thanks for the correction!

Timothy

Footfall (Niven and Pournelle) – Aliens borrow their interstellar (Slower than light) technology.

Great song ‘the Jayhawk War’

Harry Turtledove – aliens and humans stand off for a while

(what is it about Science Fiction that we always seem to wind up with ‘Space Nazis?’ ;-)

There was a Lester del Ray where humans wind up taking on the power of Gods, as I recall.

HG Wells of course.

In fairness to Ringo, IIRC the people discussing the need to make women bear more children are the villains of the series

John Q, I think by “beaten by the time difference” you mean Weiner-pwned.

No, he’s not just slightly misquoted, he’s grossly misquoted. As Porter tells us, the closest thing to this that Burke actually wrote is the following:

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

Now the quote below from Boller and George is truly a real quotable quote—um, at least I hope it’s real:

Radicals have plenty of quotations from Karl Marx, anyway, and probably see no need to add to the Marxist treasure-house. Extreme rightists in America have a real problem, in any case; they would like to cite the Founding Fathers, but rarely find what they want in Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson. Hence the quote-faking.

Burke is often (slightly) misquoted:

http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/2298.html

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke
Irish orator, philosopher, & politician (1729 – 1797)

I’m not sure how we leap from Friday the 13th to de Tocqueville.

The former is no leftist plot (feminists hate the entire slasher genre, remember) although as Siskel and Ebert pointed out the first Slasher film (which I think was F13) had Jaime Lee Curtis defending herself with flair and innovativeness (that coat hanger moment).

(there’s an analogy: go and see ‘Dead Calm’, an early Nicole Kidman flick in which she is raped by a psycopath, but fights back fiercely and effectively. It’s based on a classic Jim Thompson novel. PS the first 60 seconds is one of the most shocking scenes in any film I have ever seen—but then I have a young niece).

It’s ridiculous to say that these films are popular amongst college educated liberals. I find them creepy at best, and misogynistic at worst.

What they are is unbridled capitalism. There is a market, they do well at the box office, Hollywood makes them.

What de Tocqueville does talk about, and a lot of conservative thinkers have noted, is that if you run a society on the mighty dollar, and only the mighty dollar, then you get a society which can cater to the lowest common cultural denominator.

That is more or less where the US is now. That’s not a liberal-lefty problem, that is a problem of unblemished free market capitalism. Be it fast food, violent films, drugs, whatever, these ills of modern society (if they are ills), are the product of the success of the US economy and social system.

This is a problem American conservatism just hasn’t come to grips with—rabid free market capitalism does not create a cohesive society. The impulse to serve the greater good is not a capitalist one, it is a collectivist one. Nobody goes to war for Exxon-Mobil.

As to US ‘greatness’, well speaking from the perspective of the rest of the world, if you don’t tackle your contribution to Global Warming, then ‘greatness’ is really just a smokescreen whilst we all go down to defeat.

And American ‘greatness’ has dragged us into the quagmire of the Middle East, at enormous harm to the local inhabitants, and to the great detriment of the safety of people in Europe (as well as North America).

Saying the Soviet Union was bad doesn’t justify everything the US did or does.

A little more humility on the exercise of power might be appropriate.

Just on the 12SS and the Canadians on Normandy Beach.

I had relatives there, it was anything but a cakewalk. The Germans were outnumbered and numbed by heavy bombardment. But they fought like tigers. And they had better tanks and anti tank guns (Tigers, Panthers, and ‘88s).

Had the numbers of men and materiel in Normandy been anything like equal, the Germans would have won. The good news is that we had overwhelming air power and artillery.

The Canadians fought well (see also Ortona, Italy, v. Von der Heydte’s paratroopers). But the SS really were crack troops, and battle hardened after fighting the Russians.

Sci fi was produced for decades by white, progress-loving American males, and there was an ungodly lot of slaughtering of the alien/mutant/hive-mind hordes that happened in these books. In the 60s, lots of young writers who were fairly left-wing realized that just beneath the surface of so many of these books was a hyper-chauvinist, fascist, genocidal tendency. So they responded in their own expatiating works. (These writers included Phillip Dick and James Tiptree Jr., who was recently the subject of a very well-received boigraphy.) One rather literal-minded response was The Word for the World Is Forest by Ursula LeGuin, in which a race of beings is brutally dispossed, but finally fights back and defeat their alien oppressors … who turn out to be us (I hope I’m remembering it right—I read it in the 70s). She was a really good writer, but this bit of agit-prop was not one of her shining moments.

A more lateral exploration was The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad. (Interestingly, I don’t think Spinrad is half the prose writer LeQuin is, but in this book, he creatred a clever little bit of postmodern auto-critique.) He imagines a world where Hitler never participated in politics, but instead imigrated to the U.S., illustrated science fiction pulps, and when his English got good, started writing them. The Iron Dream is Spinrad’s pulpy pastiche of a typical 1930-40s sci fi novel as written by Adolf Hitler. In it, the Earth is a post-atomic wasteland, mutants everywhere, with only a small number of pure humans existing in their own country. The purest human of all, however, lives it the fetid mutant nations, makes his way to the pure-human nation, proves his purity by the most rigorous tests, becomes the leader, and fights a war against the mutant nations, particularly one nation that uses forbidden technologies to create armies of identical mutant soldiers. He reluctantly concludes that the best solution to the mutant problem is elimination of them. Etc. The sick thing is that as you read the book and realize it is a history of the Nazis (in a very self-mythologizing way), it is also completely plausible as a period pulp sci-fi book.

This was clever, and there was a feeling after that generation of writers that the crude quasi-fascism and imperialism of earlier sci fi was a dead relic, but obviously it has come roaring back, alas.