Asimov is someone I admired a long time ago, and then I started to connect some dots in his writing. He’s very much an authoritarian/totalitarian centralizer, a world government shill from day one. He isn’t an individualist, he’s a collectivist.
Also, with regards to his son, the pedophile? I’ve rarely encountered a family where that crap was a one-off, out-of-the-blue sort of thing. There’s usually some form of abuse in there, somewhere, in the preceding generations. I don’t know what the hell went on with his father, or what the household he grew up in was like, but… Man, that’s a disturbing title for someone to have: Largest collection of child porn to date. And, interestingly enough to the current political situation, it appears that Robert Mueller was key and essential to getting him out of those charges… Just makes ya wonder. Mueller seems to have a lot of “interesting” cases in his background.
I put Asimov up on the same shelf I put Clark: Horribly flawed men who did some good work, but whom I’ll hardly hold out as saints.
Same as Kirk. It is impossible to think about my teen years without remembering the tens of Asimov’s books I read. Some decades later, I have come to despise him. He had a very definite agenda but he was not honest about this. He tried to pass the liberal opinions as universally accepted truth. He was completely dishonest: a rabid leftist atheist Jew.
One of the greatest minds in the history of mankind? Wrote a journal of several hundred pages in his last days, just the ideas and thoughts he had that he never had time to pursue.
It’s not hatred, RLVC. It’s that we don’t like it very much. We don’t like their political ideas, either, and the fact that he tried to pass his radical opinions as truth (especially in his non-fiction books).
His fiction is entertaining, although the characters are very simple and without development. They are archetypes that repeat once and again in multiple novels: the American hero that succeeds despite very few information, the old guy having a sexual relationship with a young girl (in his last novels), the scientist
Besides being a story, the trilogy of the Foundation is a propaganda for a world government uncontrolled by the people. The Second Foundation is exactly that. A kind of galactic European Union.
I enjoyed the world he had created once he had linked his robot, empire, and foundation series into one grand arc through his novels in the 80s. It has a poetry to it for those into grand and lost civilizations. Someone once wrote an essay on the rise and fall of the Spacer Worlds as if they had been real.
But, apart from the technological and stylistic datedness of the early works, his writing was only ever decent, and not always that.
Two notes on the ideological aspects-
1. When I read the Lije Baley stories, I assumed he was doing that thing in which he set up two contrasting dystopias for humanity’s future [the crowded hive cities of Earth, full of humans scared of the natural world or the outside or of space; and the wildly underpopulated, slowly demographically decaying, Spacer worlds, obsessed with cloning, AI, and biotech solutions] so as to compare, contrast, and consider them. Later I read somewhere that he actually considered the Earth version to be a utopia and was surprised so many readers considered it a dystopia in its own right.
In retrospect, mid-century Jewish New Yorker whose ideals were fixated on the crowded, communal tenements of Brooklyn or Lower Manhattan? Dunno.
2. At the end of Foundation and Empire, he has his main character positioned to choose mankind’s destiny, and he chooses to join an emerging collective overmind comprised of many humans, with a view to turning the whole human galaxy into a collective consciousness. (I’m not sure how he incorporated mortality or reproduction, if he did.) Yuck and double yuck, a terrifying fate for humanity.
But of course for him it would obviate the need to wait and build a second empire, and end the rise and fall of civilizations forever. The End of History.
Yuck, again.
But he did put one odd thing in. The problem that tipped his hero into this decision was something they had seen on the last of the Spacer worlds, what he considered a new and terrifying threat to humanity that only mental unity could defend against. This threat assessment is not sufficiently explained.
But the terrifying discovery was the last of the Spacer descendants, a genetically mutated hermaphrodite posthuman being.
I have been left wondering what Asimov meant by what would now be considered a grossly fascist and cisheterosexist attitude.
Not just any old pedophile, either–He had the largest collection of child porn found to date, at the time.
And, he was “gotten off” by none other than Robert Mueller…
I followed that whole “Pizzagate” thing with a certain incredulity, thinking “No way this can be true…”, and then I start remembering all the little data points about our Mr. Mueller, sainted Establishment type that he is: Dude was intimately involved with the Whitey Bulger thing, and the number of cases where something really f**ky came out, like the one with Asimov’s son…?
Yeah, I’m starting to wonder if some of the conspiracy nutters aren’t actually the sane ones.
Gaikokumaniakku: Tangentially related: 3M22 Zircon: Debunking Misconceptions. At the link, a military expert criticizes Russian hypersonic weapons.
