September, 2013 - Death Is Bad

Fire and Ice

Musings On Present Day, Personal 2 Responses »

Sep 302013

Sometimes people try to imply that those who don’t want to die don’t care about others. For example, if put this way:

“I’m dating a guy who wants to be frozen and wake up in 1000 years and plans to find a new girlfriend then.”

We sound pretty awful. Which is the entire purpose of these “How can you imagine living without your partner?” questions. They are not SERIOUS questions, they are intentional libel. This is evident if you think about them for even a few minutes.

The asker of this question knows perfectly well how someone can go on living without their partner because they see it all the time. Even the happiest and strongest relationships still almost always end with one of the two still alive. And that person goes on living, and finds happiness again. It’d be like accusing your grandma of never really loving your grandpa because a few years after he died she was still alive, and had even had the gall to remarry. The question “how can you imagine being with someone else?” is faux-outrage. It’s moralizing in its most contemptible form.

I don’t WANT to live on without my lover. But I know it won’t end the world.

I can’t force anyone to take a life-saving medical intervention any more than I can force someone to be cryonically preserved. I would be sad if my partner didn’t take a life-saving medical treatment to prevent her from dying at 40, just like I’d be sad if she didn’t get frozen so she could live to 1000 with me. But I wouldn’t kill myself if she died at 40 either, so that’s not a reasonable reason to ask me to die before 1000.

To say otherwise is to endorse Sati

SF/F Review – Heroes of the Valley

Book Club Review No Responses »

Sep 272013

Heroes of the Valley, by Jonathan Stroud

Synopsis: A coming-of-age story in a Viking village

Brief Book Review: A fantastic YA novel. Stroud really knows how to make a story live within its world. The Valley feels like the entirety of the world, and it’s a rich, vibrant world that lives and grows far outside the pages of the novel itself. The characters are self-determined and display constant agency. The female characters are strong in the real sense, rather than just the “I know kung-fu and wear leather pants” sense. The protagonist moves from an innocent, precocious boy full of naïve ideals to a mature young man who avoids becoming jaded and retains reasonable idealism. There’s plenty of humor, conflict, and action along the way and all of it flows naturally. The way that nothing ever quite works out the way it’s intended to makes for captivating storytelling. And the twist at the end is fantastic.

I’m going to go off on somewhat of a tangent, but it will be relevant to the review.

I’m not a reader of YA. I never choose to read it myself anymore – the few times I have done so in the recent past I’ve always regretted it (Harry Potter, Hunger Games). Not because they aren’t good (they are!), but simply because this genre no longer speaks to my interests. I’m strongly in favor of the current effort to introduce a YA category to the Hugo Awards. I think that they should be recognized, and that they don’t get enough recognition because most Hugo readers feel the same way I do. I also would like the YA’s not to get mixed in with my non-YA Hugo considerations, but that basically never happens because YA’s just don’t get nominated. This book is an excellent example of why there should be a YA category. This book deserves a Hugo nod at the least.

A fellow book-clubber once said he hates reviews that end with “If you like Urban Fantasy, you’ll like this book” because it tells him nothing of value. “Yes, if I like this kind of book, I will like this kind of book. Thanks.” What he wants to know is if the reviewer would recommend the book on its own merits, not just to people who will like that type of book. People who’ve calibrated my taste against theirs (via previous reviews, or the My Top 5 Books post) will want to know if I would recommend this book to me. Of my top 5 books, 4 feature graphic violence. 2 have sexual assault. Gods and post-human entities feature strongly in 3. Identity/self confusion is a central theme for all but one. Those aren’t YA books, and I haven’t been in the target audience for YA books for a long time. This is a great YA book and I’d have recommended it to the me from 20 years ago, or to any young nieces/nephews I have. But despite all that, it’s not a book I’d recommend to me, so – regrettably – Not Recommended.

Book Club Review: Seriously though, this is an excellent YA book. It makes for a good change if there’s been too much heavy serious stuff lately. And there is SO MUCH to talk about because the book has SO MANY layers! It is a story about how the stories/lies we tell our children end up distorting their view of reality and coming back to hurt them. These old fables start off each chapter, and they corrupt our hero’s view of the world and end up hurting him both in the developmental and literal and (ultimately) extremely-literal sense. There’s a lot of ambiguity – the bad guys are bad and the good guys are good, but the story also explores bad people doing good things, and good people doing bad things. There are power struggles that go beyond the surface confrontations, trade-offs between idealism and practicality. Initially the valley is a fairly peaceful place, and the book explores the uses of violence and initiation of force from game-theoretic angles. What seems at first to be a story about the importance of honor turns to a story about how honor doesn’t justify killing, turns to a story about how sometimes violence is justified. There is no lack of meaty topics for discussion, we actually went late at our meeting. Definitely Recommended.
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9/26 – Happy Petrov Day

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Sep 262013

More details here

Please take a moment today to not destroy the world.

