CapitalistImperialistPig

Autonomous killer robots aren't just science fiction anymore, and a lot of people would like to ban them. A recent major conference in Geneva failed to agree though.  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/17/world/robot-drone-ban.html I don't think that the prospects are very good, at least partially because it's a ban that would be very hard to enforce.  Killer robots don't need a vast industrial base like nuclear weapons.  They can be built in modest warehouses using cell-phone brains and other widely available components.  Those that proved decisive in the recent war over Nagorno-karabakh were built by Israel and Turkey, and lots of others are in on building them, notably the US, China, and Russia.  Another obvious reason for skepticism is that they appear to be a military game changer, probably as big a one as the tank and the machine gun.  Nagorno-karabakh proved that they can be devastating against tanks and entrenched troops, as well as logistics....

  Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by  Steven Pinker   The ideals of the Enlightenment, says Pinker, are reason, science, and humanism, and their pursuit has led to remarkable improvements in the human condition.   A blurb by Bill Gates calls it “My new favorite book of all time.”   I am a bit less enthusiastic. He has a beef with those who don’t agree.   Religion gets a brief dismissal, but his true scorn is reserved for some of his liberal intellectual colleagues, especially those of the left.   Marxism and some related religions of the left get their juice from the real and imaginary diseases of capitalism, and especially from Marx’s conviction that the internal contradictions of capitalism would lead to a fatal pass.   Pinker makes the case that that apocalyptic hope is a mirage. The book is listed at 556 pages, but it seems longer, even though the last 100 pages consist of notes and index.   I...

Turning and turning in the widening gyre    The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,... Yeats What kind of bad stuff is likely to trouble the world to come?  Prediction is hard, said Bohr, but especially of the future.  Some bad stuff to come, maybe. 1) Global Warming - I called these maybes, but this one is a all but a cinch.  It is pretty obvious that the world is not about to take any firm action to avoid a substantial increase in temperature.  Summits will be held, half measures will be promised but not taken, and CO2 will accumulate.  Hands will be wrung, seas will rise, desertification will proceed, and, quite likely, hundreds of millions will starve. Americans would rather starve, be flooded or cooked out than pay more for gasoline. 2) At least two revanchist powers with global spanning nuclear missiles are making menacing noises.  What happens when Russia ma...

  This very short, fascinating book is the war diary of a Spitfire pilot who fought through the Battle of Britain in Squadron 609, one of the most celebrated units in Fighter Command. There was a steep learning curve in air combat in World War II and casualty rates were enormous, especially among inexperienced pilots.   Crooks’ squadron lost about half its pilots over Dunkirk, and it many more days of fighting before they were winning more than they were losing. Despite the danger and the continual loss of friends and squadron mates, it is clear that the pilots loved flying and aerial combat.   It was the happiest time of his life was frequently said at a pilot’s funeral. By all accounts, the Spitfire was an exhilarating machine to fly, and the life or death struggle was a matchless thrill.   The author gives a good account of the tactics and strategy of the struggle. Typically, German bombers flew at relatively low altitudes while the ME 109 German fighters ...

  Mr. Holland’s book covers the crucial period between Hitler’s attack on France, Holland, and Belgium and the defeat of his attempt to destroy the British Fighter Command.   The attack on France was an immense success, mostly due to the incompetence of French planning, leadership, and communications.   France had spent much of its military budget on the fortifications of the Maginot Line and had anticipated the German push through the low countries, but utterly failed to appreciate the main thrust through the Ardennes.   Even when this was reported, the high command refused to believe it, and thanks in part to poor communications, failed utterly to respond aggressively. The tragedy was that France had plenty of tanks, soldiers and aircraft to respond but poor leadership, communications, and morale meant that they could not respond effectively to Guderian’s panzer thrust to the coast.   As a consequence, much of the French Army, and the British Expeditionary F...

  Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest are usually accounted long books, each logging in at 1000 plus pages, as well as erudite literary works.   Just for comparison, Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle at 2685 pages is longer than GR and IJ combined.   The Baroque Cycle is published as three books, but it is really one long novel.   I don’t want to make a pretense of being any literary scholar, so I want to confess right up front that despite reading the whole thing, including all 300 plus endnotes, I found IJ occasionally compelling but frequently tedious and rarely funny.   More grievously, I did not recognize GR as one of the greatest novels of all time, though it too had its compelling moments.   I’m afraid that I found the description of the V2 and its place of manufacture more interesting than most of the characters. The BC lacks the high literary seriousness of these other works, being at heart a swashbuckling tale embedded in an elaborately mi...

  Book Pre-Review:  War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires by  Peter Turchin   Peter Turchin styles himself as a latter day Hari Selden – he is looking for theories of Cliodynamics - general principles of history.   Two big principles animate his War and Peace and War.   One is due to the great Arab historian and polymath Ibn Khaldun.   Khaldun identified the crucial role of asabiya – the fundamental social glue that unites a people – in the stability of nations and empires.   The second is the role of Malthusian cycles in the instability of empires. The basic idea of the Malthusian cycle is that peace and prosperity lead to growth in the numbers of the peasant class.   This leads to competition for land, increases in rents, decreases in pay for landless laborers and increased prosperity for the nobles and other rentiers, which, in turn, leads to an expansion of the Noble class.   The peasants and laborers suffer starvat...