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Everyone has had some embarrasing fuckups in espionage (Venlo incident and Cambridge five for Brits, for example), meanwhile you don't hear much of the success stories or the stuff you hear is coloured as retired agents try to make their in all likelihood dull posts sound more like James Bond or Jack Ryan.
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Aug 21, 2018 21:07
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Cyrano4747 posted:On the other hand they’re REALY good at spying on each other quote:Bad Hair Day
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Aug 21, 2018 21:15
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Nenonen posted:Everyone has had some embarrasing fuckups in espionage (Venlo incident and Cambridge five for Brits, for example), meanwhile you don't hear much of the success stories or the stuff you hear is coloured as retired agents try to make their in all likelihood dull posts sound more like James Bond or Jack Ryan. I'm reading The Zimmerman Telegram by Barbara Tuchman right now. Keith Jeffery's Official History of MI6 is also good.
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Aug 21, 2018 21:44
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Nenonen posted:Everyone has had some embarrasing fuckups in espionage (Venlo incident and Cambridge five for Brits, for example), meanwhile you don't hear much of the success stories or the stuff you hear is coloured as retired agents try to make their in all likelihood dull posts sound more like James Bond or Jack Ryan. Listen to Spycast, a podcast about Intel work. It's great. https://www.spymuseum.org/multimedia/spycast/
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Aug 21, 2018 22:31
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Azerban posted:want to hear about this one
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Aug 21, 2018 23:19
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Comrade Gorbash posted:So you're saying the French are very good at spying. They didn't surrender, they just infiltrated German territory with millions of spies.
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Aug 21, 2018 23:39
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Panzeh posted:Yep, this is why in Gettysburg in the shots where you actually have both shooter and shootee in frame, they're aiming high. Most of the time they try to edit it so they can show the shooters shooting straight.
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Aug 21, 2018 23:42
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13th KRRC War Diary, 21st August 1918 posted:By 4.30 a.m. all Companies had reported themselves in position. "D" Coy having previously relieved the Coy. of 1st/1st HERTS. in the outpost line. The outpost line was was held just prior to zero by patrols.
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Aug 21, 2018 23:42
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WW2 Data A day late but not a bomb short, its the end of the AN series of bombs, and we get to see a number of depth bombs, two aircraft mines, and a couple of smaller bombs used in clusters. Which depth bombs were built with a round nose, and which with a flat nose? Why shouldn't you use an aircraft mine as a bomb? All that and more at the blog!
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Aug 21, 2018 23:57
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_G._Sebold chitoryu posted this in the cold war thread: chitoryu12 posted:https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/15/botched-cia-communications-system-helped-blow-cover-chinese-agents-intelligence/ also:
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Aug 22, 2018 01:07
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Was the government in Starship Troopers fascist? Everybody says it's fascist but I would say no because because it had a democracy (albeit limited) open to any race, doesn't have any party institutions in parallel to national institutions, has freedom of speech and doesn't seem to demonize any group in their society (though arguably it does that to the aliens). I don't know much about fascism though so I could be totally off base. Wikipedia makes a big deal about fascism having a "rebirth myth" where the fascists say they have redeemed society from degeneracy and the ST government does that hard core.
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Aug 22, 2018 01:15
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OctaviusBeaver posted:Was the government in Starship Troopers fascist? Everybody says it's fascist but I would say no because because it had a democracy (albeit limited) open to any race, doesn't have any party institutions in parallel to national institutions, has freedom of speech and doesn't seem to demonize any group in their society (though arguably it does that to the aliens). I don't know much about fascism though so I could be totally off base. Wikipedia makes a big deal about fascism having a "rebirth myth" where the fascists say they have redeemed society from degeneracy and the ST government does that hard core. I haven't read the books but from what I remember off hand/second hand is that the book gov't was sort of an Idealized Garrison State.