In the interest of having backups, this is the full text of “9/26 is Petrov Day”, linked above.

Today is September 26th, Petrov Day, celebrated to honor the deed of Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov on September 26th, 1983. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, take a minute to not destroy the world.

The story begins on September 1st, 1983, when Soviet jet interceptors shot down a Korean Air Lines civilian airliner after the aircraft crossed into Soviet airspace and then, for reasons still unknown, failed to respond to radio hails. 269 passengers and crew died, including US Congressman Lawrence McDonald. Ronald Reagan called it “barbarism”, “inhuman brutality”, “a crime against humanity that must never be forgotten”. Note that this was already a very, very poor time for US/USSR relations. Andropov, the ailing Soviet leader, was half-convinced the US was planning a first strike. The KGB sent a flash message to its operatives warning them to prepare for possible nuclear war.

On September 26th, 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov was the officer on duty when the warning system reported a US missile launch. Petrov kept calm, suspecting a computer error.

Then the system reported another US missile launch.

And another, and another, and another.

What had actually happened, investigators later determined, was sunlight on high-altitude clouds aligning with the satellite view on a US missile base.

In the command post there were beeping signals, flashing lights, and officers screaming at people to remain calm. According to several accounts I’ve read, there was a large flashing screen from the automated computer system saying simply “START” (presumably in Russian). Afterward, when investigators asked Petrov why he hadn’t written everything down in the logbook, Petrov replied,”Because I had a phone in one hand and the intercom in the other, and I don’t have a third hand.”

The policy of the Soviet Union called for launch on warning. The Soviet Union’s land radar could not detect missiles over the horizon, and waiting for positive identification would limit the response time to minutes. Petrov’s report would be relayed to his military superiors, who would decide whether to start a nuclear war.

Petrov decided that, all else being equal, he would prefer not to destroy the world. He sent messages declaring the launch detection a false alarm, based solely on his personal belief that the US did not seem likely to start an attack using only five missiles.

Petrov was first congratulated, then extensively interrogated, then reprimanded for failing to follow procedure. He resigned in poor health from the military several months later. According to Wikipedia, he is spending his retirement in relative poverty in the town of Fryazino, on a pension of $200/month. In 2004, the Association of World Citizens gave Petrov a trophy and $1000. There is also a movie scheduled for release in 2008, entitled The Red Button and the Man Who Saved the World.

Maybe someday, the names of people who decide not to start nuclear wars will be as well known as the name of Britney Spears. Looking forward to such a time, when humankind has grown a little wiser, let us celebrate, in this moment, Petrov Day.

Wherefore to blog?

Personal No Responses »

Sep 252013

I dunno why other people blog, or how, but I do it because my thoughts used to be dead-weight. I would think a lot, like I assume most people do. Long, meandering chains of contemplation. While driving from point A to point B. While showering. Far, far too often while laying in bed trying to fall asleep, which kept me up for hours (problem now solved!).

I came to realize that often I was simply thinking the same things over and over again, walking the same path over and over. Like rewatching a movie you’ve already seen twelve times. There was the illusion of progress, due to the effort and the changing scenery, but in the end I hadn’t gone anywhere.

Moreover, this energy was completely wasted. The thoughts were contained within myself, never placed anywhere. To any outside observer they might as well not have happened. I could as well be the deaf/mute village idiot for all they knew. All this mental work was accomplishing exactly nothing.

So I took up blogging, which to me is simply taking the internal narrative that’s running through my head while I’m showering and typing it up. I’ve already put in the work of thinking up this crap, I might as well put in the tiny, tiny extra bit of effort required to permanently record it. Now it is at least visible to the outside world. I can reference it if need be. Ten years from now I can look back at what an idiot I was back when I was younger. There is something to show for it.

