My impression of Hanson (after a couple of his books) is that his personal reasons were rooted in the basic fact that, unlike on his farm, in academia he was unable to order his colleagues off his property.

Have I judged him too harshly?

I really liked Hanson’s “The Other Greeks : The Family Farm And The Agrarian Roots Of Western Civilization” (1995), but I’m not a classical scholar so I can’t say whether it is good history.

I wish he’d stuck with that period, but apparently he had personal reasons for turning to modern times (see #17 above).

Nice preview feature, by the way.

But I have read Dan Simmons, and at least a couple of the Hyperion books (the first two, specifically, before he starting pulling a Geo. Lucas on his own mythos, albeit more competently) were really good space opera. A superhuman time-manipulating killing machine, giant inscrutable AIs, a crazy poet, a galaxy-spanning network of teleportation devices, all kinds of fun stuff.

This piece – for the love of the sweet baby Jesus, what dread ideological disease keeps striking SF authors I really liked in high school? I mean, didn’t anyone else used to admire Orson Scott Card?

page 218:  The reason why other activities do not provide a substitute is precisely because they are “civilized”:  in other words, bound by artificial rules.  Compared to war, der Ernstfall as the Germans used to say, every one of the many other activities in which men play with their lives is merely a game, and a trivial one at that.  Though war too is in one sense an artificial activity, it differs from all the rest in that it offers complete freedom, including paradoxically freedom from death.  War alone presents man with the opportunity of employing all his faculties, putting everything at risk, and testing his ultimate worth against an opponent as strong as himself.  It is the stakes that can make a game serious, even noble.  While war’s usefulness as a servant of power, interest, and profit may be questioned, the inherent fascination it has held for men at all times and places is a matter of historical fact. When all is said and done, the only way to account for this fascination is to regard war as the game with the highest stakes of all.

page 221:  However unpalatable the fact, the real reason why we have wars is that men like fighting, and women like those men who are prepared to fight on their behalf.

My extensive notes from the book are available at
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/9/22/02622/8960

I agree.

I’m always just hoping that someone can show me the science in the social science that will explain why people are immature and keep on having wars.

What is the cause of people being immoral?

Gsmoke made the correct point that technology is increasing the ability of the few to create greater destruction.

Since we don’t really know what makes people immature and destructive, being mature won’t help us that much to prevent the destruction.

Why are the “adults” so impotent?

There’s an awful amount of bedwetting crap about the “Restoration of the Caliphate” knocking around on in wingerdom. The fact that it’s as only slightly more likely than us growing wings doesn’t seem to diminish the meme’s strength. It’s crap from wingnuts who’ve rarely used a passport. One fantasy of reactionaries feeding the fantasies of another set of reactionaries.

But just like other neocons, though (indeed this is where they all part company with conservatives), he’s deeply ambivalent about what to do with these passions. Whether to endorse them, or tame them. The doses of romantic endorsement that one finds in Bloom, for instance, can also be discerned at times in Kagan. Which means, I guess, that neocon romanticism may well have sources other than Leo Strauss. (It’s hard to call Kagan Snr a Straussian. He’d never try, for instance, defending Strauss/Bloom’s Plato.) His son, Robert, on the other hand, more of a ‘manly man’ perhaps, is far more explicit in endorsing the romanticism, seeking to reinfuse politics with these impulses Greek. Just to make sure that modernity never turns us all into unmanly last men.

Is that like the way Chris Muir reads Kant?

What are the anti-imperialists hoping for, to turn the whole world forever more into a collection of 21st century Switzerlands?

How dull is that?

It might seem dull to a child. To me, it seems the hight of adulthood to end the endless wars.

In actuality, we have entered a period in time when readily available technology enables small groups of individuals to create the same kind of havoc and damage that previously were only available to states and armies. We may be going into a period of real chaos especially if climate change effects start hitting home and peak oil is a reality. I’d study walordism and the Period of Warring States in ancient Chinese history for parallels.

Armchair warriors are always a nuisance. Armchair warriors directing operations are a disaster.

As for VD Hanson, when I heard him on his “In Depth” interview on CSPAN II explain to a caller that the US fought WWII to end the Holocaust, I realized that this man knows nothing about modern history. He has turned himself into a lugubrious buffoon.