellow named Ardashir came once again out of the east - in this case, if memory serves me, actually from the region of Persis/Farsis, proceeded to overthrow the Parthian empire, introduced several reforms in economics, military, and government, and became the first ruler of a very powerful, revitalized kingdom known today as the Sassanid or Sassanian Empire. This one is the Persian Empire you're thinking of, and fought a number of embarassingly successful campaigns against Rome, cumulating in the disaster of 260 when Shapur I actually captured the Emperor Valerian in battle. This empire continued along, doing very well for itself and being one of the great powers of the world, until the great Islamic wars of expansion blew out of Arabia. Pretty much nobody could stand against these guys, and the Sassanids were no exception, their last gasp being the Battle of Nehawand in 642 AD where their last great army was destroyed.
It's only by this date that an actual Islamic Persia exists, but it's still just the latest in a long string of Persias. The one now called Iran
Riiight.
Do so many people really believe that if a country isn't spending all their money on development, they might as well not be spending any?
-PS
I seem to have come off with far better luck in regards to teachers than about ninety-eight percent of the North American population, but a few stood out on top of that. The main ones I remember are my two history teachers, one of whom taught tenth grade (classical) and twelfth grade (20th-century) history, the other teaching eleventh which was pretty much the inbetween.
.. "Now, that's how things usually work - to make a really big bang you have to compress the mass together, make it harder for the neutrons to mi - EVERYONE HUG PATRICK!" Insert massive tackling of me, as well as being hit with said rubber ball three times on one toss. Eesh.
;)
The first guy had an unusually interactive teaching style, where he'd try to do as little speaking as possible. Instead he questioned the students a lot, asking them to explain or justify a given statement until they could either argue about it inside and out, or knew they were so off-base that they should try again sometime. He took the lectures more like a kind of storytelling, and was obviously deep into it, and his enthusiasm managed to infect the class. I remember one day when he was out of class for the day because of a dentist's appointment, and a couple of the school's more stoner-ier, slacker types who didn't care about anything were actually griping about missing one of his classes.
He also taught by example a lot, and had an unnerving habit of bringing one knicknack or another from the area he was talking about (be it ancient history or modern) as examples. Had plenty of things like that and used them too.. The gladius hanging over his desk went into a big spiel on the Roman military; we spent a few classes with his scale model of the Rosetta Stone learning how to translate heiroglyphs and stuff.
He also made the examples for other stuff he was teaching both funny and effective. For talking about the Battle of Thermopylae, he stood in the doorway with a yardstick and dared the front row of the classroom to try and dislodge him without getting whacked with the thing. In another class he was talking about nuclear fission by standing in the doorway and throwing a rubber ball (meant to represent a neutron) into the class (with the people meant to represent fissionables). When the ball didn't hit anyone despite bouncing around, he went on
The other guy was far more traditional, possibly in the 1890's-teacher-traditional - strictly organized lectures that seemed timed to a stopwatch, a class schedule that never wavered and God help you if you were goofing off in his class. However, his enthusiasm for his subject was still catching and got most of the students. He was like the history teacher AC mentioned in a way - if you didn't try in his class you didn't exist to him, but show any kind of effort and he'd go out of his way to help. The best thing I got out of his class (aside from massive training in university-style lectures) was the question, "Why?"
The main thing he wanted to teach is that there is a reason behind everything, and a reason behind that reason, and so on and so forth until you're either far enough back that it doesn't matter or actually find the original relevant cause. You didn't know something in his opinion until you could explain why it was as it was. It made a huge difference between absorbing facts and actually understanding them; although I knew that difference beforehand I didn't quite realize how important it was until that year.
Anyway, I am ever so babbling.
-Patrick Stewart
Perhaps the army was small (as it tended to be back then), but the USN was appropriately huge. Consider the fact that it was "limited" by treaty to parity with Britain's, whose shipbuilding policy for some time had been to match the combined sizes of the next two largest European fleets, and then exceed that by a little bit.
135,000 tonnes of carriers in the 1930s was a lot more than it is today..
-Patrick Stewart
Random bit of trivia here. A lotta folks think that the Soviets were being cowardly by waiting until the war was almost over and doing a land grab. Found out not too long ago that they'd actually made an agreement with the rest of the Allies to jump on Japan's back three months to the day after Germany fell.
Which it did on May 8.
-Patrick Stewart
Probably more than the US needs its fourteen (sixteen?) carriers and scads of boomers. As North Americans, we've got a bit of an ivory tower complex going. Nobody alive on this continent today, going back I'd say three or maybe four generations, has any recollections of what it's like to have their homeland be on the wrong end of a conflict. Civil War veterans would have had fits if they'd seen what some parts of the world are going through today, or have gone through in the past century.
Keep in mind that Russia is a very large country and is not entirely surrounded by friendly neighbours. Territorial disputes up and down the east (China, for example, still has a claim on Russia's Irkutsk region, which it said was taken from it under duress), the scads of civil problems in southern European Russia, and so forth.. It's a very hostile part of the world. This is also a country, remember, that has been attacked roughly once per generation for the past seven hundred years. It's not the friendliest position one can be in, considering their only real option otherwise would be to do something drastic like give up Siberia to the Urals.
As for the Cold War mindset, things like that die hard, as anyone living in a NATO country would know. They weren't bent on world conquest like the propaganda stated - any more than the US was bent on world conquest, like Soviet propaganda stated. Because of that, and the whole slapped-every-few-decades thing they put up with, a large military helps a good number of people there feel secure. A lot of the people in the military (not all, mind you, but a lot) are in there simply because they think they're Doing The Right Thing. Or they're getting three meals a day, depending on the situation.
I don't think it's inexcusable for Russia to have a modern and/or large military. Ineffecient, yes; but as someone else said the US having a large military during the Depression was almost as bad. However, there's a fairly good chance that if they cut back too much on - or removed altogether - their armed forces, someone foreign or domestic could come along to make their lives a lot worse.
People have their problems, and sometimes some folks are unfortunate enough to pay the price for it like the Kursk's crew did, but in the end it's in the same interest as any other nation's: making sure they've got a country to come home to at the end of the day.
-Patrick Stewart
Oh yeah. Of course the population of the United States will agree on what defines "perfection" when the seven hundred (or whatever) people at the top of the government haven't had general agreement amongst themselves since Pearl Harbor.
Oh, and people actually believe the government is capable of trying to enforce it.. geeze. Yeah. Three hundred million people are going to gladly go along with that with no problem. Especially considering they're well-armed enough to conquer Russia in midwinter.
Get a grip, people. It's not the creeping death that everyone seems to think it'll be. Once you strip off the reactionary what-if BS it's just another new technology. As someone said the last time Katz posted some FUD about this, s/human genome project/nuclear power/g. Hell, people once thought margarine was going to Bring Society Down.
I love modern society.
-PS