* <<F4M.0822>> Logical madness
Had a thought while reading Philip Sandifer's capsule review of
"Turncoat" by Steve Rzasa (part of a much
[[
http://www.philipsandifer.com/2015/04/guided-by-beauty-of-their-weap
ons.html][larger and more interesting article]]). Sandifer writes:
"The themes are similarly old hat - several paragraphs are spent
discussing how the human ships 'took more risks than we did, even
though their fragility is orders of magnitude greater than ours. They
utilized tactics that did not appear to have a rational thought
behind them, and yet, when the consequences are taken into
consideration, their approach worked nearly as well as our eminently
logical battle plan,' which reads like the bad rip-off of Kirk/Spock
arguments that it is."
It is a hackneyed SF trope, for sure. Worse, it doesn't make sense.
Wouldn't a perversely logical non-human foe benefit more by making
"irrational" tactical decisions? Humans are hung-up on rationale, on
understanding why things happen -- bad things, especially. It's the
reason terrorism is so effective at emotionally debilitating people.
How blowing up a café full of people works in favor of the Irish
Republican cause is a complete mystery, and that's why it's so
upsetting: the senselessness of it. So, if some perversely logical
non-human foe, presumably one with no emotional capacity but with the
intellect to observe how emotional harm done to humans negatively
impacts their effectiveness in all undertakings, wanted to cut deep
into human morale, it would be well-served by maximizing
seemingly-random acts of destruction, even self-destruction. That
shit unnerves people.
--
Excerpted from:
PUBLIC NOTES (F)
http://alph.laemeur.com/txt/PUBNOTES-F
©2015 Adam C. Moore (LÆMEUR) <
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