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Aug 22, 2018 01:36
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P-Mack posted:Bunch of people get dragged out of their chairs and shot in the back of the head for spying, starting a few years back. Speculation about how they all got found out, whether it was a mole or double agent or whatever. Holy poo poo. Were these chinese nationals or what? God drat, what a fuckup that was.
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Aug 22, 2018 02:54
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I didn't realize there were still full-on cold war-style summary killings of foreign agents. I mean, I thought we were nominally having amiable diplomatic relations. Surely if France found a US agent snooping around somewhere and just tossed them in a lake with cement shoes, it'd be some kind of diplomatic incident?
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Aug 22, 2018 03:32
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SlothfulCobra posted:I didn't realize there were still full-on cold war-style summary killings of foreign agents. They were Chinese nationals passing on information to the US, not US agents.
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Aug 22, 2018 03:44
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SlothfulCobra posted:I didn't realize there were still full-on cold war-style summary killings of foreign agents. I mean, the US and China both regularly execute people for other crimes still. Granted the feds haven't actually executed anyone for spying since the Rosenbergs, but the option is there. In the hypothetical situation of France executing a US spy now, well, it's been illegal to do executions in France since 1981, further EU compacts it signed onto made it impermissible to reintroduce executions except during war and certain emergencies, and then in 2007 they amended the constitution to forbid the death penalty at that level. So France upending all that just to execute a spy would be indicative of a whole raft of major changes, you know? Raenir Salazar posted:I haven't read the books but from what I remember off hand/second hand is that the book gov't was sort of an Idealized Garrison State. I guess you could say that. It is unabashedly a pro-military state which uses the military for a lot of things that would be completely civilian in our world. But that's also against a lot of what fascists do in the real world once they're in power. It's also been mentioned a lot by others, but it's also a story about how Heinlein felt about his own personal peacetime military service in the 30s, and stories from his friends who actually went and fought during World War II, and the way many of them felt being part of the military specifically helped them and him (and also how many people just didn't stick to it and would have been better off not being there).
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Aug 22, 2018 03:55
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He doesn't go into a ton of detail but the gist of it is that the democracies fell apart after a big war with China and the veterans of the war took over to restore order and somehow ended up forming a world government. Everybody gets generic rights (right to a trial, right to free speech, property rights etc.) but to get the franchise you have to serve a 2 year term in the military which is pretty dangerous. You only get the franchise once you get out, soldiers can't vote. I think the view of it as fascist caught on after the movie, Verhoeven hated the book, ditched the nuance and made everyone dumb. People watch the movie and assume the book must have been advocating what the movie was making fun of.
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Aug 22, 2018 04:06
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It is also important that, in the book, military service was explicitly the easiest means of getting the vote, not the only method. The movie was a butchery of the setting - almost on the same level as a "Batman kills everyone even remotely criminal" adaptation of Batman would be. Even the scenes that are shared between the two are heavily distorted in the adaptation.
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Aug 22, 2018 04:10
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Gnoman posted:It is also important that, in the book, military service was explicitly the easiest means of getting the vote, not the only method. IIRC there's a scene where Rico and his buddies on leave get into a bar fight with some merchant marine sailors because five years in the merchant marine gets you the vote as opposed to two years in the military. Gave me the impression that serving in pretty much any public service position or working on vital infrastructure or some such does it, military service is just the fastest because it's dangerous. It's certainly authoritarian in tone, but I think Heinlein was at the time more on an idea that you should only have the right to vote if you've served the country in some fashion, which is its own can of worms but within the context of the book I'd hesitate to describe what little is really described of the setting as fascist. A big part of fascism is usually an intense xenophobia, and a small part of the book is how there's a third alien race that's fighting the bugs alongside the humans.
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Aug 22, 2018 04:39
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Cythereal posted:A big part of fascism is usually an intense xenophobia, and a small part of the book is how there's a third alien race that's fighting the bugs alongside the humans. Hitler had oriental friends.
