I didn't much care for his politics, but he wrote some good stories.
But though I will also classify myself less than appealed by descriptions of his politics and I voted up davidw above I want to be clear I think it would be uncool to bash him for it at the time of his death.
"So what do I do? I agree with nearly everything he is for, but I’m better qualified to make it happen. I avoid some issues, but I go for his most popular ones and say, yeah! Want that! And I can make it happen better than he can. I’ve got the experience of working in government, but I’m not the establishment any more than Mr. Trump is. Heck, I’ll offer him a cabinet post. I could use his energy in my administration." -POURNE
http://voxday.blogspot.nl/2016/04/jerry-pournelle-on-donald-...
"But he has never wavered on his desire to fill the Supreme Court with Justices as near in scholarship and view to Scalia as possible; that alone would be enough to get me to the polls for Trump if he’s nominated." -POURNE
https://newrepublic.com/article/139817/donald-trump-wants-ig...
Both here and elsewhere, Lukacs argued that as white nations, America and Russia might profitably work together to prop each other up against a planet where they were a racial minority. The right-wing science-fiction writers Jerry Pournelle (an admirer of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini) and Larry Niven pursued a similar argument in their CoDominium novels, a long-running series of novels that started in 1973 and imagines a world where the U.S. and the Soviet Union work together to govern an unruly planet.
http://crookedtimber.org/2011/12/12/the-attractions-of-fasci...
At one point, Gingrich was supposed to be writing a novel with his friend, noted authority on the political attractions of Fascism, Jerry Pournelle. I don’t know what happened to it, but I imagine it would have made quite interesting reading (Inferno, Pournelle’s ‘Benito Mussolini redeems himself in an updated version of Dante’s hell’ schlock-epic with Larry Niven, is certainly entertaining if your tastes run to certain varieties of kitsch).
1) Niven didn't co-write any of the CoDominium novels, as far as I know. Mote had some historical references to it, but it was set hundreds of years after the CoDominium had collapsed.
2) The CoDominium weren't the "good guys" in those books.
3) Pournelle was not an "admirer of Mussolini".
Inaccurate to the point of being dishonest.
You're quite aggressive in this thread about someone who just died in a multitude of comments, and it's not like JP will rise up to defend himself. I don't like his politics either and I'm sure that some of what you wrote has merit but please have some respect. This simply isn't the time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15221830
And finally, read the words [3] of an anonymous MIT-AI Lab member who spent much of their own time helping POURNE and I as well as many other tourists. Even though POURNE isn't around to defend himself, I feel obligated to post this in response to the crass misunderstandings and misstatements of the facts in your attempt to smear the MIT AI Lab and its members (your own words: "Fuck them."), and because I agree with the point that "If he didn't want to have this as his enduring legacy, he had plenty of opportunity to make amends. And the offensive acts were not private ones.", and also with the points about asymmetric audience and the responsibility to do well by one's celebrity:
But you both implied the MIT-AI Lab staff came off as jerks, and it was coldtea who said "Fuck them", but I was responding to both of your misimpressions that POURNE doesn't deserve his well earned reputation as a drunken abusive jerk.
But I still ask both of you to please re-read the words I cited. Do you care to address those?
Do you agree that he violated the terms of the MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy, or not?
Do his own sputtering mis-punctuated threats of having his Pentagon friends, reporter friends, and even the House Armed Services Committee upset CSTACY sound like he was drunk to you, or do you believe he behaved that way all the time, his behavior was justified, CSTACY flushing his account was not justified, and do you continue to carry his water (or booze) by denying he was acting like a jerk?
Again, as the MIT-AI Lab staff member I quoted said, "If he didn't want to have this as his enduring legacy, he had plenty of opportunity to make amends."
Japan is a great ally. I lived there for over a decade, and I can say that I love the Japanese people. But I will admit - and their people of the WWII generation would too (although - sadly they are (have been) passing too quickly), it took a solid kick in the teeth to get them to calm down and cooperate.
Sometimes, with intense nation-state disagreement, things are settled at the point of a gun. Where there is a winner and a loser.
I like diplomacy as much (or more) than the next guy ... but it is irresponsible for a nation to be unprepared for when that doesn't work.
N.B. Fighting back after Pearl Harbor is a different kettle of fish than exporting democracy by force. We have no business doing the latter. It's obscene.
EDIT: I didn't downvote you. I appreciated your take on the query posed.
I didn't say one shouldn't be prepared to fight, just that fighting is almost never the right way to start it. Being prepared to defend yourself and your allies requires a vastly different inventory than cannon diplomacy.
I enjoyed the heck out of most of the Niven/Pournelle books I read, but the political didactics weren't part of the fun for me.
Heinlein wrote stories about heroic Libertarians and happy soldiers.
Pournelle wrote stories about incompetent and deluded liberal professors and conniving politicians.
Think about the scene with the kid in Moon is a Harsh Mistress where an entitled Earth boy gets handsy with a woman and they hold an impromptu court for him.
In the book, he learns from his mistake and is a "convert" to Heinlein's way of thinking. Pournelle's political writing was much more Manichean - the boy would be an entitled villain to his death.
It's been more than a couple of decades since I have read either. It seems that I need a refresher!
I suspect that you're not actually interested in the facts here.
