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Lets Read: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

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Stop: Neither Slurs nor Personal Attacks against other users are acceptable on SV
  • Staff Post
    • neither slurs nor personal attacks against other users are acceptable on sv
    Several users have been infracted for rules violations in this thread. @Scrivener has been hit under Rule 2: Don't Be Hateful for referring to @veteranMortal's character as a "fucking retard", as has @Mazeka for "correcting" this to "cunting twat". @hellgodsrus has been hit under Rule 3: Be Civil for telling @Scrivener to "go take a long walk off a short pier, and stop being a fucking idiot". All three have been threadbanned for three days.

    This sort of posting is not acceptable on Sufficient Velocity. Please refrain from the use of slurs, any slurs, and from making personal attacks against other users. And if you see this sort of thing, please report it rather than engaging in-thread, especially in a manner that is itself rules-violating. Rule 3: Be Civil still applies even if other posters are breaking the rules.
     
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    • Grey Rook said:
    Pardon the interjection, but what are strategic hamlets? I'm not familiar with that concept.

    Also, @veteranMortal, what is the Walla Walla? A prison of some kind, but which one?
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    It's where you isolate your rural population from potential insurgents by relocating them to "strategic hamlets" which your forces can police the entry of guerrillas to. It was a Vietnam War program inspired by British programs in Malaya. Basically another attempt by counter insurgents to 'drain the sea' to get at the fish.

    I can't Believe It's Not Concentration Camps basically.
     
    Grey Rook said:
    Pardon the interjection, but what are strategic hamlets? I'm not familiar with that concept.

    Also, @veteranMortal, what is the Walla Walla? A prison of some kind, but which one?
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    Washington State Penitentiary. In universe it is where the Americans put "quislings" - allegedly they then provide therapy and so on, but like, it's a prison, not a hospital.
     
    OOC: By the way, as a thought? The Royalists is four syllables and takes longer than the two syllable name of Ingsoc to type. Even just calling them Royalists takes three syllables and longer to type. Nicknaming them Ingsoc shows what kind of ideology they have and yet is a more subtle reference than what Channel 4 corrupted the reference by calling them Big Brother. Though calling The King that could be a thing.

    Calling them Ingsoc while in the pub is something I could see happening.
     
    Oh man

    I just discovered this and was waiting for this shithole of a chapter!

    I'm not about to divulge my whole life story at this hour of the day. Suffice to say, I got lucky and despise myself for that fact every day. There are better, kinder people than me who should have been in my place, and I hate that.

    God I hate every word that comes out of this mans mouth. I saw Windsor, and whilst that castle was certainly big (magnified by the effect that it being on a raised piece of land has as you walk towards it), Stalwart against Zombies it ain't.

    It it survived, it's because a lot of money was spent on turning it into a fortress. I can't help but wonder how many people would be alive if that money was spent in other ways.

    I'm in the mood for an old style cursing, so a pox on the monarchy til the day they perish.
     
    IC: Just everyone in the UK remember that SV is not actually a secure environment. If you're in the UK, Les Majeste laws do apply if you're in an area where someone will try to enforce them.
     
    Wade Garrett said:
    Just piping up to say that while the exact timeline of WWZ is fluid the most likely person to be Governor of California having the various evacuated state governments in exile crash on his couch is...Arnold Schwarzenegger, yes, THAT Arnold Schwarzenegger.
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    So when Bobby Jindal ran to California, did he, at any time, scream "GET TO DA CHOPPAH!" or was he weak, uncool, and undeserving of surviving the politically questionable zombie apocalypse?
     
    you know despite how the japanese part is written I like how two people from different sides of life's coin were united by mere circumstance to become a zombie slaying duo. how can Max be so annoying on one hand then write this. Seriously the unintentional duality, there was also that part where said one part of the duo was taken in by a member of the Ainu. also this is OOC.
     
    Yeah.

    Max Brooks had-has real artistic talent. It's just combined with a lot of incredibly lazy, stereotype-riddled worldbuilding and a profound lack of reflection on some of the problems with the cultural zeitgeist he wrote the work in.
     
    Simon_Jester said:
    Yeah.

    Max Brooks had-has real artistic talent. It's just combined with a lot of incredibly lazy, stereotype-riddled worldbuilding and a profound lack of reflection on some of the problems with the cultural zeitgeist he wrote the work in.
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    And it's a damn shame but maybe the spiritual successor in 2020 has some potentia----*Reads Devolution* GOD DAMN IT.
     
    John_Cruelty said:
    That's one hell of a reaction.

    How bad is it and in what ways?
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    The novel's message is not particularly subtle: Nature Is Not Nice, anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves, and trying to force it to adapt for our convenience is always going to end badly. Also, a skill set that's based on anything but manual labor is useless and you deserve to die for having it.
     
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    ShuraNoDougai said:
    The novel's message is not particularly subtle: Nature Is Not Nice, anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves, and trying to force it to adapt for our convenience is always going to end badly. Also, a skill set that's based on anything but manual labor is useless and you deserve to die for having it.
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    ...I wonder if Max the novelist thinks he'd survive the zombie apocalypse.
     
    RiverDelta said:
    ...I wonder if Max the novelist thinks he'd survive the zombie apocalypse.
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    The anti tech angle is consistently brought up like In an interview, a former lawyer for a tech company describes going to a tech conference where a man was showing off how he had hacked his hand to play the piano by sequentially stimulating his muscles with electrodes, then discussing the possibilities that this technology, applied to an exosuit, offers to the disabled and the elderly. Frank raises a possibility of his own: that somebody could hack that suit and force the person wearing it to shoot up a school. Frank describes the man as looking like Frank had just kicked over his sandcastle, having never even considered the possibility of how his revolutionary technology could be used for ill.

