Upon Mars.

Originally Posted By: Cmiller

And, more surely, some background music could have been added to set tone. However, Jeff never did add music to his games. Its sad that i frown upon that. Music really helps my attitude toward playing a game. It would've been nice, but not "too" necessary i suppose.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

The First World War, by the late John Keegan. It has a lot about the eastern fronts, which never bogged down in trench warfare like the western front. I guess the main new idea I got from it was just to see that what I had always thought of as the great debate about the war, on the western Allied side, is really a false dichotomy.

One side of the debate holds that the British and French generals were a bunch of heartless morons who blindly sent thousands to obviously pointless slaughter. The other points out that they tried constantly to improvise new methods, in a technologically unprecedented conflict, and eventually developed the modern combined arms tactics that broke the stalemate.

After reading this one last book about the war, I've decided that it was probably both. The commanders on both sides did constantly innovate, and did try to achieve results while avoiding high casualties. They just didn't innovate nearly enough, or fast enough. And the enormous human cost of that failure was obvious enough even at the time that they should have known they had to do more. None of them was stupid, but none of the was really brilliant, and it's hard to excuse any major industrial power for failing to put brilliant people in charge of an enterprise like the Great War.

The other big thing I learned from this book was that the German tragedy was not the mirror image of the Allied one, but almost the opposite. The German army was a lot more professional than any of the others, especially in the high command. Some of the higher German commanders were brilliant, and moreover they devolved authority down to much lower levels than the Allies did, to the point where mere colonels sometimes made huge strategic decisions for the Germans, and so decisions were made faster. The German army adapted its tactics quite quickly, as well. Where the Allied armies seemed to assume by default that whatever they were doing was right, the German army's working assumption seemed to be that anything could be improved. The main reason that the Allied innovations were never big enough was that the Germans were very quick with effectively countermeasures.

The problem on the German side was just that they should never have gotten into the whole mess in the first place, because it was clear from the start that it was unlikely to end well. Keegan is the first author I've seen who seems actually to have read the famous Schlieffen plan, which was arguably the ultimate cause of the whole damn thing.

Von Schlieffen's pre-war grand plan was how imperial Germany thought it could beat everyone else single-handed, by overwhelming France quickly enough to be able to shift its forces east and fend off Russia before too late. What Keegan points out, and it's the first I've heard it, is that the plan was never even really a plan.

According to Keegan, the memorandum of von Schlieffen that was the final embodiment of the plan just tails off vaguely, shortly before the intended final battle around Paris, with implicit admissions that the numbers did not really add up. The existing French road network just did not permit enough German troops to move fast enough to get the job done. The failure wasn't completely absurd; war is tremendously uncertain, and the Schlieffen plan could arguably have given Germany a chance. But it was obvious even at the time that it was an enormous gamble with a high risk of catastrophic failure.

The brilliant and professional German high command seems to have taken that terrible gamble recklessly, partly in spite of their brilliant professionalism, but partly because of it. The existence of their proud military subculture — their exalted status in the semi-democratic society of imperial Germany, the public funding of their enormous armies — depended upon their being able to deliver a huge German victory. To have to confess beforehand that they had not made Germany strong enough to take on the world would have been as great a catastrophe for them as to lose a major war, and so for them there seemed to be little to lose. They took their best shot.

Originally Posted By: Harehunter

Aloreal, I had read that there were earlier codifications of law, but not being very familiar with them I did not speak to them.

And once again, you have taken my pitifully incomplete thought and expressed it in a manner that is more lucid and understandable. There is a distinct difference between morality and a legal system that is based upon morality.

As for morality being a derivative of social behavior that has developed in many non-human species, that may be a bit of a stretch. It was just a theory, and theories are meant to be examined and torn apart in order to prove them or to disprove them.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

I'll admit to being a religious Christian, but I'm also a materialist.

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba

That's really condescending, since the implication of that statement is that Mormons are awful people. It's like me saying, "Hey Upon Mars, you're a pretty decent and normal person for someone who lives in France." Wouldn't you be offended if I say that?