Phileas Frogg: History is a gift and its study a blessing; even the people whose effects I have come to despise are so obviously superior to our present milieu that one can’t help but feel a sort of scruffy abashedness in the presence of their biographies. And, of course, it gets worse the further back you go. One wonders at the impression a fully fledged Adam in the Garden, before the Fall, would have had on us scampering apes. Darwin got it backwards, we didn’t evolve from an ape-like...
Bob Sykes: LBJ also kept a cooler of beer in that Caddy, and he usually was drinking a beer while he drove around.
Phileas Frogg: “Interestingly, working-class Americans are more likely to read local news, while the wealthy and highly educated favor national and global news.” I wonder how much of this is social norms vs self-perception. Do the wealthy and educated feel in touch with (or that they should be in touch with) national and global events, or is it mere mimicry? How about the working-class? The two are necessarily mutually exclusive of course, but I wonder if there’s a different primary...
Phileas Frogg: As advances in weapon’s have improved the range and effectiveness of the individual soldier’s impact on the battlefield, the number of soldiers has increased in importance relative to the quality of any individual soldier. It’s the Thermopylae Principle in reverse because of weapons advancements. Reminds me of RTS balancing, where to effectively implement melee units developers need to give them either unrealistic speed or durability relative to the ranged capabilities of...
Bob Sykes: Calling Mohamed Farrah Aidid’s militia a mob is a bit much, but they were lightly armed and poorly trained. However, they defeated the US/UN mission to Somalia, or at least fought it to a draw. We’re still fighting Aidid’s grandchildren, and we still haven’t won. The war is now in its 4th decade, with no end in sight. Settling aside our Indian Wars (1607 to 1918). Somalia is the longest US war.
McChuck: Anybody who has ever played a wargame can tell you that your defenses can handle a certain amount of opposition, but when enemy numbers, regardless of quality, exceed that number, you get overrun. The mobs in Mogadishu back in 1993 weren’t well organized, weren’t well equipped, weren’t well trained, and weren’t well led. But there sure were a whole lot of them shooting at the Rangers.
Russell: New article about Thorp https://archive.ph/fq5JC
Phileas Frogg: The class divide in the US is as deep and wide as any as has existed in history, but instead of acknowledging the divide, much less trying to bridge it, we have chosen moralization and mutual animosity, which will be the death of us.
Freddo: https://www.zerohedge.co m/geopolitical/us-drones -are-expensive-and-error -prone-so-ukraine-turns- china
Jim: The principle applies whatever the source of the wall-penetrating radio waves in question.
Phileas Frogg: In conjunction with the Rob Henderson excerpt one can safely conclude that neither drug use, nor sexual immorality, can be meaningfully correlated with class. “But poverty causes crime!” Does it?
Bruce: Green energy is a patronage fraud, and Terraform Industries is working with it. But their tech isn’t a fraud.
Handle: What is Henderson taking about? I was under the impression that it was a broadly believed meme and one frequently portrayed in popular entertainment for several generations before Henderson was born that college kids got drunk and enjoyed / experimented with recreational drugs quite a lot. Maybe Rob’s poorer friends couldn’t afford to watch those episodes of South Park or didn’t hear about George W Bush’s “youthful indiscretions”? Man, the left really is...
Bob Sykes: How effing stupid are we supposed to be. The energy input to make the methane will be several times the energy of combustion when the methane is burned. And, of course, all the methane will become exactly the amount of carbon dioxide originally removed from the atmosphere. Net, no carbon dioxide removal. And considering all the carbon produced during the manufacture of the Terraform system and the solar/wind systems, this proposal actually increases atmospheric CO2. And the cost claims are...
Gaikokumaniakku: If it’s “synthetic,” they could just call it “synthetic methane,” right? Calling it “synthetic natural gas” makes my brain hurt because I like to think that natural things are not synthetic. I love methane tech because I was raised on Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Typically I like to see it as a way of dealing with dung from agriculture, but I am a fan of methane tech regardless of how they make it.
Bruce: Very glad to see @TerraformIndies here. This could be really big. For example, why not put a Terrform Indies converter on every nuclear power plant in front of those electric heaters in the cooling towers? Closer to where people need natural gas than oil wells where they just burn the natural gas off because it’s not worth transport costs. And if CO2 is bad, like the climate change people say, it’s great to have a way to turn CO2 to something useful. And worse case, it’s a...
Asimov is someone I admired a long time ago, and then I started to connect some dots in his writing. He’s very much an authoritarian/totalitarian centralizer, a world government shill from day one. He isn’t an individualist, he’s a collectivist.
