Jerry's pages were always the first pages I read when he was a columnist for the Byte magazine in the 80's. He was a true pioneer in those early days of computing who wrote non-stop about new products and the computer exhibitions he attended. RIP.
Wikipedia says he was involved in missile defense under Reagan which suggests to me he may have been one of the "opposed to big government except when it's people I like" variety.
But though I will also classify myself less than appealed by descriptions of his politics and I voted up davidw above I want to be clear I think it would be uncool to bash him for it at the time of his death.
"So what do I do? I agree with nearly everything he is for, but I’m better qualified to make it happen. I avoid some issues, but I go for his most popular ones and say, yeah! Want that! And I can make it happen better than he can. I’ve got the experience of working in government, but I’m not the establishment any more than Mr. Trump is. Heck, I’ll offer him a cabinet post. I could use his energy in my administration." -POURNE
"But he has never wavered on his desire to fill the Supreme Court with Justices as near in scholarship and view to Scalia as possible; that alone would be enough to get me to the polls for Trump if he’s nominated." -POURNE
Both here and elsewhere, Lukacs argued that as white nations, America and Russia might profitably work together to prop each other up against a planet where they were a racial minority. The right-wing science-fiction writers Jerry Pournelle (an admirer of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini) and Larry Niven pursued a similar argument in their CoDominium novels, a long-running series of novels that started in 1973 and imagines a world where the U.S. and the Soviet Union work together to govern an unruly planet.
At one point, Gingrich was supposed to be writing a novel with his friend, noted authority on the political attractions of Fascism, Jerry Pournelle. I don’t know what happened to it, but I imagine it would have made quite interesting reading (Inferno, Pournelle’s ‘Benito Mussolini redeems himself in an updated version of Dante’s hell’ schlock-epic with Larry Niven, is certainly entertaining if your tastes run to certain varieties of kitsch).
"The right-wing science-fiction writers Jerry Pournelle (an admirer of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini) and Larry Niven pursued a similar argument in their CoDominium novels, a long-running series of novels that started in 1973 and imagines a world where the U.S. and the Soviet Union work together to govern an unruly planet."
1) Niven didn't co-write any of the CoDominium novels, as far as I know. Mote had some historical references to it, but it was set hundreds of years after the CoDominium had collapsed.
2) The CoDominium weren't the "good guys" in those books.
You're quite aggressive in this thread about someone who just died in a multitude of comments, and it's not like JP will rise up to defend himself. I don't like his politics either and I'm sure that some of what you wrote has merit but please have some respect. This simply isn't the time.
Please read my words correcting the crass misrepresentations and misunderstandings in the post from the guy who attacked the MIT AI Lab with the quite aggressive words "Fuck them", as well as the MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy which POURNE violated, and of course POURNE's own words describing how much effort the MIT AI Lab staff and even RMS himself put into personally helping him and even writing him free software to his specifications, and also the words of an anonymous staff member on the topic, POURNE's enduring legacy, asymmetric audience, and his failure to live up to the responsibility of his celebrity. Specifically:
And finally, read the words [3] of an anonymous MIT-AI Lab member who spent much of their own time helping POURNE and I as well as many other tourists. Even though POURNE isn't around to defend himself, I feel obligated to post this in response to the crass misunderstandings and misstatements of the facts in your attempt to smear the MIT AI Lab and its members (your own words: "Fuck them."), and because I agree with the point that "If he didn't want to have this as his enduring legacy, he had plenty of opportunity to make amends. And the offensive acts were not private ones.", and also with the points about asymmetric audience and the responsibility to do well by one's celebrity:
I didn't say you did. By 'the guy who attacked the MIT AI Lab with the quite aggressive words "Fuck them"' I meant coldtea. If I meant 'you' I would have said 'you' instead of 'the guy'.
But you both implied the MIT-AI Lab staff came off as jerks, and it was coldtea who said "Fuck them", but I was responding to both of your misimpressions that POURNE doesn't deserve his well earned reputation as a drunken abusive jerk.
But I still ask both of you to please re-read the words I cited. Do you care to address those?
Do you agree that he violated the terms of the MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy, or not?
Do his own sputtering mis-punctuated threats of having his Pentagon friends, reporter friends, and even the House Armed Services Committee upset CSTACY sound like he was drunk to you, or do you believe he behaved that way all the time, his behavior was justified, CSTACY flushing his account was not justified, and do you continue to carry his water (or booze) by denying he was acting like a jerk?