(That’s why the book review posts – I always find myself thinking about a book after I’ve finished it)

As a side effect, I’ve found that it greatly reduces the hamster-wheeling in my head. Once those thoughts are put down on paper (figuratively) and published (hah!) they usually cease to plague me, or do so to a MUCH lesser extent. It’s amazingly freeing.

It’s not a panacea, sadly, because once those thoughts are down and I can quit rethinking them new thoughts surface to take their place. Thus I have to keep blogging/writing/etc. But at least now I’m treading new ground, rather than chasing my tail. I think it helps.

If nothing else, it feels good.

Pinkie Pie Is Made Of People!

Speculations 3 Responses »

Sep 202013

So I was supposed to write this yesterday, but I kinda lost interest. I probably wouldn’t even be writing it today, but I said I would. So in brief:

It seems to me that the other Pinkie’s would count as people because they displayed a range of emotions, had the ability to think about themselves and comprehend the world, and could carry on normal conversation with the other ponies.

I think it’s important to treat beings with these markers as people, because it probably won’t be too long until we’ve created non-human and/or non-biological beings who fit these criteria, and they should have the same basic rights as existing people. I find that a scary number of people currently living don’t know what makes a person a “Person” with selfhood and rights. They seem to just default to “Did it come from a human uterus?” to answer to that question. It’s not a bad heuristic, but it doesn’t give enough weight to near-sapient non-human animals (who are generally viewed as expendable), and it gives too much weight to non-sapient humans (such as those who are brain dead or severely mentally handicapped).

I think that heuristic is already breaking down a bit. When IVF first became available there was a moral outrage about the soulless abominations that would thusly be birthed; and what legal and moral rights should apply to these inhuman “test-tube babies”. Now it’s seen as a routine procedure, and the moral outrage has instead shifted to human cloning, which is just as idiotic but most people don’t seem to notice. Because they are confused about what a “Person” is, and for some reason don’t want to investigate the issue. So an episode that reinforces this sort of ‘avoiding the subject and just defaulting to the old paradigms’ kinda annoys me.

On the other hand, the new Pinkies certainly didn’t seem as complex as the original Pinkie. They had a maniacal obsession with “fun” and would fixate on that concept to the exclusion of all other concerns. They were certainly less valuable than the fully functional Pinkie. If the population of Pinkies had to be reduced, they were the correct first choice.

Furthermore, none of them protested their treatment. It’s an unfortunate fact that we only have those rights we take, and as soon as these Pinkies realized they were targeted for extermination they should have rioted. Or protested in some way. That they had no concern for their own continuation makes it much easier to justify their elimination. Or perhaps, as Khitchary suggests, they weren’t worried because they knew they were just returning to a different world rather than actually dying. (I’ll avoid the afterlife comparisons)

Anyway, I’m now all done on this subject. To the future!

The role of angst

Musings On Present Day 1 Response »

Sep 182013

Let’s assume that Twilight did the right thing by eliminating the excess Pinkie Pies. (Yup, I’m continuing this thread) If we grant a few premises, the ones commonly spelled out in these sorts of disaster stories, this is a safe assumption. What, then, is my complaint? If the correct decision was reached and the correct action was taken, can’t we just celebrate that? Do we really have to see the person who did the right thing tortured with self-doubt and regret?

Yes, we do – and not because we’re a sadistic audience. It’s because this is a morality tale – specifically one that examines the morality of killing certain people so that the rest of society may survive. The moral that is taught in these stories is that it is better for one person to die than for everyone to die. However it presumes that the audience already has internalized the “killing people is bad” lesson. The story is about the conflict of two moral desires – the desire to never intentionally kill anyone, and the desire to not allow society to crash and burn.

Alonzo Fife’s explanation of Desirism (the best human-level ethical system I’ve yet found) states that intentional actions are motivated by the desires of the actor, and that the purpose of a society’s moral code is to instill in actors those desires that society deems important. In our society two very strongly promoted desires are those to not kill, and those to prevent social collapse. That’s why the conflict presented in this morality tale is so intriguing. As Eliezer says, as story of Good vs Good is far more interesting than a story of Good vs Evil.

When a character is forced into violating one of those desires to fulfill the other, the level of his/her torment at having to break that rule demonstrates how dearly s/he held it. A character forced to eat vanilla ice cream instead of chocolate in order to save a sibling shouldn’t show any remorse or hesitation. A character forced to kill to do so should be tortured. S/he should have lasting psychological scars, and require therapy. When this happens in real life to good people, suicide sometimes results.

