dctoedt

Al Gore is definitely one of them!

Absolutely correct — and that's not sarcasm or irony. (Gore never claimed to have "invented the Internet"; that was a calumny spread by Republicans.)

Point taken about the French thirst for revanche; I stand corrected.

Again: Catastropic naïveté.

I have to differ. I don’t think anyone on either side even imagined, let alone intended, that the Western Front would get bogged down in four years of trench warfare or (on the Allied side) that Russia would fight so suboptimally. There was a lot of catastrophically-naive optimism at work.

Countries and people WANTED the war, war was still thought about as a general benefit to the country

That was true among some of the players in various governments — Kaiser Wilhelm being a prime example. Can you cite any (reputable) historians who think that was a general attitude?

So you agree with me — stupid decisions, catastrophic fuckups.

I think sooner or later, Iran will succeed in sinking a big US ship

Sinking or even just seriously damaging a U.S. aircraft carrier — approx. 5K people in crew + airwing, billions of dollars in ship and aircraft — might trigger a Pearl-Harbor or 9/11 fury among the American public. No U.S. president could get away with even a "proportionate" response, let alone doing nothing.

Think of the Tonkin Gulf incident in 1965, which led to the U.S.'s widened involvement in Vietnam on the basis of grossly-distorted reports about alleged attacks — which never happened — on U.S. destroyers (which are comparatively small ships). [0] If Iran were to actually sink a U.S. aircraft carrier, then Trump-Hegseth-Miller might well nuke Tehran in response.

We sure as hell don't need anything like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 by a terrorist. It triggered a cascade of some of the stupidest and costliest government decisions in history. Belgrade, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, London, they all effed it up almost beyond belief. WWI cost millions of lives and untold billions in resources that could have been put to far better use. Iran sinking a U.S. carrier could be a similar trigger.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident

If you were born in 1900 you probably are at the tail end of the Lost Generation — the Greatest Generation is considered to be those born between 1901 and 1927.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greatest_Generation

Please reread my comment — yours has two possible meanings.

I can be absolutely certain of my perception and recollection of what my consciousness is experiencing and has experienced.

There's abundant evidence to the contrary — at least as far as your recollection of what your consciousness previously experienced.

(IOW: Memory is extremely fallible.)

If there's anything worth defending, people will volunteer to defend it.

That's a pretty binary view of the situation. It's not enough for something to be worth defending: People have to recognize that it's worth defending — and that might not happen instantaneously, because "people" come to appreciate things at very different rates.

Yes, that's an edge case — my comment to which you responded was not meant as a complete statement of Reality.

It is called forced labour or slavery.

In war, people who tolerate military conscription and discipline will conquer those who're slaves to pigheaded "you're not the boss of ME!" individualism.

It'd be nice if humans would voluntarily abandon war someday. But a corollary of the First Commandment is to face facts.

Neither of the jury verdicts altered the reality of whether Simpson did or didn’t kill the two victims.

(In Simpson’s second trial, the jury found him liable, not “guilty.” Guilt is the term used in criminal prosecutions. Liability is the term used in civil cases.)

"Innocent until proven guilty" concerns whether someone did a crime

See my upthread comment: "Innocent until proven guilty" is catchy but false.

innocent until proven guilty

Pithy but untrue. The verbose-but-correct statement is about procedural prerequisites: Government officials are forbidden to imprison or fine you until your guilt is proved, to an impartial and properly-instructed jury in a fair trial, beyond a reasonable doubt. (The Scots have the better formulation for criminal cases: Guilty, or not proved.)

Illustration: OJ Simpson was found not guilty [sic] in his criminal trial. So he couldn't be imprisoned. But then a different jury found — under the lower, preponderance of the evidence standard — that Simpson did indeed murder his ex-wife and the other guy. The latter case was the civil action for wrongful death, brought by the survivors of his victims. The survivors won a $33.5M verdict. Simpson's assets were seized, and sold at a court-ordered auction, to pay the judgment — including his Heisman Trophy.

And Brian Reid's Scribe formatter [0] — so much nicer than roff, troff, etc. (descendants of Runoff). In 1981-82 I wrote a user manual and taught my fellow law-review editors — none of whom were computer people — how to use both Emacs and Scribe (PDP-11 / TOPS20). It was a real boon, freeing up our paid secretary from having to repeatedly retype manuscripts after we'd edited them, and cutting down on printer errors that had to be hand-corrected on galley proofs.

[0] https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA125287.pdf (Brian Reid's CMU Ph.D dissertation a.k.a. a manual for Scribe).

More information about the origins of the collection and the photographer (a U.S. Army officer, assistant military attaché): https://manhoffarchive.org/narratives/intro

a fairly narrow class of credentialed bureaucrats, entry into which is gatekept by elite universities and professional organizations.

Now take the next step: Explicitly state, and then defend, your implied premise, namely that it's bad to be governed by people who, from education and experience, have come to know something about their subject areas — and that we should be happy to invite the ignorant, the misguided, and the charlatan to exercise power and authority.

accepting that Congress is free to set things up as it sees fit within the Constitutional constraints.

The unitary-executive crowd worships a golden calf, namely the first three words of Article 2: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America."

One could argue that the "executive Power" is whatever the Congress says it is. Suppose that a future Congress were to decide that the president is to be, basically, the butler for the federal government — think Mr. Carson on Downton Abbey, in charge of the household staff but still very much a servant himself — with of course the other specifically-enumerated presidential powers (read: duties) in the remainder of Article 2. It's hard to say in advance that such a hypothetical congressional action would be categorically inconsistent with the Framers' intentions.

