"I'd characterise the Space Shuttle as a ghastly design abomination that set manned space travel in the west back a generation. If NASA'd stuck with the Saturn series derivatives..."

Again, I spent years at Rockwell International working on the Space Shuttle, and it's worse than Charlie says. The Saturn V was destroyed, blueprints shreded, jigs sold as scrap, precisely to preclude continuation of Staurn V/Apollo derivatives. Thus the Welfare for the Aerospace Corporations could be advanced for political ends. There were subcontractors in all 50 states, to get Congress to greenlight this turkey.

Worse, the Shuttle was sold as part of a 3-tier system: (1) Shuttle for Earth to LEO; (2) Orbital Transfer Vehicle (and Manned OTV) for LEO to HEO and Cislunar; (3) Lunar orbit-to-surface and surface to orbit vehicle. Then the Saturns were killed, and (2) and (3) cancelled. The IUS (which sent unmanned craft from Space Shuttle orbit to Venus and Jupiter) was originally called "Interim Upper Stage" (interim until OTV) but was then redubbed "Intertial Upper Stage." I worked on that, too.

Climb up on the roof, kick away the ladder, and set the roof on fire. Great plan.

Saturn. Inertial. Spelling doesn't count, because Content is King, right?

The cover story is that President Nixon approved (1) through (3), then "forgot" to tell the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) which bureaucratically killed (2) and (3) since they had no orders to the contrary. "Plausible Deniability."

Wow. That's even worse than I thought. The space programmes actually been dead since the 70s, and no ones really noticed...

That crazy dropping-ICBMs-out-the-back-of-planes idea from the Cold War is making a comback:

http://www.wired.com/news/images/manual/67876_tspace1.html

I've just written a 3,900 word draft paper on "The Topology of Politics" -- a subject that Mr. Stross has explored in "Elector." I've emailed copies to several folks who've requested it, and have at least 1,000 words more to add in the next draft. I mention this here for the Stross connection, and that Arrow's Theorem and problems with voting were mentioned here earlier. Readers debate as to whether or not political positions can be infinitely far apart, whether political position space is separable, whether political position space is a metric space. One key issue is to measure (if possible) the difference between political positions. Is the USA's position regarding Gitmo closer to Nazi death camps, Khmer Rouge killing fields, or USSR gulags, for example. USA is not Nzi, one comments, but is it different enough? Does the triangle inequality hold? Is the space dense (is there always a compromise position in between any two positions)?Hacker's said, some 20 years ago, that "topology is politics" -- but does that apply only to decisionmaking about networks, or is it more general? Writing nonfiction gets in the way of writing fiction, but it can get faster feedback.

In a message dated 6/21/2005 9:28:14 AM Mountain Standard Time, qtopic+15-cysSFgyrHZf@quicktopic.com writes:

Is the USA's position regarding Gitmo
closer to Nazi death camps, Khmer Rouge killing fields, or USSR
gulags, for example.


-- well, that settles that.

Actually, Steve, I wouldn't dismiss Jonathan's argument that quickly. Far as I can see between the typos, he's not saying the USA is equivalent to Nazism/Khmer Rouge/etc, but saying that we need metrics that allow us to clearly gauge how a society is doing. There's a political continuum that, along one axis, presumably includes both states with a (hypothetical) perfect human rights record and states that practice internal and external genocide; it would be kind of useful to understand how to evaluate it without miscounting stuff.

(If you're an animal rights nutter, then by your own cultural standard of "meat is murder" every country on the planet is carrying out a campaign of genocide, or at least condoning freelance mass murder in death camps called "farms". Being able to exclude this sort of argument from the debate, without going so far in the opposite direction that we fall for arguments of the form "that's not a death camp, that's a perfectly legal penal facility for dealing with criminals", is pretty important.)

In a message dated 6/22/2005 12:41:04 PM Mountain Standard Time, qtopic+15-cysSFgyrHZf@quicktopic.com writes:

Actually, Steve, I wouldn't dismiss Jonathan's argument that
quickly.


-- it should have included "that's a perfectly kosher detention camp" as an option.

And to get technical, the detainees at Gitmo (or in the "Hotel California") have neither the rights of criminal defendants nor those of prisoners of war.
On the one hand, they were captured in war, not arrested on suspicion of crimes. They haven't necessarily committed any offense except being on the other side.
 