Also, with regards to his son, the pedophile? I’ve rarely encountered a family where that crap was a one-off, out-of-the-blue sort of thing. There’s usually some form of abuse in there, somewhere, in the preceding generations. I don’t know what the hell went on with his father, or what the household he grew up in was like, but… Man, that’s a disturbing title for someone to have: Largest collection of child porn to date. And, interestingly enough to the current political situation, it appears that Robert Mueller was key and essential to getting him out of those charges… Just makes ya wonder. Mueller seems to have a lot of “interesting” cases in his background.
I put Asimov up on the same shelf I put Clark: Horribly flawed men who did some good work, but whom I’ll hardly hold out as saints.
Asimov at work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zkrN9Wbclg&list=PL3cjFmyNgTOB8CNjt4Ku930PLoDhKLu1p&index=25&t=0s
Same as Kirk. It is impossible to think about my teen years without remembering the tens of Asimov’s books I read. Some decades later, I have come to despise him. He had a very definite agenda but he was not honest about this. He tried to pass the liberal opinions as universally accepted truth. He was completely dishonest: a rabid leftist atheist Jew.
I never much liked Asimov. I thought Foundation was dull, and the robot books weren’t that good. Did like Pebble in the Sky, though.
My opinion of him has lowered considerably since I last read him in my teens.
I, for one, don’t understand the Asimov-hatred. I liked him then and I like him now.
Ripper…what is this?
One of the greatest minds in the history of mankind? Wrote a journal of several hundred pages in his last days, just the ideas and thoughts he had that he never had time to pursue.
It’s not hatred, RLVC. It’s that we don’t like it very much. We don’t like their political ideas, either, and the fact that he tried to pass his radical opinions as truth (especially in his non-fiction books).
His fiction is entertaining, although the characters are very simple and without development. They are archetypes that repeat once and again in multiple novels: the American hero that succeeds despite very few information, the old guy having a sexual relationship with a young girl (in his last novels), the scientist
Besides being a story, the trilogy of the Foundation is a propaganda for a world government uncontrolled by the people. The Second Foundation is exactly that. A kind of galactic European Union.
I enjoyed the world he had created once he had linked his robot, empire, and foundation series into one grand arc through his novels in the 80s. It has a poetry to it for those into grand and lost civilizations. Someone once wrote an essay on the rise and fall of the Spacer Worlds as if they had been real.
But, apart from the technological and stylistic datedness of the early works, his writing was only ever decent, and not always that.
Two notes on the ideological aspects-
1. When I read the Lije Baley stories, I assumed he was doing that thing in which he set up two contrasting dystopias for humanity’s future [the crowded hive cities of Earth, full of humans scared of the natural world or the outside or of space; and the wildly underpopulated, slowly demographically decaying, Spacer worlds, obsessed with cloning, AI, and biotech solutions] so as to compare, contrast, and consider them. Later I read somewhere that he actually considered the Earth version to be a utopia and was surprised so many readers considered it a dystopia in its own right.
In retrospect, mid-century Jewish New Yorker whose ideals were fixated on the crowded, communal tenements of Brooklyn or Lower Manhattan? Dunno.
2. At the end of Foundation and Empire, he has his main character positioned to choose mankind’s destiny, and he chooses to join an emerging collective overmind comprised of many humans, with a view to turning the whole human galaxy into a collective consciousness. (I’m not sure how he incorporated mortality or reproduction, if he did.) Yuck and double yuck, a terrifying fate for humanity.
But of course for him it would obviate the need to wait and build a second empire, and end the rise and fall of civilizations forever. The End of History.
Yuck, again.
But he did put one odd thing in. The problem that tipped his hero into this decision was something they had seen on the last of the Spacer worlds, what he considered a new and terrifying threat to humanity that only mental unity could defend against. This threat assessment is not sufficiently explained.
But the terrifying discovery was the last of the Spacer descendants, a genetically mutated hermaphrodite posthuman being.
I have been left wondering what Asimov meant by what would now be considered a grossly fascist and cisheterosexist attitude.
Also, his son was a pedophile? You learn something new everyday.
Not just any old pedophile, either–He had the largest collection of child porn found to date, at the time.
And, he was “gotten off” by none other than Robert Mueller…
I followed that whole “Pizzagate” thing with a certain incredulity, thinking “No way this can be true…”, and then I start remembering all the little data points about our Mr. Mueller, sainted Establishment type that he is: Dude was intimately involved with the Whitey Bulger thing, and the number of cases where something really f**ky came out, like the one with Asimov’s son…?
Yeah, I’m starting to wonder if some of the conspiracy nutters aren’t actually the sane ones.