An emacs routine to convert a region of org-mode formatting to Markdown formatting and put into the clipboard:

  ;; Written by Claude 2026-06-06 
  (defun my/org-to-markdown-clipboard ()
    "Export org region (or buffer) to Markdown and copy to clipboard.
  With no active region, exports the whole buffer."
    (interactive)
    (require 'ox-md)
    (let* ((text (if (use-region-p)
                     (buffer-substring-no-properties (region-beginning) (region-end))
                   (buffer-substring-no-properties (point-min) (point-max))))
           (md (org-export-string-as text 'md t '(:with-toc nil
                                                  :with-author nil
                                                  :with-date nil
                                                  :with-title nil))))
      (kill-new md)
      (message "Markdown copied (%d chars)" (length md))))
  
  (with-eval-after-load 'org
    (define-key org-mode-map (kbd "C-c m") #'my/org-to-markdown-clipboard))

[Re: Starship Troopers] The book, however, represents a weightier piece of analysis in its own right and provides some fascinating insights into fascism, civil and civic duty, and the role of the individual in the machine.

One of my favorites as a teen, and it holds up reasonably well for me decades later. I didn't see it as insights into fascism so much as a meditation into what it would take to keep a global, and later interstellar, society functioning. Yes, there was emphasis on duty, but not to an excess (ISTM), and not a surprise considering Heinlein's U.S. Naval Academy background and subsequent service.

That’s really splitting hairs.

As software people are keenly aware, accuracy in writing is important.

The Republic of Vietnam was a dead man walking, but it was a United States puppet state, and they finally collapsed in 1975.

I don't disagree. In hindsight, the U.S.'s political strategy was disastrous. American decisionmakers — like all of us — had to make their best judgments based on education and experience (and the often-malign influence of groupthink). Some factors were especially salient:

• As WWII ended, the "Atlanticists" in the State Department supported France's insistence on retaining their Southeast Asian colonies (IIRC, because the U.S. wanted a strong anticommunist France to help stand up to Stalin and the Red Army after Germany's surrender). Also IIRC, FDR was inclined to support Ho Chi Minh's independence movement, but he was gravely ill by then.

• The American political class was very much aware of the lessons of Munich in 1938; of Stalin's conquest of Eastern Europe in 1945; and of North Korea's invasion of South Korea in 1950. It wasn't unreasonable for them to fear the spread of totalitarian communism.

• The governing Democratic Party was acutely aware of the political impact of McCarthyism in the 1950s, including being incessantly attacked by the GOP for having "lost" China in 1949 (as if China was ours to lose).

• Douglas MacArthur's advice to President Kennedy — not to put troops on the ground in Asia — didn't carry the day. [0]

Those interested in this debacle should read David Halberstam's magisterial book The Best and the Brightest. [1]

[0] https://thediplomat.com/2018/10/a-new-take-on-general-macart...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_and_the_Brightest

Have you ever seen the videos of American fleeing Saigon?

Yes. I was a serving Navy officer at the time. My above comment stands.

FTA: the defeat of American troops and fall of Saigon in 1975

This is a bit misleading: Yes, strategically the U.S. was defeated in 1975, but U.S. troops had pulled out in 1973, having essentially never been beaten on the battlefield — not that it matters, of course.

It's even harder than "clearly erroneous" (the standard applied when a judge makes fact findings without a jury). Under the Seventh Amendment, if a hypothetical reasonable jury could have reached the result that the actual jury did, then that's the ball game [0], even if the trial judge or appellate-court judges would have reached a different result.

[0] Assuming that the trial judge didn't materially screw up in admitting or excluding evidence, or in instructing the jury about the law, and also assuming no proof of juror bias or improper influence.

exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis

Or more succinctly, as first-year law students learn: Expressio unius est exclusio alterius — to state one thing is to implicitly exclude others.

https://definitions.lsd.law/expressio-unius-est-exclusio-alt...

You would be surprised at the number of frivolous lawsuits and seemingly "zero risk" decisions that wind up turning into actual legal risk and legal fees. [¶] The legal world is a lot more complicated than you think.

The law is a lot like an app: It has to take into account a gazillion edge cases and corner cases — not to mention that people can be ignorant and/or malicious. It really is complicated, as you say above.

Well done on not hurling insults at @ndriscoll, BTW. Personal attacks don't persuade the target, and they can turn off onlookers who might be undecided. (Competent lawyers learn early that judges and jurors don't like personal attacks and can be less inclined to believe the attacker.)

this surgeon skipped a step

That was the foundational premise of Dr. Atul Gawande's book The Checklist Manifesto, an expansion of his article The Checklist in The New Yorker [0]

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist

I was in Iowa a few years ago, and the food is awful. ... I suspect it’s always been awful, and people just don’t care about it very much as long as they get the calories they need.

Um: My dad grew up in Iowa, so I'd be there seeing family every so often. Years ago it struck me how many Iowans I saw there were ... not svelte.

This suggests a "knife skills" automatic habit to cultivate:† Whenever opening anything, point it away from your face, or at least move your face out of the line of fire. (Champagne, soda bottles, whatever.)

† "Knife skills" automatic habits = things such as, • always cut away from yourself; • whenever holding something down with the non-knife hand to be cut, curl that hand's fingers under, so that the non-knife hand's knuckles serve as a guard for that hand's finger tips.