121–130 of 142 posts
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Thank you for playing! I appreciate your kind words.
I'm old enough that Total Annihilation is my favorite game all time. Still remember the wonder of discovering that. Thank you for all the happy memories.
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If you ever find yourself genuinely unable to understand the views of large groups of people, that's usually a good sign to take a step back and try to approach the subject more dispassionately. People are usually pretty rational on close inspection. They just operate under different premises and experiences. This article is pretty typical of the genre "unhappy leftists ask why people inexplicably reject their utopia…
If as you say, that Trump did not want to confront Russia in order to prevent nuclear war (I don't think that was his motivation, but let's roll with your argument for a sec) then Trump was an appeaser in the mold of Neville Chamberlain. As for his actual motivations, I think it had a lot more to do with wanting to make money in Russia as well as his admiration of autocrats. > People are usually pretty rational on cl…
"Donald Trump said on Tuesday that Hillary Clinton’s plan for Syria would “lead to world war three” because of the potential for conflict with military forces from nuclear-armed Russia."
In the early 90s, I read all of the Hugo winners at the time. A Canticle for Leibowitz was one of my favorites. A few years later, it was one of the three major influences we used when making the original Fallout (along with Road Warrior and City of Lost Children).
Thank you for your work. The persona of the desert wanderer helped this shy kid feel a little more confident in high school.
> If the failure by “A Canticle for Leibowitz” to predict the nuclear holocaust tells us anything, it’s that this is indeed possible. The nuclear holocaust wasn't really a prediction of that book; it was a premise.
Yeah I think Miller was using the nuclear holocaust as a vehicle to reflect on original sin (i.e., the inevitable tendency of human beings to engage in self-destructive behavior) and the antidote to it offered by the Catholic Church. If he had written the novel today it probably would have been something other than MAD that nearly wiped out civilization twice.
Maybe last year, but we're back to nuclear sabre-rattling and great-power conflict now.
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Interesting take, I would have thought that the early moderns were not too interested in vindicating monasticism. Do you have particular thinkers in mind here?
Well it was a kind of hand wavy pronouncement on my part. With respect to the ‘Fall of Rome/Dark Ages’ narrative I had Pico della Mirandola and Edward Gibbon in mind. Considering their takes on monasticism, I suppose monasticism as the savior of civilization was actually a much later add on.
Yeah that's what I was thinking too. I'm going to re-read Canticle soon-ish but I wonder to what extent Miller endorses even the latter. I feel like his concerns were much more immediately spiritual than cultural. I'm thinking particularly of the scene where the main character of whichever volume meets the Pope up-close and is taken aback to see that his garments are moth-eaten and threadbare.
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Not quite a dystopia, but of you (like me) also loved those books, then a highly recommend CS Lewis' Space Trilogy. One of my favourite series of all time, especially the last one.
Those are good, but kind of strange and hard to get through, especially the first one.
I really enjoyed the book. I’m almost always down for some sci-fi dystopia, and as a religious person I enjoyed this particular lens on it. A couple I highly recommend from another Catholic author, The Lord of the World, and Dawn of All, by Robert Hugh Benson. Those two are more early 20th century Catholicism in worldview, which I particularly enjoyed.
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The original claims were: > 1) the Russians run bombers to the airspace of Alaska all the time. 2) US jets intercept and turn them around. 3) It's the expensive version of the border crossings between India & Pakistan If we're charitable, then in isolation #1 is reasonable. But not so much in the context of #2 and #3. Note that actual cross-border incursions are very common between India & Pakistan. As well as betwee…
You're right. The examples I mention are not like the border crossings between India & Pakistan. > they're generally going to deliberately penetrate the "buffer zone", Yes. My comment concerned your earlier use of principally in "principally intended to preserve normative freedom of movement rights." I believe they are principally done as surveillance flights, with freedom of movement rights as an important but secon…
My comment stands and the misinterpretation has at least born fruit.
The 'border crossings' i mentioned might have been better referred to as 'border stations', where rehearsed performance occurs daily between guards. Not referencing physical incursions into disputed territories to maintain claim.
My vote for best quote from the book “Abbot Zerchi smiled thinly. ‘You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.'”
“Never tell a child you have a soul. Teach him, you are a soul; you have a body. As we learn to think of things always in this order, that the body is but the temporary clothing of the soul, our views of death and the unbefittingness of customary mourning will approximate to those of Friends of earlier generations.” George Macdonald 1892 ("Friends" here is a reference to Quakers)
via https://books.google.com/books?id=vDMrAAAAYAAJ&dq=george+mac...
h/t https://mereorthodoxy.com/you-dont-have-a-soul-cs-lewis-neve...
I tried reading "A Canticle for Leibowitz” recently. Didn't love it. Not alot really happened in it. It felt like a response/commentary to the sort of apocalypse that was envisaged in the 1980's, like nuclear war. I feel like there's a much more sophisticated post apocalyptic vision of the future now. As an alternative, I loved "The Road" - now there's a really great post apocalyptic scifi.
I really didn't like The Road. Felt like bleakness for bleakness' sake, a kind of "pessimism porn". Maybe I just didn't understand it.
I the book Capitalist Realism recently, and it had an interesting section that observed modern society tends to confuse bleakness and depravity with "being realistic."