On Tue, 12 Dec 2023 13:53:47 +0000, James Nicoll wrote:
The Cross-Time Engineer (Adventures of Conrad Stargard, volume 1) by Leo Frankowski
A Polish engineer is transported into the past, ten years before the
first Mongol invasion of Poland. Luckily for him, his allies include the book's author.
https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/because-i-was-paid
Surely it's obvious that Jim Baen rejected the literary masterwork
Conrad's Crusade unread because the woman Leo Frankowski introduced
him to broke up with him, given the blog post preserved in the
Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive that you pointed to!
Yes, I write this with pen in cheek. Since Putin's invasion of
Ukraine is profoundly immoral, I cannot praise him for helping to
provide the world with the near-equivalent of vat-girls.
Speaking of the famous phrase which I almost paraphrased there -
but rejected because I rejected impugning the virtue of vat-girls,
the phrase "the moral equivalent of war" sometimes conjures up
visions of the space race, the Olympics, or international
Chess tournaments somehow bringing about World Peace through
sublimating the human aggressive impulse.
Which, of course, I find silly. Wars don't happen because people
have aggressive impulses.
Instead, reading Elaine Morgan's _The Descent of Woman_ (in the
first edition) and Andrew Bard Schmookler's _The Parable of the
Tribes_, the _true_ cause of war can be seen. It is driven by
population pressure and competition for resources, and it is
made possible not so much by how aggressive we are, but by our
lack of an inhibition mechanism on the _extent_ of intraspecific
violence.
Just as I have heard of the American, Norman Borlaug, who did so
much to conquer hunger, thanks to a YouTube video, I had also heard
of the Russian, Viktor Zhdanov, who challenged the world to wipe
out smallpox...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWT2mWf0ULY
and so wiping out global poverty and addressing its consequences
certainly could be thought of as a more admirable effort the
world's powers could engage in.
However, it is not at all surprising that in a democracy like
the United States, the beleaguered taxpayer might be driven
to ask the people of the Third World "Couldn't more of you just
take these (contraceptives) and make the job cheaper for us"?
That, I think, is the reason world poverty hasn't been eliminated
already.
John Savard
John Savard
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