Wis[s]e Words

Books read in April

Published on May 1, 2008

Another month gone by means another list of books read.

Madame de Pompadour — Nancy Mitford
Following on from her biography of Frederick the Great. This was written much earlier, in 1954 as opposed to 1971 and I found it slightly harder going. It’s also longer, which doesn’t help. After a while Mitford’s light, teasing style began to annoy a bit.

The Clan Corporate — Charlie Stross
The third novel in the Merchant Wars series, charlie’s attempt at writing a proper epic fantasy series, though it owns more to H. Beam Piper than to J. R. R. Tolkien.

London: A Social History — Roy Porter
This was published in 1994, so it misses the developments of the past fourteen years, but this is still an excellent one volume history of London and its peoples. It’s not as comprehensive as Peter Acroyd’s later London the Biography, but it’s not as up itself either.

The Assassination of Julius Caesar — Michael Parenti
Takes the murder of Julius Caesar and puts it in a class war context.

The Year of Our War — Steph Swainston
Interesting fantasy novel by a new and unknown to me writer.

The People of the Talisman — Leigh Brackett
Another short Eric John Stark novel, in the vein of the Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom novels, but much better written.

Tanks in Detail — Panzer III — Terry J. Gander
What should be an indepth look at one of the more important German World War 2 tanks is let down by its shortness and doesn’t contain much not already known to the tank enthusiast.

Tanks in Detail — Sherman & Firefly — Terry J. Gander
Another entry in the same series as above, suffering from the same flaws and with a less interesting selection of pictures and drawings to liven it up.

Stations of the Tide — Michael Swanwick
Okay but not spectacular science fiction novel by a writer who has done better. It never quite gelled into a coherent story.

Postwar — Tony Judt
Flawed history of postwar Europe, too focused on the big countries (Germany, France, Italy and the UK) in my opinion.

The Voyage of the Sable Keech — Neal Asher
The first Asher novel I’ve read, not the best starting point as it needs a lot of backstory knowledge to make sense out of.

The Great History of Comic Books — Ron Goulart
A nicely chatty history of the American comic book, which largely confines itself to the socalled Golden Age (1920s-1950s). Dated, sketchy but a reasonable overview still.

Worlds of the Imperium — Keith Laumer
Fun fast-paced adventure sf by the master. Not an unmissable classic by any means, but good enough to pick up secondhand.

A Plague of Demons — Keith Laumer
Another sf adventure novel by Laumer. It was interesting reading those two so short after each other and see the simularities. Both are set partially in North Africa – Algeria to be precise, both feature tough loners whose name starts with a B, etc.

The Prefect — Alastair Reynolds
This is a prequel to Revelation Space and its sequels, set at a time when the Glitter Band was not yet destroyed and as a consequence somewhat of a less sombre novel than Reynolds usually writes. It took a while for me to get in it, but once it did it was rather
good.

Chain of Command — Seymour Hersh
A good though dated (written in 2004) overview of the crimes of the Bush administration in their war on terror, going from what happened in Abu Ghraib all the way back up the chain of command to the crimes at the heart of the War on Iraq.

Rainbows End — Vernor Vinge
Once upon a time I would’ve said Vernor Vinge was the science fiction author with the most convincing view of the future. Now however it just seems old fashioned, even slightly dull. Nevertheless this is still an accomplished novel, though not half as convincing in its depiction of the near future as e.g. Halting State or Brasyl.

Dutch mumps epidemic: how religion threatens public health

Published on April 25, 2008

You wouldn’t think it possible anymore in a modern, rich country like the Netherlands, but we are in the midst of a mumps epidemic. Actually, that’s not quite right: only part of the country is influenced by this epidemic and not so coincidently, it’s the most Christian part, the socalled bible belt, which stretches from my homeland of Zeeland, up to the central part of the Netherlands. This is where the communities of strict protestant churches are the largest and unfortunately many of these churches belief vaccinations, like insurances, are incompatible with a proper Christian belief. If god wants you to be sick, you will be sick and you shouldn’t attempt to thwart the will of god. More sane christians argue that if god wants you to be sick you will get sick, vaccination or not, but these are hardcore.

Normally, this isn’t that much of a problem, apart for those unfortunates who get polio because their parents refuse to protect them against it. But get enough of those loons together and it’s not a question of a few children getting diseases they needed have had, but you get a proper epidemic threatening not just them, but everybody. Vaccination programmes only work if enough people participate; once you get enough unprotected people infected, the risk that you will get the disease as well despite your vaccination gets much bigger. Which seems indeed to have happened, as about a quarter of cases in this epidemic concern vaccinated children as well.

In other words, this is a case in which freedom of religion conflicts directly with public health. Because of their beliefs about vaccination, these Christian groups endager not just themselves and their children, which is bad enough already, but also the rest of us. that’s why vaccination programmes should be mandatory and religious beliefs not be allowed as a reason to opt out. Especially since so often it’s the parent‘s beliefs which are responsible for the refusal to protect the child.

