Our Boys

By -
During WWII, a large flight of planes took off from two aircraft carriers. While they were away, one was sunk. Too many planes returned. When the hold was filled, the crew started tipping planes over the side so that others could land. This was duly reported in the stateside press, with the editorialization that this illustrated how much value our army put on the lives of our fighting men. Why did Martin, who told me this story, laugh?

Comments

  1. Unknown5:37 PM

    because if they didn't tip x planes over the side so that x planes could land, those planes stuck in the sky would presumably have been lost anyway, with their pilots. i don't know why your friend laughed, but that may be it. there was no net sacrifice of planes to save soldiers.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wabulon4:14 PM

    Yes, that is why. To put it more exactly, the admirals must have reckoned that the price they were willing to pay to liquidate one of their own pilots did not exceed the difference in value between an average plane and a bottom-of-the-hold plane.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more