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Aug 22, 2018 04:43
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Epicurius posted:They were Chinese nationals passing on information to the US, not US agents. Yeah. Some of them were just shot in the head with no arrest or trial so iffy as far as due process goes, but no diplomatic issue.
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Aug 22, 2018 04:56
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Gnoman posted:It is also important that, in the book, military service was explicitly the easiest means of getting the vote, not the only method. The movie isn't a butchery of the setting, it simply presents things even more through the eyes and mindset of Johnny Rico than the book does. And frankly in his later years after writing the book, Heinlein grew more dismissive of it and was somewhat embarrassed about the way he chose to set it. He'd probably have found the movie a good take on the book if he hadn't died a good 9 years before it came out. The movie also doesn't eliminate mentions of civilian service or anything. It's just Johnny skips out on things like that in favor of going in as infantry.
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Aug 22, 2018 05:21
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Early sci fi was all about that sort of bold, potentially misguided, imagining of some weird way that society could be in the future. It's a lot like how in another book he goes into a lot of unnecessary detail about the whole newfangled polygamy system he deems necessary for his new space future. Although now that I think of it, I'm not sure how I'd identify fascism from an internal "good faith" perspective. It's only particularly obvious from an external viewpoint where you can see the falsehood and totalitarianism and such.
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Aug 22, 2018 05:49
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fishmech posted:The movie isn't a butchery of the setting, it simply presents things even more through the eyes and mindset of Johnny Rico than the book does. And frankly in his later years after writing the book, Heinlein grew more dismissive of it and was somewhat embarrassed about the way he chose to set it. He'd probably have found the movie a good take on the book if he hadn't died a good 9 years before it came out. I think the best rebuttal to that is why Rico was whipped in both versions. In the movie, he was "responsible" for the death of a fellow trainee in the stupidest live-fire exercise in history, because he made that trainee remove his helmet shortly before a third trainee was sent into electroconvulsive shock and emptied a magazine into the guys face. In the book, he "detonated" a dummy nuclear warhead during a training op in a manner that would have been entirely safe - but did so by "eyeballing" it instead of running the proper calculations. Or, in other words, a level of professionalism that is leaps and bounds above the best we see from the movie military is grounds for punishment in the book version.
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Aug 22, 2018 06:09
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Gnoman posted:I think the best rebuttal to that is why Rico was whipped in both versions. And what part of that was supposed to be a rebuttal? They both set up rather weird and pointless training exercise with the goal of having an excuse for savage corporal punishment, but the movie's version adheres more closely to what sort of situation would involve vicious corporal punishment, and is more in tune with Johnny Rico's base character of "somewhat lazy, incurious, and unambitious scion of a fairly well off family, joining up with the military for not particularly good reasons".
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Aug 22, 2018 06:16
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I'm rather tired right now, and the points I'm trying to make just don't want to come across. I know that there are much better scenes to illustrate what I am trying to say, but the only other scene I can remember that is roughly equivalent between the two is the guy at the recruiting center - the movie clearly presented it as a "this is the only use we can get out of this thing, shove him there", and he quite clearly was encouraging the group to join up. The book stated explicitly that he was placed there in order to scare people away from joining up just to get the "easy" vote, to the point where he wasn't allowed to wear his good prosthetics on duty because the crude ones were scarier. I probably shouldn't even have joined the conversation right now, but by the time I check the thread the topic will have moved on entirely.
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Aug 22, 2018 06:23
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The guy who lived through the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands had a very different idea of the glories of militarism and professionalism than a guy who served in a peacetime military. Verhoeven was very much channeling his own frustrations with the fetishization of the military into that movie, along with a healthy dose of satire of American military exceptionalism tossed in. The way I've always seen it is that the book was the idealized, propaganda version of how it worked and the movie was how the grunt on the ground saw things, since he's not the guy cool enough to get the shiny power armor like everyone else. The more time I spend in the military, the more I see the movie version as being a more accurate version of what happens when there's a society whereby the military dictates everything, but that's probably just my inner alcoholic airman thinking.
