perfidy

George Will discusses Marine General Charles Krulak, who is the son of Marine General Victor Krulak, who we have been discussing in relation to the CAP program in Vietnam. Will talks about Krulak the Younger's (sounds like a character in a bad fantasy movie) theories on modern warfare, which he describes as the 'Three-Block War':

In today's conflicts, he says, you can have a Marine wrapping a child in swaddling clothes. And a Marine keeping two warring factions apart at gunpoint. And a Marine in medium- or high-intensity combat. It can be the same Marine, in a 24-hour time frame, in just three city blocks.

"You can't," he says, "defeat an idea with just bullets -- you need a better idea." But first you need bullets. You need, Krulak says, the enemy "to be petrified," as were the Germans who gave U.S. Marines a name that stuck -- "devil dogs" -- as a term of respect when, at Belleau Wood, Marines blunted the Germans' 1918 drive on Paris.

There is a heart-rending ingenuousness to U.S. efforts at amicability, even to the point of encouraging Marines, before they entered Fallujah last month, to grow mustaches, as many Iraqi men do. Shiloh, where almost 24,000 Americans were casualties, was where both sides in the Civil War lost their illusions about its being a short and not-too-bloody war. After Fallujah, it is clear that the first order of business for Marines and other U.S. forces is their basic business: inflicting deadly force.

Niall Ferguson offers an historical perspective on the recent difficulties in Iraq. It seems that the British had some difficulties when they occupied the region in the wake fo the Great War. A while back, Military History Quarterly (I believe) had a fascinating article on the campaign that led to the British occupation of Baghdad, but I was unaware of the level of casualties that the British sustained after that.

The Instapundit has a good article up at TCS, looking at the reasons why the X-Prize is getting results.

The money quote is from X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis:

The results of this competition have been miraculous. For the promise of $10 million, over $50 million has been spent in research, development and testing. And where we might normally have expected one or two paper designs resulting from a typical government procurement, we're seeing dozens of real vehicles being built and tested. This is Darwinian evolution applied to spaceships. Rather than paper competition with selection boards, the winner will be determined by ignition of engines and the flight of humans into space. Best of all, we don't pay a single dollar till the result is achieved.

Faster, please.

[wik] The title of this post has been changed. I completely forgot, and did not notice until just now, that I had never changed the boring auto-generated title to one of my trademark half clever personalized titles. It will never happen again.

A lifelong democrat is very concerned about the direction of his party. This expands, rather eloquently, on the point I was raising in my recent post (and in the comments thereof) about the ad placed by the St. Petersburg Democratic Club.

In light of our earlier post about scientologist's secret arrangement with the IRS, I thought I'd throw this one into the ring: A court ordered a prominent critic of the cult to pay $500,000 in damages in a breech of contract dispute.

Superior Court Judge Lynn Duryee issued that order in a breach-of- contract lawsuit against Scientology defector Gerald Armstrong.

The Church of Scientology had sought $10 million from Armstrong, who joined the church in 1969, left the fold in 1981 and later became one of the movement's harshest critics. He was sued by the church in 1984 for allegedly stealing thousands of pages of private papers that shed new light on the movement's mysterious founder, the late L. Ron Hubbard. Hubbard, a prolific science-fiction writer and freelance philosopher, founded the Church of Scientology in the 1950s and died in 1986.

During his years in Scientology, Armstrong says he worked as an intelligence officer and communications officer and compiled documents for a church-sponsored biography of Hubbard. He says he has been in Scientology's sights since the church filed its 1984 lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court to get control of Hubbard's private papers.

Judge Paul Breckenridge Jr., who presided over that case, issued a ruling in which he called Hubbard "virtually a pathological liar when it comes to his history, background and achievements." In settling that case in 1986, Armstrong agreed to return the documents. He says that the church paid him $515,000 ($800,000 including his lawyer's fee) and that his attorney at the time persuaded him to sign an agreement promising to "maintain strict confidentiality and silence with respect to his experiences with the Church of Scientology."

That agreement says Armstrong would pay $50,000 for every utterance about Scientology. The church maintains that Armstrong has violated the agreement at least 201 times and owes it just over $10 million.

...Armstrong still vows to never pay a penny to the church.