Again, as the MIT-AI Lab staff member I quoted said, "If he didn't want to have this as his enduring legacy, he had plenty of opportunity to make amends."
He was a bit too much towards the right-wing conservatism and militarism. I believe the best interests of the US are better served by soft diplomacy rather than the indiscriminate use of military force. One can be respected by either love or fear but only love will get one real loyalty.
Nation-states are not people. Nations have (temporary and shifting) alliances based on common shared interests -- not love.
Japan is a great ally. I lived there for over a decade, and I can say that I love the Japanese people. But I will admit - and their people of the WWII generation would too (although - sadly they are (have been) passing too quickly), it took a solid kick in the teeth to get them to calm down and cooperate.
Sometimes, with intense nation-state disagreement, things are settled at the point of a gun. Where there is a winner and a loser.
I like diplomacy as much (or more) than the next guy ... but it is irresponsible for a nation to be unprepared for when that doesn't work.
N.B. Fighting back after Pearl Harbor is a different kettle of fish than exporting democracy by force. We have no business doing the latter. It's obscene.
EDIT: I didn't downvote you. I appreciated your take on the query posed.
Nations are not loyal but people can be. If you do soft diplomacy right, those people will see your country as a partner and will vote accordingly.
I didn't say one shouldn't be prepared to fight, just that fighting is almost never the right way to start it. Being prepared to defend yourself and your allies requires a vastly different inventory than cannon diplomacy.
Your couldn't tell from his books? They're full of ineffectual and whiny bureaucrats and academics being put in their place by rugged and noble soldiers and whatnot.
I enjoyed the heck out of most of the Niven/Pournelle books I read, but the political didactics weren't part of the fun for me.
So... Like Heinlein? Post-WWII Cold War sentiment of that type was not uncommon. I/We (old people) looked at "big government" as something that collectivists (national socialists (nazis), fascists, international socialists (communists), socialists) did ... and without going all John Birch, even ignoring the air-raid sirens making you (uselessly) hide under your desks, it made one cynical about systems related to people pointing their nukes (back) at you...
Maybe their goals were similar, but I always found Heinlein's poltical writing so much more positive that I enjoyed it, even though I didn't like his politics.
Heinlein wrote stories about heroic Libertarians and happy soldiers.
Pournelle wrote stories about incompetent and deluded liberal professors and conniving politicians.
Think about the scene with the kid in Moon is a Harsh Mistress where an entitled Earth boy gets handsy with a woman and they hold an impromptu court for him.
In the book, he learns from his mistake and is a "convert" to Heinlein's way of thinking. Pournelle's political writing was much more Manichean - the boy would be an entitled villain to his death.
Here you mean "Manichean" to mean 'redemptive' in the moral-dualism sense? If not, what do you mean? (I want to make sure I am reading you as you intend)
I don't think this is the right place to discuss this, but the so-called "Star Wars" program under Reagan to which I'm referring was considered by many to be wasteful spending. I don't think there is much in the constitution mandating space lasers.
(Franklin was going to put in "don't let the people get nuked from orbit", but it slipped his mind. Or perhaps he figured that was covered by the "right to life" bit.)
I think it must have been your sense of humor that ended the cold war. The comment you're replying to is very obviously not serious.
Actually, the best commentary I have heard on this subject is that the Soviet Union fell of its own internal conflict and didn't need help from your pal Ronnie.
And to further reply to your cousin-comment to this one there is a huge difference between a constitutional mandate and a very specific implementation... Nobody mandated Star Wars.
Breaking the back of OPEC, plummeting the price of oil played no small factor. Even today, with the bounties of modern production tech, Saudi Arabia and Russia and Venezuela are hurting more than a little...
I don't see the implied dichotomy here. The separate goals of 'zapping incoming missiles' and provoking the Soviet Union into a destructively expensive arms race are not incompatible.
The point is that if it was a head-fake to provoke the Soviet Union into destroying itself by defense spending (which is NOT the reason the Soviet Union collapsed), then 'zapping incoming missiles' was a lie. And if it really could 'zap incoming missiles', then it wasn't a head-fake.
The fact of the matter is SDI was a fraud on the American people, the United States wasted huge amounts of money on it, it couldn't 'zap incoming missiles', the defense contractors cheated, took the money and ran, which could have been used for much better purposes, because the Soviet Union collapsed for completely different reasons than overspending to compete with SDI.