Dutch media bias in the Middle East

Published on April 16, 2008

Branko reports on the findings of political scientist Jacqueline de Bruijn on how the Dutch media reports on the Israeli-Palestine conflict. The results are depressing but unsurprising:

the press under-reports Israeli attacks on Palestinians, even when there are dozens of victims, but it reports on every Palestinian attack on Israelis, even when there are no victims;

as a result, the few times Israeli aggression is reported on, this makes it seem that the supposedly rare Israeli attack is a response to a continuous stream of Palestinian aggression

As one person cynically noted: dead Palestinians are not news, simply because there are so many of them. Israel’s state propaganda makes handy use of this fact by continuously stressing that its attacks are merely responses to Palestinian aggression (a tactic Israel also uses with the PR for its attacks on Lebanon). What makes the whole matter worse is that Israel’s heavy handed violence against the occupied population is actually beneficial for this PR strategy. There’s no reason for Israel to tone down the murderousness of its regime.

[…]

For the press to combat this bias, it first has to recognize that it does have a problem. Everybody can see that De Bruijn’s qualitative statements are correct simply by opening the newspaper and observing the loaded language, regardless of the merits of De Bruijn’s methodology and quantitative statements. Next, the press has to figure out how to attack this problem.

De Bruijn presented her findings during a meeting in which the press were present. Also there was essayist Mohammed Benzakour who came with an equally interesting observation: several of the major Dutch newspapers have correspondents in Israel who are allied with the Zionist cause. The correspondent for Algemeen Dagblad and broadcaster EO (evangelists) is former chairman of the Nederlandse Zionisten Bond and has a daughter who works as press spokes person for the Israeli army, and the correspondent of the Volkskrant organizes trips to Jerusalem for Cidi. That does not necessarily invalidate their reporting (for all I know they take great care to remain as objective as possible), but it does signal a clear conflict of interest, which should in turn alert news consumers. Then again, why should I consume news from a suspect source?

I’ve noticed the tendency of the Dutch media to largely look at the conflict through Israeli eyes before, so it’s good to see my suspicions being confirmed. It’s also another blow against zionist propagandists like the bad news movement who like to pretend the Dutch media are biased against Israel.

If there was a retard cup, FC Groningen would’ve won it

Published on April 14, 2008

Quick question: if you are a football club and one of your main rivals comes over for a game, not long after they bought three of your best players, would you think it was a good idea to hand out thousands of bogrolls? No, I don’t think so either, but FC Groningen thought this was a marvelous idea to allow it, as “a fun way to say goodbye to those players going to Ajax”. Even the fire brigade allegedly gave permission for this stunt. So of course the obvious happened. Some nutters thought it would enhance the party mood if they set fire to those bogrolls, more and more people started throwing lit rolls and before you know it, there was a fire and panic. Worse, the firehoses available in the stadium turned out not to have pressure on them, the fire retardant chairs didn’t turn out to be so fire retarding and finally some or all emergency exits were locked.

That winning combination of club incompetence and hooligan violence has led to incredible disasters in the past. Remember Heizel stadium? Fortunately here, despite the fire and the panic, the worst that happened was a complicated ankle fracture for one unlucky fan. No thanks to FC Groningen though. Stupidity all around.

Oh no John Ringo!

Published on April 14, 2008

I would just like to note Davind Hines’ delightfull takedown of John Ringo’s Paladin of Shadows series makes. If you don’t know Ringo, he’s one of an interchangable stable of authors writing the kind of formulaic mil-sf series Baen Books churns out by the dozen, featuring flint-eyed conservative he-men saving the world from alien menaces while spineless liberal appeaseniks are trying to stab them in the back. Those are bad enough already, both in content and writing, which is several rungs below David Weber, my personal bright red line below which I don’t bother, but this is much worse. A sample from the first chapter of the first book:

He knew that at heart, he was a rapist. And that meant he hated rapists more than any “normal” human being. They purely pissed him off. He’d spent his entire sexually adult life fighting the urge to not use his inconsiderable strength to possess and take instead of woo and cajole. He’d fought his demons to a standstill again and again when it would have been so easy to give in. He’d had one truly screwed up bitch get completely naked, with him naked and erect between her legs, and she still couldn’t say “yes.” And he’d just said: “that’s okay” and walked away with an amazing case of blue balls. When men gave in to that dark side, it made him even more angry then listening to leftist bitches scream about “western civilization” and how it was so fucked up.

It gets much worse and Hines is good at showing how bad it gets without getting the ick all over you, so to speak. What is it with Baen anyway? It’s not that they publish rightwing wankfests that I mind, it’s that several of their authors are decidedly creepy. There’s Krautman, who seems to think having the Waffen-SS star as heroes in one of his booksis no biggie, Leo Frankowski, who first presented a lighthearted rape in one of his intermibable Crosstime Engineer novels before moving to Russia because American women just didn’t understand a man’s needs and now Ringo and his not-quite rapist-hero and his collection of whores. To be sure not every rightwing Baen novelist is this batshit insane –David Weber might have some issues with liberals but seems quite sensible otherwise, while Eric Flint writes the same sort of mil-sf as the rest of them but featuring union members (he calls himself a Trotskist as well) — but there is a high percentage of outright nutters being published there.