In war, you don't arrest enemy combatants; you just kill them on sight, armed or unarmed, coming at you or running away, or for that matter while they're sleeping or sitting on the crapper. The only time you're not allowed to kill them is when they're actively trying to give up, and you're under no obligation to go out of your way to give them an opportunity to do so; eg., when you bomb a troop-train or a truck convoy with PGM's from 35,000 feet.
 
When you do capture them, you're perfectly entitled to hold them prisoner until the conflict is over. We didn't release our German prisoners in 1944, or let them have lawyers.
 
Hence, Gitmo detainees have no right to legal representation, to be charged with a crime, or what have you. We _can_ charge them with crimes and try them if we find an individual has done something skanky, but we don't have to. They're not being held for committing crimes, but for being taken in arms against the United States.
 
On the other hand, since they were fighting for states and/or organizations which don't themselves abide by the laws of war when dealing with us, they therefore have no protection as prisoners of war under the Conventions, which apply only to those who follow them themselves.
 
Eg., the rules say that combatants are allowed to hide physically but cannot pretend to be innocent bystanders; they must wear uniform or other identifying marks (armbands, etc.) which make them easy to distinguish from civilians, and they must carry weapons openly.(*)
 
If you don't do the above, you're fair game for anything, and these turkeys were certainly not abiding by that rule or any of the others.
 
Hence we have a perfect right to do whatever we want with them, including just shooting them in the back of the head whenever we please. They're the "enemies-general of human kind", like pirates.
 
If we chose to be more merciful than that, it's purely out of the goodness of our hearts or calculation of our own interests, not any form of obligation whether moral or legal.
 
(*) and you can't go home, bury the rifle, take off the uniform/armband, pretend to be a farmer, and then start up again later, either.

Don't the rules also say that the decision not to apply the Geneva rules to a given prisoner must be made by a competent tribunal?
Isn't it true that some unknown proportion of the Gitmo detainess were not under arms when arrested, and there's no way of knowing whether they were combatants _at all_?
And if your position is simply "The rules are - here we make the rules", why the sniffiness about people comparing Gitmo to other places where the same judgement has been made?

In a message dated 6/23/2005 7:11:00 AM Mountain Standard Time, qtopic+15-cysSFgyrHZf@quicktopic.com writes:

Don't the rules also say that the decision not to apply the
Geneva rules to a given prisoner must be made by a competent
tribunal?
-- nope. You're thinking of taking measures against _individuals_ who've violated the Conventions. This is quite different; their entire _side_ are outside the Conventions.

Isn't it true that some unknown proportion of the Gitmo detainess were not under arms when arrested, and there's no way of knowing whether they were combatants _at all_?
-- well, they'd say that, wouldn't they?
 
>And if your position is simply "The rules are - here we make therules", why
the sniffiness about people comparing Gitmo to other places where the same judgement has been made?



-- because the other places you mentioned were violations of the general rules. We're not violating any rule.

>because the other places you mentioned were
> violations of the general rules. We're not violating any
> rule.

You are a twat and I claim my £5.00

Cheers

Jim

"Should any doubt arise as to whether persons, having committed a belligerent act and having fallen into the hands of the enemy, belong to any of the categories enumerated in Article 4, such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present Convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal."

Convention 3, Part 1, Article 5. The Guantanamo prisoners have (allegedly) committed belligerent acts, and have fallen into the hands of the enemy. The convention says that they are to be accorded the protections of the convention until a competent tribunal says otherwise.

"Isn't it true that some unknown proportion of the Gitmo detainess were not under arms when arrested, and there's no way of knowing whether they were combatants _at all_?
-- well, they'd say that, wouldn't they? "

And the people holding them captive would disagree, wouldn't they? A tribunal would be a good place for the airing of evidence, wouldn't it. But no, I forgot, you've decided that the rules don't apply. Convenient.

Jim, I saw him first, that fiver's mine.

Could somebody explain who JoatSimeon is.

I'd like to make sure I don't know him.

Dave: JoatSimeon is S. M. Stirling.

"Should any doubt arise as to whether persons,"

-- that's individual persons, as I said. It simply doesn't apply in this instance. And, of course, the so-called ammendments of 1977 don't apply at all, since we didn't sign them.

You ought to ask yourself a question: here we are, at war with people who've declared they want to kill or enslave us all and destroy our civilization, and your instinctive impulse is to cark at your own side, and sympathize with the sort of people who blow themselves up in restaurants full of mothers and children.

Why, exactly, do you have this reflex?