    I don't think hacking works that way....
     
    RiverDelta said:
    ...I wonder if Max the novelist thinks he'd survive the zombie apocalypse.
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    It's a classic delusion among population-reduction-will-restore-virtue types - having never experienced survival filters like starvation, war, oppression, or genocide, the proponents tend to overlook the part where if you reduce the population by 90% that they're prrooooobably not gonna be the lucky ones. The continuation of privilege or in-group membership is often assumed by people who currently enjoy it, regardless of their "qualifications" for the new environment they propose or the disruption in the social order that provides it.

    So you get moralising about Who Is Worthy - something that happens to other writers of this kind of thing, like a ton of milscifi stuff, so your Ringos and the like (who go much further, and are very explicit about their moral judgements) - where the very act of writing about how totally cool it is to be a "Person Who Chops Wood, Respects the Troops, Builds Houses out of Wood, and Shoots Gun (or Swings Shaolin Spade)" is itself passively insulting the author for being a nebbish who pokes at a keyboard like a nerd instead of having lots of procreative sex while playing the guitar.

    Maybe an easy contrast is to Cormac McCarthy, who definitely doesn't think he will inherit the wastes, or that survival is for the virtuous.

    Edit: Actually, thinking about it, a lot of those heroes are Ex-Navy Seals with STEM Degrees who make their own guns - so some noncombat stuff is sufficiently masculine - though they usually focus on the part where he has a sub-MoA grouping with every combat system of the US Military circa 2030.

    ShuraNoDougai said:
    I don't think hacking works that way....
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    Yeah, all you need is a Good Guy hacking an Exosuit to deal with the Bad Guy hacking an Exosuit. In fact, you could make exosuits mandatory, so that should a crime be detected then they automatically upload an Agent ala the Matrix who can pilot random civilians.
     
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    ScottishMongol said:
    The story is bookended by a scene where a female Episcopalian Bishop is burned at the stake, not for anything in particular, just for being a female priest. This is presented as the final victory over Cultural Marxism.
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    Not just for being a female priest, but for allegedly worshipping Isis. This is what makes her being Episcopalian weird, because 'pretend christian worshipping Isis' is an old anti-catholic trope. Old as in featured in 1950's Evangelical propaganda like Chick Tracts.

    So either she is an example of 'everything evil is the same' on Lind's part, or she was just a random catholic woman as seen through Lind's SI.
     
    Iceblocks said:
    Not just for being a female priest, but for allegedly worshipping Isis. This is what makes her being Episcopalian weird, because 'pretend christian worshipping Isis' is an old anti-catholic trope. Old as in featured in 1950's Evangelical propaganda like Chick Tracts.

    So either she is an example of 'everything evil is the same' on Lind's part, or she was just a random catholic woman as seen through Lind's SI.
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    Yeah but that's definitely a case of Lind not knowing what liberals actually believe.

    But also, no, they specifically say that if she was just a heretic they would deport her, it's claiming to be a female priest that gets her the death penalty.
     
    The book, or that part of the book, is written by a mind that is very deep in the sociopathic depravity of "screw you, we won, we don't have to justify doing what we want and this is what we want."

    From a Watsonian perspective, because it's the memoirs of a victorious military commander whose control over his own little right-wing version of Democratic Kampuchea in New England is uncontested and who has killed or outlived all his rivals, and so can now say whatever he wants as long as it doesn't conflict with the id of his followers' fanaticism.

    From a Doylist perspective, because the subconscious of William Lind is a very ugly place.
     
    ShuraNoDougai said:
    yeah I know this but It wouldn't have amounted to much if American Lendlease hadn't been there to provide steam for the soviets the Russian logistics chain was in absolute shambles after it went through Stalin's Purge to solidify his personal power when the Purges spilled into the Red Army itself from grunts to high command
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    I know this is dozens of pages back, but I have to interject here. If this were remotely true, then American lend-lease wouldn't have made one whit of difference. Because the Russian logistical chain was what was necessary to make sure the lend-lease got to where it would do any good once it reached the Soviet Union, instead of sitting on the docks gathering dust as happened with much of the material the Entente sent Imperial Russia in the First World War. The basic problem here is you confuse "material" with "logistics", when material is in reality but one component of logistics.

    Historians debate whether lend-lease was necessary for the Soviets to survive or merely a facilitator for victory[1], what they don't debate is that without the Soviet domestic industrial system which had been built up by then - which includes the overseeing bureaucratic system that was necessary to make the industry function and which lend-lease had to be filtered through once it reached Soviet shores - the Soviet Union would have collapsed.[2]

    [1]As an aside, there's also no debate on how necessary American lend-lease was for Britain's survival. There's a clear consensus that Britain would have had to sue for peace without it once they ran out of money to actually buy the American products under cash-and-carry.
    [2]Now whether the Stalinist method in building up the aforementioned industrial system was the only or the best way to do it... that's much more contentious.

    and boy would the Russians be feeling that loss of experienced everything when Germany decided to break the treaty.
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    ... And then the Americans would have felt it when they have to fight millions of more Germans and their material without the Russians killing or destroying them. Lend-lease was not a kindness, it was a transaction.
     
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    obssesednuker said:
    [1]As an aside, there's also no debate on how necessary American lend-lease was for Britain's survival. There's a clear consensus that Britain would have had to sue for peace without it once they ran out of money to actually buy the American products under cash-and-carry.
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    What, in particular, would the British have been unable to afford that would have made the defense untenable?
     
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