>For the first time, after years of level financing at around $4 billion, opponents are on the verge of pushing through deep budget cuts in the program, which so far has cost $20 billion. The House leadership is moving to slice in half the Bush Administration's request of $4.7 billion for Star Wars for the fiscal year 1991, to $2.3 billion. The Senate voted to set aside $3.7 billion.
>[...] In a dozen or so major tests conducted this year, half have experienced problems, ranging from runaway rockets to warhead explosions to satellite malfunctions. The failures have marred the most ambitious and costly agenda in the program's history, intended to be the first broad demonstration of anti-missile technologies that have been incubating in laboratories, often amid great secrecy, for more than seven years since President Ronald Reagan started the program in March 1983.
Reagan's great lie in the sky: Star Wars scientists may have deceived Moscow and Congress about the project, writes David Usborne in Washington
>Now, however, allegations are being made that the entire experiment was a scientific fraud. According to a New York Times report based on interviews with four unidentified former Reagan officials, the two missiles had secretly been fitted with radio beacons to guarantee their meeting in space.
"the so-called "Star Wars" program under Reagan to which I'm referring was considered by many to be wasteful spending."
And was considered by others to be the final straw that broke the Soviet Union and put an end to a 70 year Cold War and eliminated one of the most evil empires in the history of the human race.
"I don't think there is much in the constitution mandating space lasers."
Article I, Section 8. Unless you're one of those people who attempt to argue that armies and navies are limited to 18th century technology.
>"and eliminated one of the most evil empires in the history of the human race"
Yet ironically, so many of those very same people who once argued that are now enthusiastically supporting and carrying the water for Trump's total capitulation to Putin. Makes you wonder if they really mean what they say, or if they just lust for power and hold party over country. Hmm...
> It is claimed by apologists for the Reagan administration that, whatever the exaggerations in capability, some of it intentional, SDI was responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union. There is no serious evidence in support of this contention. Andrei Sakharov, Yevgeny Velikhov, Roald Sagdeev, and other scientists who advised President Mikhail Gorbachev made it clear that if the United States really went ahead with a Star Wars programme, the safest and cheapest Soviet response would be merely to augment its existing arsenal of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. In this way Star Wars could have increased, not decreased, the peril of thermonuclear war. At any rate, Soviet expenditures on space-based defences against American nuclear missiles were comparatively paltry, hardly of a magnitude to trigger a collapse of the Soviet economy. The fall of the USSR has much more to do with the failure of the command economy, growing awareness of the standard of living in the west, widespread disaffection from a moribund Communist ideology, and - although he did not intend such an
outcome - Gorbachev's promotion of glasnost, or openness.
Ten thousand American scientists and engineers publicly
pledged they would not work on Star Wars or accept money from the SDI organization. This provides an example of widespread and courageous non-cooperation by scientists (at some conceivable personal cost) with a democratic government that had, temporarily at least, lost its way.
* I know Sagan isn't exactly a historian, but I'll choose his assessment of space war technology over other people's.
>Wikipedia says he was involved in missile defense under Reagan which suggests to me he may have been one of the "opposed to big government except when it's people I like" variety.
Wasn't Reagan also against big government? At least in his words?
If yes, working there would be contradictory for Jerry if he was "opposed to government" period, not if he was merely opposed to "big government".
He wrote a book with some others guys that was supposedly influential in governemnt during the cold war. My understanding the impetus behind "star wars" missile defense was was kind of a decoy to get the Soviet Union to spend themselves to death.
> My understanding the impetus behind "star wars" missile defense was was kind of a decoy to get the Soviet Union to spend themselves to death.
That is a very, very generous way to characterize defense programs that wasted tens of billions of dollars without producing anything. When you're dealing with a public that finds details boring and is willing to lump it all under "defense spending," you can sort of get away with it.
Well, except for numerous technologies that are in use today. Our current missile defense program, which is fairly crucial right at the moment, greatly benefitted from SDI.
SDI programs from the era that did not produce anything include the nuclear pumped X-Ray laser, which never worked at all. The shocking amount spent on that bullshit would have been enough to fund a huge amount of useful work in science, defense, or whatever.