Actually, the best commentary I have heard on this subject is that the Soviet Union fell of its own internal conflict and didn't need help from your pal Ronnie.
And to further reply to your cousin-comment to this one there is a huge difference between a constitutional mandate and a very specific implementation... Nobody mandated Star Wars.
The fact of the matter is SDI was a fraud on the American people, the United States wasted huge amounts of money on it, it couldn't 'zap incoming missiles', the defense contractors cheated, took the money and ran, which could have been used for much better purposes, because the Soviet Union collapsed for completely different reasons than overspending to compete with SDI.
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/18/science/technical-failures...
Technical Failures Bedevil Star Wars
>For the first time, after years of level financing at around $4 billion, opponents are on the verge of pushing through deep budget cuts in the program, which so far has cost $20 billion. The House leadership is moving to slice in half the Bush Administration's request of $4.7 billion for Star Wars for the fiscal year 1991, to $2.3 billion. The Senate voted to set aside $3.7 billion.
>[...] In a dozen or so major tests conducted this year, half have experienced problems, ranging from runaway rockets to warhead explosions to satellite malfunctions. The failures have marred the most ambitious and costly agenda in the program's history, intended to be the first broad demonstration of anti-missile technologies that have been incubating in laboratories, often amid great secrecy, for more than seven years since President Ronald Reagan started the program in March 1983.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/reagans-great-lie-in...
Reagan's great lie in the sky: Star Wars scientists may have deceived Moscow and Congress about the project, writes David Usborne in Washington
>Now, however, allegations are being made that the entire experiment was a scientific fraud. According to a New York Times report based on interviews with four unidentified former Reagan officials, the two missiles had secretly been fitted with radio beacons to guarantee their meeting in space.
It's almost as if the goals of Star Wars were written by a ... drunken science fiction writer!
But that doesn't mean we don't need everlasting world peace, or a pony, or whatever fantasy your heart desires, as N Korea proves daily.
There is no such thing. A good defense is the best offense.
And was considered by others to be the final straw that broke the Soviet Union and put an end to a 70 year Cold War and eliminated one of the most evil empires in the history of the human race.
"I don't think there is much in the constitution mandating space lasers."
Article I, Section 8. Unless you're one of those people who attempt to argue that armies and navies are limited to 18th century technology.
Yet ironically, so many of those very same people who once argued that are now enthusiastically supporting and carrying the water for Trump's total capitulation to Putin. Makes you wonder if they really mean what they say, or if they just lust for power and hold party over country. Hmm...
> It is claimed by apologists for the Reagan administration that, whatever the exaggerations in capability, some of it intentional, SDI was responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union. There is no serious evidence in support of this contention. Andrei Sakharov, Yevgeny Velikhov, Roald Sagdeev, and other scientists who advised President Mikhail Gorbachev made it clear that if the United States really went ahead with a Star Wars programme, the safest and cheapest Soviet response would be merely to augment its existing arsenal of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. In this way Star Wars could have increased, not decreased, the peril of thermonuclear war. At any rate, Soviet expenditures on space-based defences against American nuclear missiles were comparatively paltry, hardly of a magnitude to trigger a collapse of the Soviet economy. The fall of the USSR has much more to do with the failure of the command economy, growing awareness of the standard of living in the west, widespread disaffection from a moribund Communist ideology, and - although he did not intend such an outcome - Gorbachev's promotion of glasnost, or openness. Ten thousand American scientists and engineers publicly pledged they would not work on Star Wars or accept money from the SDI organization. This provides an example of widespread and courageous non-cooperation by scientists (at some conceivable personal cost) with a democratic government that had, temporarily at least, lost its way.
* I know Sagan isn't exactly a historian, but I'll choose his assessment of space war technology over other people's.
Wasn't Reagan also against big government? At least in his words?
If yes, working there would be contradictory for Jerry if he was "opposed to government" period, not if he was merely opposed to "big government".
That is a very, very generous way to characterize defense programs that wasted tens of billions of dollars without producing anything. When you're dealing with a public that finds details boring and is willing to lump it all under "defense spending," you can sort of get away with it.
Well, except for numerous technologies that are in use today. Our current missile defense program, which is fairly crucial right at the moment, greatly benefitted from SDI.
Details, details...
The thing that's frustrating about that (aside from the fact that people are ignorant of such things, but still feel qualified to comment on the topic) is that plenty of people knew it was bullshit three decades ago. The sheer hypocrisy of the politics of SDI is almost unique in human history, considering how much money was wasted by people who claimed to be concerned about excessive government spending.
Regardless, other SDI technologies such as Brilliant Pebbles and Brilliant Eyes are direct predecessors to current, successful, military technologies. There have also been many spinoffs benefiting civilians.
In the analogy Larry Page or Sergey Brin of Google would be Edward Teller, capable of forcing pursuit of an absurd project well past the point where it's obviously ridiculous to continue, simply because he can fire anyone he wants. But those guys aren't blatantly ideological, demented old men, and I'm not aware of Google ever burning money in a manner quite as cosmically absurd as Project Excalibur. The business wouldn't survive much of that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_national_missile...
Well, getting someone to spend themselves to death.
He wasn't shy about his politics and I think it's fair to say they were pretty far out to the right.