If a character in fiction quickly and without any signs of discomfort resorts to exterminating a large group of people, it means something. Yes, the answer was right in a utilitarian framework, but human characters should have other desires besides simply “maximize utility”. Humans are limited, humans are flawed, and humans are notoriously running on corrupted hardware. Utility Maximization is a morality that is only safe for Gods. It’s good for a human to have reached the right conclusion, but unfortunately that human must feel some remorse if it has the desires it should have. If it doesn’t show remorse that is a sign it does not have the desire to not kill others. It is dangerous, and should not serve as a model for others!

The fact that all of Ponyville was OK with this mass execution means either that their society is deeply corrupt, or that the clones are not people and therefore are not counted in morality. I’ma go on further about that, but this post is long enough as it is, so it’ll have to wait until tomorrow.

Consent in Art

Musings On Present Day No Responses »

Sep 172013

Continuing musing on Too Many Pinkie Pies (TMPP) from yesterday. Spoilers below. (Also, a major spoiler for Paolo Bacigalupi’s “Pop Squad” short story!)

The purpose of art is to create an emotional experience for your audience. With that in mind, maybe Dave Polsky (writer of this episode, yes I did just look it up) did exactly the right thing. By the time Season Three was in production it was already well known that a sizable portion of the MLP viewership was/is composed of people in their 20s and 30s. If, as I previously suggested, this episode had dodged the extermination bullet by distributing the Pinkies across Equestria I wouldn’t have noticed – just another kid gimmick on a kid’s show. And I’ve read enough GrimDark/pragmatic/survivalist stories about the horror of having to kill someone to prevent ecological collapse that seeing yet another one wouldn’t really affect me. I read Bacigalupi’s “Pop Squad” – about a man whose job it is to kill unlicensed children so the world doesn’t collapse under the weight of overpopulation – and wasn’t very bothered. I mean, it was good, but it wasn’t “The Fluted Girl”-level of awesome.

So maybe this was a guided-missile of a story – designed to go right over the heads of the main audience and smash directly into the morality filter of the adult viewers. I’m not the first person to comment on the shocking aspect of this episode (although the other posts I saw focused on the method used to determine which Pinkies should die, rather than the kill-decision itself) It got in under our cynicism radar by coming in the guise of MLP awesomeness and hitting us when our guard was down. It probably couldn’t have worked in any other medium. It was a rare and (presumably) irresistible opportunity to actually have the emotional effect artists seek to create.

Part of me wants to say congratulations, but I think that’s being too hasty.

There is, after all, a level of consent in art. The audience is seeking out the sort of emotional experience that the artist is promising. Promising one thing and then blindsiding your audience with something else is fraud. For someone with a clinical phobia of heights to go to an amusement park and agree to go on a merry-go-round, only to have that merry-go-round turn out to actually be a 120-foot roller coaster with screaming clowns and live snakes, would be traumatic. One can’t excuse that sort of violation by saying the emotional experience was worth it, and that it was only possible due to the surprise factor. That is not ok. Likewise, someone settling down to a light-hearted comedy shouldn’t be subjected to watching footage of the Rape of Nanking. I avoid horror, and TMPP felt like a horror episode at the end. I’d be OK with that from Buffy. I had not consented to that from MLP.

I think in the end it’s the consent part that bothers me. I’ve read far worse in MLP fanfic (hello Fallout:Equestria!) and I enjoyed it. I knew what I was getting into – atrocity is par for the course in the Fallout universe. Even the disturbing video I linked yesterday with the “real ending” wasn’t as bad in comparison, since I knew it was a fan work, on YouTube, and I always expect the worst from YouTube. Carefree murder in a canon episode of MLP… not so much.

Did that just happen?

Uncategorized 2 Responses »

Sep 162013

Over the weekend I saw “Too Many Pinkie Pies” (FiM S3 E3). A good episode, but one that had a jaw-breaker of a moral punch packed inside it.

For those who haven’t seen it –

(SPOILER ALERT!!)

(turn back now)

(last chance)

Ok, no complaining if you’re still here. Ahem. Pinkie Pie magically clones herself. A lot. Her clones aren’t perfect copies though – they have the ability to feel at least some emotions (fun, and boredom, and anxiety) but are easily distractible, don’t seem to think much, and don’t share all of Pinkie’s memories of her friends. They aren’t zombies, but they aren’t fully Pinkie either. Maybe a moderately mentally disabled Pinkie (yes, insert joke here, haha).