The thing that's frustrating about that (aside from the fact that people are ignorant of such things, but still feel qualified to comment on the topic) is that plenty of people knew it was bullshit three decades ago. The sheer hypocrisy of the politics of SDI is almost unique in human history, considering how much money was wasted by people who claimed to be concerned about excessive government spending.
The "nuclear pumped X-ray laser" may or may not have been feasible - tests were inconclusive. That type of research is similar to the Google "moonshot" projects, many of which have been busts, eh?
Regardless, other SDI technologies such as Brilliant Pebbles and Brilliant Eyes are direct predecessors to current, successful, military technologies. There have also been many spinoffs benefiting civilians.
> The "nuclear pumped X-ray laser" may or may not have been feasible - tests were inconclusive. That type of research is similar to the Google "moonshot" projects, many of which have been busts, eh?
In the analogy Larry Page or Sergey Brin of Google would be Edward Teller, capable of forcing pursuit of an absurd project well past the point where it's obviously ridiculous to continue, simply because he can fire anyone he wants. But those guys aren't blatantly ideological, demented old men, and I'm not aware of Google ever burning money in a manner quite as cosmically absurd as Project Excalibur. The business wouldn't survive much of that.
From the blog he seemed to be aligned with Trump on many things: "regain control of borders", climate-change skepticism, supporting judges like Scalia for supreme court and so on.
He wrote a book called fallen angels where Ralph Nader had taken over the US government and replaced all science with hippy woo woo about crystals. The world was plunged into a new ice-age because of global cooling and only science fiction fans could save it.
He wasn't shy about his politics and I think it's fair to say they were pretty far out to the right.
In Footfall, SF authors (including a clear cameo of Heinlein) were the advisors that enabled the US government to save the Earth from the aliens. So... yeah.
JP had a helluva career. Advised mayors, presidents, influenced space policy, inspired a ton via Byte Magazine, in addition to a catalog of books that were usually well grounded in science.
I loved Chaos Manor as a teen. Having yet to even own a computer I was amazed at everything Jerry was doing with his. I'd then dream of all the amazing things I'd do with mine when I got my own computer. I really miss those early days of personal computing.
One of my favorite military-SF anthologies was There Will Be War, which iirc Pournelle edited. His CoDominium and Janissaries works were also good reads, and he had some wonderful collaborations with Larry Niven.
There's a great interview with him from Leo Laporte not to long ago (2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7j3IG4h42Y&list=UUWoyADQ1Ri... Loved his writings when I was young (and still do), chaos manor along with Steve Ciarcia were always the first sections I went to in Byte.
I was only a kid when I read his columns in Byte where he gave a narrative of his experiences using products - a really unique style for the time and thoroughly enjoyable - I always read the JP columns.
This is a sad day. Besides his novels, I seem to recall Jerry Pournelle doing a lot of writing for ( Byte | Computer Shopper | PC Magazine). back in the day. I really enjoyed his articles back in the 90's when I was first getting started in computing.
Mods, can we get a black bar to commemorate Mr. Pournelle?
That's a good question. I've only read his non-fiction stuff myself. The books I feel like I've heard people talk about the most though, are a couple of the ones he wrote with Larry Niven: Inferno, Lucifer's Hammer, etc. I think I'll try to track those down and read them soon, as my little way of paying tribute to the man.
Like other's have said; his collaborations with Niven are really great. Footfall, Lucifer's Hammer, and A Mote in God's Eye were my personal favorites.
Agreed. His collaborations with Niven were great. Both were great authors alone, but as a team they were really something special. Footfall, A Mote in God's Eye, and Lucifer's Hammer are a few of my favorite sci-fi reads to this day.
I always think they each took something from Heinlein - Pournelle got his politics, his passion, and worldbuilding, while Niven got his brainstorming and whimsy. Put them together and you get a whole Heinlein.
I just checked his site today like I do every few days. He just got back from DragonCon, complaining of a flu bug he caught sometime during his trip. He signed off his last post, "Bye for now". I will miss him and his writing.
In the late 90's he did a review of a video card for Linux that allowed dual monitors. This was an article in Byte magazine and dual monitor setups for Linux were hot shit back then.
I wrote him because I was having trouble getting it to work with XWindows and he actually wrote me back with some tips to get it working. Don't remember the name of the video card, but I'm sure I have that email around somewhere...
I really appreciated it and remember thinking how special it was to get a personal response from a writer at Byte.