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Aug 22, 2018 06:33
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Gnoman posted:I think the best rebuttal to that is why Rico was whipped in both versions. The book has time to dwell on stuff like that, and the movie doesn't so it replaces the razor-crease professionalism with sadism in training that verges on outright hazing. It gets to a similar endpoint with respect to the narrative differences - the government is a mean unfeeling monolith that extracts a high price for political agency. In the book, it's being chewed up and spit out by a system that sends you up for whipping because you simulated dropping a mini-nuke in training without using the right yield tables (I think?) whereas in the movie it beats the living poo poo out of you then throws you into the bug meatgrinder. Heck they killed Rico's dad in the movie, blew up the Rodger Young, and never even mentioned the ship's theme song. If I recall correctly (it's been over 20 years since I read the book I think) Rico's dad joins up after BA gets hit and the story leans on their relationship to illustrate the whole alll-consuming nature of the military/government.
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Aug 22, 2018 06:39
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fishmech posted:And what part of that was supposed to be a rebuttal? They both set up rather weird and pointless training exercise with the goal of having an excuse for savage corporal punishment, but the movie's version adheres more closely to what sort of situation would involve vicious corporal punishment, and is more in tune with Johnny Rico's base character of "somewhat lazy, incurious, and unambitious scion of a fairly well off family, joining up with the military for not particularly good reasons". In the book the training exercise wasn't pointless and he did deserve punishment (setting aside whether corporal punishment is ever justified in the first place). I think the scenario was simulating night combat by having a blindfold on. He cheated and peaked under the blindfold. If he skipped out on learning to do it the right way he could get his whole platoon killed when they had to do it for real.
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Aug 22, 2018 06:52
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Gnoman posted:I'm rather tired right now, and the points I'm trying to make just don't want to come across. I know that there are much better scenes to illustrate what I am trying to say, but the only other scene I can remember that is roughly equivalent between the two is the guy at the recruiting center - the movie clearly presented it as a "this is the only use we can get out of this thing, shove him there", and he quite clearly was encouraging the group to join up. The book stated explicitly that he was placed there in order to scare people away from joining up just to get the "easy" vote, to the point where he wasn't allowed to wear his good prosthetics on duty because the crude ones were scarier. These are again just questions of the perspective shown on the same sorts of actions by the same characters though. Here's the script for the scene in the movie: 34 INT LOBBY - DAY - THE RECRUITING SERGEANT is missing one arm. He smiles broadly at the three teenagers. RECRUITING SERGEANT Fresh meat for the grinder, eh ? CARL That's us. Where do we sign ? He turns in his chair to grab the forms. Johnny and his friends see that he is also missing both legs. The Recruiting Sergeant catches them looking, smiles even wider. RECRUITING SERGEANT Here and here and here. As he signs, Johnny looks at the campaign ribbons on the Recruiting Sergeant's chest. We hear MUSIC: "The Mobile Infantry Anthem" plays softly in honor of distant battles. RECRUITING SERGEANT Welcome to the adventure of Federal Service. Follow the blue line. The movie doesn't need to explicitly state that this guy who's been shot to hell is meant to scare off people who would be less intent, the acting around the scene does that. But in the movie we're only seeing Johnny and his pals showing up and they're all about equally hyped, so they ignore how shot up he is. And of course, a scene or two later Johnny's getting inducted and is quickly reveead to be only useful as a grunt: 39 INT DEBRIEF - DAY - JOHNNY sits across from a MAJOR who views a list on a monitor Johnny can't see. MAJOR I'm happy to tell you that you've been accepted for Federal Service. JOHNNY Wow, that's great. MAJOR Looks like you're quite an athlete. Boy, look at those reaction stats. The Major clucks his tongue as he highlights the last category on his list: MOBILE INFANTRY. MAJOR My job is to determine what you're best suited for. JOHNNY I want to be a pilot, sir. MAJOR Sorry, son, no way. Your school records say you don't have the math skills. Johnny swallows this. He knew it was coming. The Major deletes "Pilot" from the list, then several other items. MAJOR That