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| Afghanistan |
| Farewell to Bourgeois Kings |
| 2021-08-20 |
| "Intelligence and rationalism are not in themselves revolutionary. But technical thinking is foreign to all social traditions: the machine has no tradition. One of Karl Marx’s seminal sociological discoveries is that technology is the true revolutionary principle, beside which all revolutions based on natural law are antiquated forms of recreation. A society built exclusively on progressive technology would thus be nothing but revolutionary; but it would soon destroy itself and its technology." — Carl Schmitt Understanding the true significance of events is, at least in some sense, a task best left to historians. Even the fall of the Roman empire can appear as something akin to the normal state of things for the people living through it; the true historical significance of something is generally only clear well after the fact, and every new generation has its own notion of the true meaning of history. To the people living in Germany in 1450, the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest surely meant something very different than it did to the german nationalists of the 19th century. For the former, if people thought about the battle at all, it merely represented a particularly nasty defeat suffered by a long dead empire. To the people struggling to unite the german nation under the banner of a single strong state, the roman defeat by the teutons appeared as a prefiguration of their own political and national destiny. |
| Posted by:Beavis |
| #12 City on the Edge of Forever was in many respects a seminal Star Trek episode. Really. Jim Kirk and Joan Collins. Spock does miracles in a distant past. Actual history comes into play. Seldom did so much come together so well in a prime time TV show. Rod Serling was probably even impressed. I don't even have a TV bundle these days. It's all crap... |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2021-08-20 09:57 |
| #11 I just can't get "swords and sorcery." I like hard sci-fi. The market for the former is enormous, almost nil for the latter. |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2021-08-20 09:52 |
| #10 ^Different strokes for different folks. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2021-08-20 09:47 |
| #9 In many respects, Donaldson's take on the industry mirrors Harlan Ellison's distaste for how Roddenberry mutilated his screen play for a Star Trek episode that aired as City on the Edge of Forever. |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2021-08-20 09:41 |
| #8 And I did organize an email campaign some years back to try to get J. Michael Straczynski to do the Gap Into books as a series of movies ala Babylon 5. Needless to sat I was not successful. |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2021-08-20 09:36 |
| #7 He's not for everyone. I've never read any of the Thomas Covenant books. Not my type of story. In interviews, Donaldson is quite bitter about writing and feels he's gotten a bad shake doing it. The Man Who books I still think are quite good... |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2021-08-20 09:33 |
| #6 I once tried to read Donaldson's book. Couldn't |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2021-08-20 09:04 |
| #5 Warden Dios in The Gap Into books is my bet... |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2021-08-20 08:59 |
| #4 ^Harry Seldon, Muad'dib is an a$$hole. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2021-08-20 08:26 |
| #3 I think the true irony of the ascendance of a technologically driven world is that as we move into more unforgiving terrain, replicants and alien predators on Earth, trips to hostile planets as envisioned in Alien and Starship Troopers, human survival will dictate a certain harsh practicality that will leave no room for parlor guessing games about what might work. People like Brennand and Panetta will not be remotely up to the task. A very different type will emerge. With any luck those people will look more like Paul Artreides than Reinhard Heydrich. But it could go either way... |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2021-08-20 08:18 |
| #2 Welcome aboard the USS Caine. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2021-08-20 07:33 |
| #1 Some of us waved goodbye to the elitists years ago. |
| Posted by: Airandee 2021-08-20 07:02 |