I had lunch with Jerry at DragonCon this past weekend and he was enjoying himself. He was using a walker but only when necessary. He told some of the same stories I heard at Space Access but they were still enjoyable because they were his. Because he was there. I'm going to cherish that memory forever.
Rest in peace, Dr. Pournelle. We will carry on with the fight.
I heard that that was pretty cool and was bummed I didn't get to track him down this year. Now I won't--I'm sad about that, but hey, his work speaks for itself.
I also remember him well from Space Access. Seems to me that one can draw line directly from his advocacy for the DC-X, through Armadillo & company, to SpaceX and Blue Origin's spectacular accomplishments.
He planted one hell of a seed there. The world owes him one.
More than his skill I'd argue his enthusiasm and apparently boundless passion for these things was the brighest part of his persona. There might be better programmers and better writers, but he's always been one of the best at making what he loved seem fun, interesting, and worth taking up as a career.
Science fiction may have lost another great, but I'd bet he inspired many writers in his time.
(I should explain for those who are unfamiliar with the reference: one of Pournelle's Laws was "Never trust a computer you can't lift.")
And now my personal JP story... The one time I met Jerry Pournelle was when we peed together.
I was in the men's room at one of the West Coast Computer Faires when Jerry walked in and used the urinal next to me. We had a nice little conversation while we did our business.
And thankfully for me and the other men nearby, even though Jerry was quite tipsy on that good convention beer, he never lost his aim!
I got to meet Jerry when I was going to USC, he had sent out a request for an intern to "help him with all this junk" and for what ever reason he decided I was the guy. I would go over to his house and help him sort through the piles of stuff people would send in the hope that he would mention them in his column in BYTE. I showed up in the column a couple of times, Jerry and I got into a long and spirited discussion of 'terminals' versus TV Typewriters. He had a big CP/M machine with a television screen that he used for writing (20 lines of 64 characters as I recall) and I set up and evaluated the Heathkit Z29 (which was a slick detached keyboard terminal at the time). While there were fewer characters on the screen on TV Typewriter, updates were very very fast (since it was just memory mapped). I liked that there were more characters on the terminal. But Jerry's main argument in favor was that he kept most of his writing in his head, and the screen was just there to remind him where he was, and in that mode speed won hands down. He signed my copy of Footfall with "I have another pile of software for you."
In his 80s columns he wrote (roughly, by my memory) that by the turn of the millennium you'd be able to go to your computer and ask any question with a publically known answer, and get it back right away. I thought that was ridiculous, and today you can quibble, but basically yes, you can, and he was right on the money on the timing. That was an audacious prediction back then.
He influenced me the most by his columns on space development (A Step Farther Out, and a couple of anthologies The Endless Frontier). I don't clearly remember what was in them, but there was a kind of can-do attitude about developing technological civilization in a strategic way that seems more in tune with the 60s than anything happening now.
For anyone who's first computer interaction was a microcomp like the C64, sure. But i suspect that for anyone that had spent time with mainframe/minicomp terminals, particularly those attached to the Arpanet, it may not have seemed as such a far fetched claim.
Never mind that France rolled out Minitel back then, and similar systems were also deployed elsewhere in the world.
I had a networked account in the later 80s. I also read Ted Nelson (Literary Machines) and Eric Drexler (http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_14.html) predicting something like the web but in important ways better -- there are ideas there worth returning to for today's fights about "fake news" and open-access science. Drexler was right about the timing, too.
Those guys were on the futuristic fringe, but their ideas looked good to me. So why didn't I believe Pournelle? I was like, sure, someday, but his scenario seemed practically AI-complete. I did not foresee it coming so soon out of a little bit of the right sort of natural language processing plus some great engineering.
I'm sure there were people with a better imagination! But hindsight really is way too easy.
Jerry WAS likely the first published professional writer to use a computer to create book length works. I read his articles through the 1980's. I still remember seeing his S-100 writing system at the Smithsonian Museum
And while it would be too much of a stretch to say that his printed "Chaos Manor" articles in Byte were the first Blog, there is no doubt that many of the first bloggers where highly inspired by his style of journaling.
Some of my favorite episodes of This Week in Tech was when Jerry was a guest host. I loved all of his sci-fi books over the years. Going to miss this guy a lot.
153 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadBut though I will also classify myself less than appealed by descriptions of his politics and I voted up davidw above I want to be clear I think it would be uncool to bash him for it at the time of his death.