rules out the scientific and engineering applications, and I'm afraid we reserve non-military options for candidates who are frankly less able-bodied than you are, son... He turns the monitor around and shows Johnny the list. The only thing left is MOBILE INFANTRY. MAJOR It looks like the only thing you're good for is cannon fodder. I'm putting you down for the Mobile Infantry. (Now there's a key little bit there, the Major explicitly mentioned that there's non-military options here in the movie version too, and we can gather that even an able bodied guy would have been eligible for them if perhaps they had worked harder at school. But Johnny didn't work hard so he's sent to the mobile infantry) Don Gato posted:The guy who lived through the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands had a very different idea of the glories of militarism and professionalism than a guy who served in a peacetime military. Verhoeven was very much channeling his own frustrations with the fetishization of the military into that movie, along with a healthy dose of satire of American military exceptionalism tossed in. To be fair the original novel also spends a good amount of time satirizing military aspects and especially traits of soldiers, especially fresh ones but also ones who've been in too long. It is clear that as much as Heinlein loved his time in the military and was proud of the World War II service his friends and colleagues would go on to render, Heinlein also believed there was a bunch of people who needed the military to make them "a real man" and a lot of people who's only hope to amount to anything was in the military via lack of particular talent elsewhere. It's like, Starship Troopers the novel was never a full on satire. But it was a book with a lot of parts of satire throughout it and aimed in different directions. This is part of what makes Verhoeven's full-satire movie version work so well. Because Verhoeven was able to recognize places to hook in more satire, sometimes just use Heinlein's own for various aspects, and bring a perspective to military service that complements and adds to the mostly US peacetime and then WWII/Korea perspectives. I would also say it's kinda funny how Heinlein had been in the midst of writing Stranger in Strange Land, noted for the weird hippy peace and love vibe it advocates, but then he saw some ads against nuclear arms. So this disrupts his thoughts for a bit and he responds by putting together Starship Troopers, and as it's getting ready to be published, he's going back to work in finishing Stranger In A Strange Land and publishing the whole book two years after ST came out.
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Aug 22, 2018 07:00
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To me, the greatest image of the book is right at the beginning, when the MI troopers are being fired out the twin barrels of a shotgun (the Navy ship) at the planet below. I still hold out hope that one day someone will do this with enough of a budget to do the powersuits.
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Aug 22, 2018 07:13
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MrMojok posted:To me, the greatest image of the book is right at the beginning, when the MI troopers are being fired out the twin barrels of a shotgun (the Navy ship) at the planet below. Yeah, what annoyed about the movie even more after reading the book is that in the book, you give people power armor than can jump buildings and fire mini nukes... and the bugs still gently caress them up. Also, the first battle in the book is them attacking a Skinnies (other aliens', make your own Cold War analogy) city to scare them out of neutrality or something. Love one of the last scenes where they're on some bug planets, power armor protecting them from hostile atmosphere, and then they bring in the psyker, who's going through it all in his duds. Very eerie. Then again, it was not long after I had finished reading Deathstalker series and boy does it get stranger with espers.
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Aug 22, 2018 07:33
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The best thing about this is not that the guy was stupid enough to remove the explosives from a 100 year old mine by hand. The best thing is that he asked what it was, was told in no uncertain terms that it was full of potentially unstable and toxic explosives and that he should leave it the gently caress alone and call the cops. After learning this he rolled it up a hill with two of his mates, throw it in the trunk of his car, drove to wherever, dumped it out of the trunk of the car, and then removed the explosives by hand. In the picture he looks like he might be a teen, so I guess being a moron is kind of forgivable, but holy poo poo. e: He's also told that particular explosive is toxic and dangerous through skin contact, and then posts a picture of him holding a chunk with his bare hands.