As the episode title suggests, this creates an ecological dilemma. Ponyville’s Carrying Capacity of Pinkie Pies is greatly exceeded. This is resolved by MURDERING ALL THE OTHER PINKIE PIES. They call it “returning them to the Mirror Pool” – but c’mon… a thinking, sapient person (if perhaps a mentally handicapped one) has been removed from existence. The fact that there’s no body shouldn’t make that much difference. The animation when they are “returned” is also pretty gruesome – Twilight literally blasts the Pinkie Pie with a laser (repeated shots of the laser cause her horn to heat to the point of glowing), and that Pinkie Pie then swells up grotesquely, eyes bulging, before winking out.

No one in Ponyville has a problem with this. The Mane Six are all present and approving.

The “we cannot support more people, sorry but you must die” narrative is a classic one, and it can make for great stories. I’m familiar with the SF/F genre, so I immediately think of The Cold Equations, but there’s many examples of it. In every one that I’ve read there is a great deal of angst. It’s acknowledged that this is a terrible situation and the killing is wrong, but the killing must be done because the consequence of NOT doing so is even worse. The emotional impact of the story comes from being forced to do something monstrous to avoid an even greater atrocity.

Too Many Pinkie Pies followed the structure of this story, but without any sort of regret or compassion or even acknowledgement that killing people is sorta a crappy thing to do. Just “Zap! Mass Murder! Ok, now cake!” It was really creepy. It was particularly creepy because you don’t expect to see this sort of callous disregard for life in a kid’s TV show. It actually shocked me, and I tried to shake it off, but it’s stuck with me. So I’m writing this post. I wish to register my disapproval with the board!

Seriously though, WTF? There was no hesitation, no discussion about the morality of idealism vs pragmatic survival. No debate as to whether the diminished half-brain-damaged Pinkies have a right to life, or comparing their quality of existence to that of the fully-functional Pinkie. I know it’s a kid’s show and I don’t expect it to engage the question on that level. But if you’re not going to address these sorts of problems you should just ship the excess Pinkies off to Canterlot and Manehattan and all the other places across Equestria to avoid that moral landmine, rather than going straight for the final solution. There’s ways to dodge this bullet dammit! Either dodge it and be a fluffy show, or bite it and make a cool GrimDark story of harsh survival. Not acknowledging anything is wrong is disturbing.

Also – The Real Ending below! :) (Warning – really creepy. Not canon tho.)

SF/F Review – Lucifer’s Hammer

Book Club Review 7 Responses »

Sep 132013

Lucifer’s Hammer, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

Synopsis: A comet hits Earth, post-apocalyptic survivalism ensues

Brief Book Review: /sigh

I’m going to get a bit off track here. I’ve long felt that all fiction is contemporary. Sci-fi is ostensibly about the future, but really it’s just a way of examining current issues under a different lens. You can often get a feel for what decade a SF/F book was written as you’re reading it. And for that reason, fiction really doesn’t age well. I think it can be “good for its time” and respected as laying the foundations of what we have today, but it’s often not good by current standards. Much like the Founding Fathers. It’s one of the reasons I dislike and distrust “Top 100 xxx of All Time” lists. They often list things that were influential or foundational, but not actually good.

Lucifer’s Hammer often makes these lists, and the people who read it when it was published (the 70s) say it was great. But this book is crap. Sci Fi has always had its progressive side (which it’s known for) on the one hand, and it’s old boys club (who are well-known) on the other. This is very much an old-boys-club book. The white male characters (and the only ones who matter are white males) are all entitled full-of-themselves pricks who are absolutely insufferable to read. The book is sexist – women are primarily valuable for their baby-making ability and should stick with that. The men take care of running society. It’s also racist – the black people are animalistic cannibals, who are organized and led by a white man (of course). The one good black person only associates with other white people. The douche-baggery drips from every page. I abandoned it before reaching the end.

If that wasn’t enough, the writing is flat. None of the imagery is evocative. Somehow they even managed to make a comet smashing into the earth boring. And it wasn’t until literally 1/3^rd of the way through the book that the comet actually hit. It was like being forced to sit through hours of Real Housewives of New Jersey to get to Armageddon. Except comparing this book to Armageddon would be an insult to Armageddon. Vigorously Not Recommended.