"So what do I do? I agree with nearly everything he is for, but I’m better qualified to make it happen. I avoid some issues, but I go for his most popular ones and say, yeah! Want that! And I can make it happen better than he can. I’ve got the experience of working in government, but I’m not the establishment any more than Mr. Trump is. Heck, I’ll offer him a cabinet post. I could use his energy in my administration." -POURNE
http://voxday.blogspot.nl/2016/04/jerry-pournelle-on-donald-...
"But he has never wavered on his desire to fill the Supreme Court with Justices as near in scholarship and view to Scalia as possible; that alone would be enough to get me to the polls for Trump if he’s nominated." -POURNE
https://newrepublic.com/article/139817/donald-trump-wants-ig...
Both here and elsewhere, Lukacs argued that as white nations, America and Russia might profitably work together to prop each other up against a planet where they were a racial minority. The right-wing science-fiction writers Jerry Pournelle (an admirer of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini) and Larry Niven pursued a similar argument in their CoDominium novels, a long-running series of novels that started in 1973 and imagines a world where the U.S. and the Soviet Union work together to govern an unruly planet.
http://crookedtimber.org/2011/12/12/the-attractions-of-fasci...
At one point, Gingrich was supposed to be writing a novel with his friend, noted authority on the political attractions of Fascism, Jerry Pournelle. I don’t know what happened to it, but I imagine it would have made quite interesting reading (Inferno, Pournelle’s ‘Benito Mussolini redeems himself in an updated version of Dante’s hell’ schlock-epic with Larry Niven, is certainly entertaining if your tastes run to certain varieties of kitsch).
1) Niven didn't co-write any of the CoDominium novels, as far as I know. Mote had some historical references to it, but it was set hundreds of years after the CoDominium had collapsed.
2) The CoDominium weren't the "good guys" in those books.
3) Pournelle was not an "admirer of Mussolini".
Inaccurate to the point of being dishonest.
You're quite aggressive in this thread about someone who just died in a multitude of comments, and it's not like JP will rise up to defend himself. I don't like his politics either and I'm sure that some of what you wrote has merit but please have some respect. This simply isn't the time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15221830
And finally, read the words [3] of an anonymous MIT-AI Lab member who spent much of their own time helping POURNE and I as well as many other tourists. Even though POURNE isn't around to defend himself, I feel obligated to post this in response to the crass misunderstandings and misstatements of the facts in your attempt to smear the MIT AI Lab and its members (your own words: "Fuck them."), and because I agree with the point that "If he didn't want to have this as his enduring legacy, he had plenty of opportunity to make amends. And the offensive acts were not private ones.", and also with the points about asymmetric audience and the responsibility to do well by one's celebrity:
But you both implied the MIT-AI Lab staff came off as jerks, and it was coldtea who said "Fuck them", but I was responding to both of your misimpressions that POURNE doesn't deserve his well earned reputation as a drunken abusive jerk.
But I still ask both of you to please re-read the words I cited. Do you care to address those?
Do you agree that he violated the terms of the MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy, or not?
Do his own sputtering mis-punctuated threats of having his Pentagon friends, reporter friends, and even the House Armed Services Committee upset CSTACY sound like he was drunk to you, or do you believe he behaved that way all the time, his behavior was justified, CSTACY flushing his account was not justified, and do you continue to carry his water (or booze) by denying he was acting like a jerk?
Again, as the MIT-AI Lab staff member I quoted said, "If he didn't want to have this as his enduring legacy, he had plenty of opportunity to make amends."
Japan is a great ally. I lived there for over a decade, and I can say that I love the Japanese people. But I will admit - and their people of the WWII generation would too (although - sadly they are (have been) passing too quickly), it took a solid kick in the teeth to get them to calm down and cooperate.
Sometimes, with intense nation-state disagreement, things are settled at the point of a gun. Where there is a winner and a loser.
I like diplomacy as much (or more) than the next guy ... but it is irresponsible for a nation to be unprepared for when that doesn't work.
N.B. Fighting back after Pearl Harbor is a different kettle of fish than exporting democracy by force. We have no business doing the latter. It's obscene.
EDIT: I didn't downvote you. I appreciated your take on the query posed.
I didn't say one shouldn't be prepared to fight, just that fighting is almost never the right way to start it. Being prepared to defend yourself and your allies requires a vastly different inventory than cannon diplomacy.