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Aug 22, 2018 08:49
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I remember it as Rico getting cocky and popping off that simulated nuke a bit too danger close to some friendlies. Funny how many ways people remember that scene. I don't seem to still have my copy. Honestly my military experience tended a lot more towards the pointless, brutal and stupid than some slick ideal frictionless professional society-machine.Cyrano4747 posted:On the other hand they’re REALY good at spying on each other That is just a side effect of already having an eye on your neighbors 24/7 to ensure that they don't drag street dirt into the apartment block staircase. ORDNUNG MUSS SEIN
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Aug 22, 2018 09:44
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HEY GUNS posted:i'm grateful almost every day that when i was an idiot 18 year old who didn't know any better the two reenacting units i bumbled into because they happened to be the ones in my hometown were both insane about safety Yeah- I think there's a blog post from a guy who was a sergeant in a re-enactment unit that was in the filming for Gods and Generals and he just about got cold cocked by a stuntman when he tapped the dude on the shoulder. He mentioned that real sergeants would've been pushing and shoving to get people into the lines, but a tap on the shoulder is how things were done. The stuntmen got into the units basically to die to artillery- when you see the explosion on the ground and the comical flipping guy, that's a stuntman, not a doughy re-enactor. I think modern ACW movies don't really shoot with tons of re-enactors any more, and i imagine if they did they'd just go the CGI route(G&G did in some of the bigger scenes).
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Aug 22, 2018 11:53
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fishmech posted:I mean, the US and China both regularly execute people for other crimes still. Granted the feds haven't actually executed anyone for spying since the Rosenbergs, but the option is there. This is a minor point that isn't super salient to the main discussion, but I think it's worth noting that the US executed 3 federal inmates since 2001. Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing, Juan Raul Garza for the drug-related murders of 8 people, and Louis Jones Jr for a rape and murder.
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Aug 22, 2018 11:56
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Panzeh posted:Yeah- I think there's a blog post from a guy who was a sergeant in a re-enactment unit that was in the filming for Gods and Generals and he just about got cold cocked by a stuntman when he tapped the dude on the shoulder. He mentioned that real sergeants would've been pushing and shoving to get people into the lines, but a tap on the shoulder is how things were done. thanks to them i am paranoid about gunpowder, which is a good thing to be HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 12:13 on Aug 22, 2018 |
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Aug 22, 2018 12:08
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Cessna posted:Yes, it's on their flag: Was watching the movie, operation petticoat last night, there was a reference to it in the movie.
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Aug 22, 2018 12:21
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Panzeh posted:I think modern ACW movies don't really shoot with tons of re-enactors any more, and i imagine if they did they'd just go the CGI route(G&G did in some of the bigger scenes). We'll never get another film like Waterloo where we literally had several Soviet brigades donated to play the part of the armies. Also Starship Troopers is odd from the various angles you try to look at it. Heinlein is asking the question 'how do you build a society where the prevailing sentiment is a desire to build for the good of everyone?' In doing so he posits the perfect Communist society (the bugs) against a (maybe unintentionally) fascist society (humanity). Inbetween he sticks the Skinnies who are implied to be liberal democrats (i.e. us right now) and whom are blown between the wills of the two more focused societies. I think the biggest mistake with the book is that he posits that Service doesn't actually change voting intention (it's an explicit point, Service isn't supposed to be indoctrination) whereas anyone with any experience of the forces anywhere knows that the environment pushes people to the right significantly.
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Aug 22, 2018 12:49
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Alchenar posted:We'll never get another film like Waterloo where we literally had several Soviet brigades donated to play the part of the armies. Probably not- Gettysburg had a pretty big sequence with tons of re-enactors for the Pickett's Charge sequence(also Ted Turner deciding to get into his CSA uniform and be heavily featured in the shots; to be fair, the Shaara novel movies were Ted Turner's vanity project and even he couldn't justify making another one after Gods and Generals).
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Aug 22, 2018 13:03
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