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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
Still on Future Shock, Galactic Patrol, Crystallizing Public Opinion and 12 Commandments.
Still on Castles of Steel. It’s more tense than I expected, and for surprising reasons. Everyone going into the war expected Britannia to rule the waves. Everyone today knows that Britain did, in fact, keep control of the sea, and obviously went on to win the war. The tension comes from all the disasters along the way.
The child’s model of naval warfare starts with two piles of ships, which are dashed against each other until one side is out of hit points. Both British and German strategies were chosen according to sophisticated versions of such a model, which agreed that the British would dominate an open fight on account of having more ships. In theory, Germany would only accept lopsided fights against smaller elements of the British navy, relying on torpedoes and mines to level the playing field. The British, then, had a veto on any German naval operations so long as they could avoid throwing it away.
And by God, they tried their best. Poor training, executive meddling, insane deployment orders—the British continually courted disaster. They had a near-perfect intelligence advantage thanks to lucky recovery of German codes, but they repeatedly failed to actually use it. When they did manage to engage the enemy, their gunnery was generally unimpressive, and tactical errors kept them from dealing crippling damage. Meanwhile, Germany kept trying operations which should have been suicide. Everyone on both sides thought they’re trying heroic maneuvers and devious plans, and but they're really risking everything for minimal gain, often playing exactly into enemy hands. The net results were unbelievable quantities of metal, coal, and human lives sent up in flames.
So the book is tense. Everything has to end in stalemate or disaster, and the question is usually who made the fatal mistake this time. That doesn’t detract from the overall experience. I want to recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about the period. I also want to wave it in the face of anyone promoting an elaborate strategy for, well, anything. No plan survives contact with the enemy.
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https://glog.glennf.com/hcwm-store/how-comics-were-made
Deep dive into how printing works/evolved
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Finished Final Cut last night, loved it. Started My Brilliant Friend on the train this morning, having heard from everyone and their mother that it's fantastic. Only got about fifteen pages into it, don't know where it's going yet.
My girlfriend pitched the latter to me after she finished it. I decided it sounded incredibly stressful.
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Gone South by Robert McCammon. Read it a long time ago and liked it. Also plan to pick up my copy of Medieval Canon Law again which is an intro to the subject for laymen.
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Finished reading And The Band Played On. It didn't really change my views about anything, but it revealed a few aspects that I find interesting.
When I got to the last quarter or so of the book, it started to feel to me like it was an excessively negative or doomer take on the situation. Like, okay, things were pretty bad early on, but we're finally making some real progress, can't we acknowledge that? But nope, it's just negative takes, so we'll just blow by the actual progress and find some new negative aspect to focus on.
Were they correct to slow-walk the response at first? If you look at the actual death toll over the first few years after it was recognized that AIDS exists and is a communicable disease caused by a pathogen, it's pretty low. Only 618 deaths in 1982. 5596 in 1984. It wasn't until 1983 that somebody first calculated that the mean incubation period was likely to be in the neighborhood of 5.5 years, which would infact imply a tremendously increasing death toll over the next decade, which did in fact come to pass. And that of course is just one statician's opinion. How long for that to be accepted to be true by the whole scientific community? How many times has a single or small handful of scientists claimed that something they were working on would be super terrible in the future, so we should invest a ton in it now, which would incidentally be very good for them personally, but turned out to be overblown? I bet it's more than a few. Note that Covid-19, which we responded to far more vigorously, blew right by those early-1980s AIDS death counts in a matter of weeks. The fact that homosexuality was so broadly disliked didn't exactly help, but it doesn't seem super unreasonable that society as a whole didn't jump instantly to fight a disease that doesn't seem to hit all that many people.
It seems likely that a lot of the spreading took place long before there was any recognition that AIDS existed at all. This makes it pretty tough to construct an even vaguely plausibe counter-factual where AIDS is stopped from spreading.
The book seems to poo-poo the idea that it isn't necessary for the Federal Government to allocate extra money to AIDS research, these Federal medical institutes already have plenty of money and are already free to allocate as much of it as they want to anything their scientists find interesting. I think this idea seems pretty reasonable. If AIDS is so important and so dangerous, why can't they infact reallocate money away from other things and into AIDS research? Why does everything need even more of our tax dollars thrown at it? Yeah some scientists will bitch and moan that their pet projects are no longer high enough priority to get funded, but so what. As far as I know, the corporate world cuts off lines of research that aren't sufficiently promising all the time and tells the affected scientists to suck it up. I don't think it's all that terrible for the Government to do the same.
Another aspect that seemed interesting was just how wildly promiscuous at least some members of the gay community are and how opposed many of them are to any suggestion or attempt to cut down on that lifestyle. There was tremendous pushback against things like closing down bathhouses and discouraging gay orgies. It's interesting how all of the poor arguments we complain about today about how doing anything at all mildly negative for any "oppressed group" for any reason, including to try to prevent those people from spreading and dying of an actually lethal disease, is obviously a step on the road to genocide against them. I guess the internet isn't actually that special and there's nothing new under the sun.
There is very little reasoning on this earth that can stand up to the awesome power of “But I want to.”
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