I enjoyed the heck out of most of the Niven/Pournelle books I read, but the political didactics weren't part of the fun for me.
Heinlein wrote stories about heroic Libertarians and happy soldiers.
Pournelle wrote stories about incompetent and deluded liberal professors and conniving politicians.
Think about the scene with the kid in Moon is a Harsh Mistress where an entitled Earth boy gets handsy with a woman and they hold an impromptu court for him.
In the book, he learns from his mistake and is a "convert" to Heinlein's way of thinking. Pournelle's political writing was much more Manichean - the boy would be an entitled villain to his death.
It's been more than a couple of decades since I have read either. It seems that I need a refresher!
I suspect that you're not actually interested in the facts here.
Actually, the best commentary I have heard on this subject is that the Soviet Union fell of its own internal conflict and didn't need help from your pal Ronnie.
And to further reply to your cousin-comment to this one there is a huge difference between a constitutional mandate and a very specific implementation... Nobody mandated Star Wars.
The fact of the matter is SDI was a fraud on the American people, the United States wasted huge amounts of money on it, it couldn't 'zap incoming missiles', the defense contractors cheated, took the money and ran, which could have been used for much better purposes, because the Soviet Union collapsed for completely different reasons than overspending to compete with SDI.
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/18/science/technical-failures...
Technical Failures Bedevil Star Wars
>For the first time, after years of level financing at around $4 billion, opponents are on the verge of pushing through deep budget cuts in the program, which so far has cost $20 billion. The House leadership is moving to slice in half the Bush Administration's request of $4.7 billion for Star Wars for the fiscal year 1991, to $2.3 billion. The Senate voted to set aside $3.7 billion.
>[...] In a dozen or so major tests conducted this year, half have experienced problems, ranging from runaway rockets to warhead explosions to satellite malfunctions. The failures have marred the most ambitious and costly agenda in the program's history, intended to be the first broad demonstration of anti-missile technologies that have been incubating in laboratories, often amid great secrecy, for more than seven years since President Ronald Reagan started the program in March 1983.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/reagans-great-lie-in...
Reagan's great lie in the sky: Star Wars scientists may have deceived Moscow and Congress about the project, writes David Usborne in Washington
>Now, however, allegations are being made that the entire experiment was a scientific fraud. According to a New York Times report based on interviews with four unidentified former Reagan officials, the two missiles had secretly been fitted with radio beacons to guarantee their meeting in space.
It's almost as if the goals of Star Wars were written by a ... drunken science fiction writer!
But that doesn't mean we don't need everlasting world peace, or a pony, or whatever fantasy your heart desires, as N Korea proves daily.
There is no such thing. A good defense is the best offense.
And was considered by others to be the final straw that broke the Soviet Union and put an end to a 70 year Cold War and eliminated one of the most evil empires in the history of the human race.
"I don't think there is much in the constitution mandating space lasers."
Article I, Section 8. Unless you're one of those people who attempt to argue that armies and navies are limited to 18th century technology.
Yet ironically, so many of those very same people who once argued that are now enthusiastically supporting and carrying the water for Trump's total capitulation to Putin. Makes you wonder if they really mean what they say, or if they just lust for power and hold party over country. Hmm...
> It is claimed by apologists for the Reagan administration that, whatever the exaggerations in capability, some of it intentional, SDI was responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union. There is no serious evidence in support of this contention. Andrei Sakharov, Yevgeny Velikhov, Roald Sagdeev, and other scientists who advised President Mikhail Gorbachev made it clear that if the United States really went ahead with a Star Wars programme, the safest and cheapest Soviet response would be merely to augment its existing arsenal of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. In this way Star Wars could have increased, not decreased, the peril of thermonuclear war. At any rate, Soviet expenditures on space-based defences against American nuclear missiles were comparatively paltry, hardly of a magnitude to trigger a collapse of the Soviet economy. The fall of the USSR has much more to do with the failure of the command economy, growing awareness of the standard of living in the west, widespread disaffection from a moribund Communist ideology, and - although he did not intend such an outcome - Gorbachev's promotion of glasnost, or openness. Ten thousand American scientists and engineers publicly pledged they would not work on Star Wars or accept money from the SDI organization. This provides an example of widespread and courageous non-cooperation by scientists (at some conceivable personal cost) with a democratic government that had, temporarily at least, lost its way.