Book Club Review: It’s actually not awful as a book club book. There’s a lot to be said about seeing how far we’ve come as a society. About reading what was considered “normal” and discussing the casual sexism and racism of that era. (Incidentally, I couldn’t read this book for the same reason I can’t watch Mad Men, I don’t need that kind of blood-pressure spike. People who can stomach that, in the interest of historical perspective, hated it less than I did.) The insight that fiction brings into how people of a certain age thought is hard to understate. And let’s be honest – it’s always fun to rip on bigots for a while. So I can’t say this book is a complete loss. If that is the sort of thing you want to discuss, this book would be perfect. However to me that feels like more of a directed study than a club activity. It would feel much more appropriate for a gender-studies or racial-studies class, than for a casual reading-SF/F-for-pleasure group. So – Not Recommended, but with less vigor.
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Link Archive 8/21/13 – 9/11/13

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Sep 112013

Trying to do these a little more frequently so they aren’t as long.

Cracked is a far better site than any of the professional news media. The 6 Weirdest Things We’ve Learned Since 9/11

Another *amazing* brilliant science-fiction piece from Ted Chiang is out. One of my favoritest authors ever.
“writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers”

Transdimensional Justice Monster – A flash piece by an extinctionist. Every now and then I find myself in danger of slipping back into this frame of mind.

MIRI’s Five Theses, rewritten with the xkcd-inspired Up-Goer Five text converter.

WARNING: HUMANS CAN REPRODUCE AT A RATE OF 1 PER SPACEYEAR. DESTROY INFESTATIONS IMMEDIATELY
(and other fun facts)

Looks like almost every major crop can be altered to draw its own nitrogen from the atmosphere, which would drastically reduce the need for nitrogen fertilizer. Pollution and costs would drop dramatically. “It is anticipated that the N-Fix technology will be commercially available within the next two to three years.” :) (taken from Scott Alexander)

A thought-provoking take on minimum wages: Why We Need Minimum Price Laws Today

It’s Your P*ssy, You Can Do What You Want With It –
“It wasn’t until I realized I hated sex that I thought: what about me?
Then it was on like Donkey Kong.”

A video of Korean DOTA 2 announcers. Fun times :)

A British dude gets a toll-number for all those annoying cold-calls, surveys, and political calls you get – and actually makes a bit of money! Now I need to get a landline again :)

This will be vital for my plans. A Protein That May Help Explain Memory Loss In Old Age

A great dissection of the rhetoric Kerry used in his “We gotta attack Syria” speech.

It makes sense that a group that provides the same services to its community that a church does should get the same tax breaks a church does. Feds say OK to atheists on religion tax break. I guess if you’re trying to build a case against special tax exemption for churches, doing awesome things for your community isn’t the way to go about it.

So mean, but still funny! A Japanese TV show (of course) pranks dogs. That last dog is a bad-ass!

A dinosaur prank too? Japan is dangerously close to winning the internet!

HAHAHAHA! “Pearsons did her best on Sunday to try to put a biblical spin on why the church had flip-flopped on its vaccination stance.” Vaccine-fearing Texas megachurch urges flock to immunize after measles outbreak

A great bit by Louis CK about aging – Incurable Shitty Ankle
(and while we’re on Louis CK, I now know why Melissa wants to get married! She hasn’t had a divorce yet, so she’s missing out on the best part of life!)

An amazing song by Touche Amore. You’ll probably like it even if you aren’t normally into Screamo. And two more great songs from them.
“And for my final trick I’ll make everyone who loved me disappear”

Looked up Captain Nintendo again on a lark. Is it just me or… is Mother Brain kinda a racist version of a black woman? Totally didn’t notice that as a kid.

Anime: Subs or Dubs? A more bitter fight than Kirk or Picard!

Good news on the “Hah, bit you in the ass didn’t it, you bastards?” front:
“potential spooks-to-be were tapped early (often while at school or university), vetted, then given a safe sinecure along with regular monitoring to ensure they stayed on the straight-and-narrow all the way to the gold watch and pension …
Gen Y has never thought of jobs as permanent things. Gen Y will stare at you blankly if you talk about loyalty to their employer …
This means the NSA and their fellow swimmers in the acronym soup of the intelligence-industrial complex are increasingly reliant on nomadic contractor employees, and increasingly subject to staff churn …
employees who lack instinctive loyalty because the culture they come from has spent generations systematically destroying social hierarchies and undermining their sense of belonging are much more likely to start thinking the unthinkable.”

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