* I know Sagan isn't exactly a historian, but I'll choose his assessment of space war technology over other people's.
Wasn't Reagan also against big government? At least in his words?
If yes, working there would be contradictory for Jerry if he was "opposed to government" period, not if he was merely opposed to "big government".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_of_Technology
That is a very, very generous way to characterize defense programs that wasted tens of billions of dollars without producing anything. When you're dealing with a public that finds details boring and is willing to lump it all under "defense spending," you can sort of get away with it.
Well, except for numerous technologies that are in use today. Our current missile defense program, which is fairly crucial right at the moment, greatly benefitted from SDI.
Details, details...
The thing that's frustrating about that (aside from the fact that people are ignorant of such things, but still feel qualified to comment on the topic) is that plenty of people knew it was bullshit three decades ago. The sheer hypocrisy of the politics of SDI is almost unique in human history, considering how much money was wasted by people who claimed to be concerned about excessive government spending.
Regardless, other SDI technologies such as Brilliant Pebbles and Brilliant Eyes are direct predecessors to current, successful, military technologies. There have also been many spinoffs benefiting civilians.
In the analogy Larry Page or Sergey Brin of Google would be Edward Teller, capable of forcing pursuit of an absurd project well past the point where it's obviously ridiculous to continue, simply because he can fire anyone he wants. But those guys aren't blatantly ideological, demented old men, and I'm not aware of Google ever burning money in a manner quite as cosmically absurd as Project Excalibur. The business wouldn't survive much of that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_national_missile...
Well, getting someone to spend themselves to death.
He wasn't shy about his politics and I think it's fair to say they were pretty far out to the right.
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/passings/
If dang or one of the moderators would like to change it, that works for me.
Thanks Jerry.
Rest well, sir.
This is a sad day. Besides his novels, I seem to recall Jerry Pournelle doing a lot of writing for ( Byte | Computer Shopper | PC Magazine). back in the day. I really enjoyed his articles back in the 90's when I was first getting started in computing.
Mods, can we get a black bar to commemorate Mr. Pournelle?
What might be a good starting place with his books?
"oath of fealty" is another good one that should appeal to the hackernews crowd.
I wrote him because I was having trouble getting it to work with XWindows and he actually wrote me back with some tips to get it working. Don't remember the name of the video card, but I'm sure I have that email around somewhere...
I really appreciated it and remember thinking how special it was to get a personal response from a writer at Byte.
Good bye Jerry.
Rest in peace, Dr. Pournelle. We will carry on with the fight.
He planted one hell of a seed there. The world owes him one.
Lucifer's Hammer was way up there and hit close to home (being in California and all).
Science fiction may have lost another great, but I'd bet he inspired many writers in his time.
May you be able to lift all the computers now.
(I should explain for those who are unfamiliar with the reference: one of Pournelle's Laws was "Never trust a computer you can't lift.")
And now my personal JP story... The one time I met Jerry Pournelle was when we peed together.
I was in the men's room at one of the West Coast Computer Faires when Jerry walked in and used the urinal next to me. We had a nice little conversation while we did our business.
And thankfully for me and the other men nearby, even though Jerry was quite tipsy on that good convention beer, he never lost his aim!
Goodbye Jerry.
He influenced me the most by his columns on space development (A Step Farther Out, and a couple of anthologies The Endless Frontier). I don't clearly remember what was in them, but there was a kind of can-do attitude about developing technological civilization in a strategic way that seems more in tune with the 60s than anything happening now.
Never mind that France rolled out Minitel back then, and similar systems were also deployed elsewhere in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel#Minitel_in_other_count...
Those guys were on the futuristic fringe, but their ideas looked good to me. So why didn't I believe Pournelle? I was like, sure, someday, but his scenario seemed practically AI-complete. I did not foresee it coming so soon out of a little bit of the right sort of natural language processing plus some great engineering.
I'm sure there were people with a better imagination! But hindsight really is way too easy.
Read his byte article a lot. S-100 based system is a bridge too far from my 1980s me. But enjoy his writing very much his writing.
Rip.
And while it would be too much of a stretch to say that his printed "Chaos Manor" articles in Byte were the first Blog, there is no doubt that many of the first bloggers where highly inspired by his style of journaling.
He deserves Hacker News' black banner
- Real Soon Now
'Using personal or micro computers'. There are some examples that pre-date your reference:
http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=3701