I'd just like to say that Scientology is weird. Battlefield Earth was a half decent space opera. But the over the top bios in Hubbard's books are a little, well, over the top. I remember reading in one of these that Hubbard was one of the greats of the field, and implied that he was right up there, and good friends with Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke. Which is manifest bullshit. Before Battlefield Earth, I had never heard of him, so he wasn't one of the greats. And I read a lot of sf. If he would lie about something as obviously false as that, in the author bio for a widely published book, well you can only imagine what he'd lie about to his followers. (Go to this site for an outline of the extent of those lies.)

Dean Esmay has another post on the whole jobs thingy. He excerpts a bit from a New York Times article:

The sharpest contrast can be seen by looking at the Labor Department's household survey, which shows a record high level of total employment. This survey reported an employment level of 138.3 million as of March - 600,000 more working Americans since President Bush took office in 2001.

Since the recession ended in November 2001, the payroll survey has reported 323,000 fewer payroll jobs, but the household survey has found 1.9 million more overall jobs. Common sense tells us that payroll jobs aren't the end-all, be-all of jobs in the new economy. Economists reflexively like payroll data because it has a bigger sample, but quantity doesn't always ensure quality.

An even bigger problem with the payroll survey is the evolution of what constitutes work. We can think of the payroll survey as counting all workers at traditional firms, plus some workers at start-up companies who have payroll records. But the payroll survey doesn't count individuals who are self-employed - despite the fact that their ranks have surged by at least 650,000 in just two years.

To which I would add this bit:

The payroll survey counts jobs, not workers. But counting payroll jobs is a questionable way of measuring America's evolving work force, especially in light of declining job turnover. The payroll survey's biggest problem is that it systematically double counts workers when they change jobs. Since somewhere between 2 percent and 3 percent of the work force changes employers every month, payrolls tend to be noisy. The illusion of lost jobs in recent years occurred because job turnover declined after 2000, first with the recession, then even more sharply after 9/11. As a result, 1 million jobs have been artificially "lost" in the payroll survey since 2001.

Despite last month's jobs surge, the payroll survey remains stubbornly out of whack with other economic indicators, even other labor indicators. Unemployment has been very low and is now near what economists call a "natural" rate. Real earnings rose by 3 percent over the last three years. Jobless claims are 10 percent below their historical average, and that's without adjusting for population.

Dean also links to this interesting post from soundfury, who makes the argument that except for the low payroll survey reports, the economy is better in every respect than in 1996, just before the tech bubble started inflating. Something to keep in mind, and bad news for Kerry.

I have been criminally lax in keeping up with Insults Unpunished lately, but today I tried to catch up a little. First I discovered that it is now a group blog. Surprise! Robert invited longtime companion, I mean commenter (not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you) to join him. Read his intro piece, it's a good one. Almost as good as Crooked Timber's inaugural post.

But, the point of this post, and it does actually have one, is the counterfactual exercise that Robert linked to (and excerpted) here.

AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY: washington, april 9, 2004. A hush fell over the city as George W. Bush today became the first president of the United States ever to be removed from office by impeachment. Meeting late into the night, the Senate unanimously voted to convict Bush following a trial on his bill of impeachment from the House.

Moments after being sworn in as the 44th president, Dick Cheney said that disgraced former national security adviser Condoleezza Rice would be turned over to the Hague for trial in the International Court of Justice as a war criminal. Cheney said Washington would "firmly resist" international demands that Bush be extradited for prosecution as well.

On August 7, 2001, Bush had ordered the United States military to stage an all-out attack on alleged terrorist camps in Afghanistan. Thousands of U.S. special forces units parachuted into this neutral country, while air strikes targeted the Afghan government and its supporting military. Pentagon units seized abandoned Soviet air bases throughout Afghanistan, while establishing support bases in nearby nations such as Uzbekistan. Simultaneously, FBI agents throughout the United States staged raids in which dozens of men accused of terrorism were taken prisoner.

Reaction was swift and furious. Florida Senator Bob Graham said Bush had "brought shame to the United States with his paranoid delusions about so-called terror networks." British Prime Minister Tony Blair accused the United States of "an inexcusable act of conquest in plain violation of international law." White House chief counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke immediately resigned in protest of "a disgusting exercise in over-kill."

When dozens of U.S. soldiers were slain in gun battles with fighters in the Afghan mountains, public opinion polls showed the nation overwhelmingly opposed to Bush's action. Political leaders of both parties called on Bush to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan immediately. "We are supposed to believe that attacking people in caves in some place called Tora Bora is worth the life of even one single U.S. soldier?" former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey asked.

When an off-target U.S. bomb killed scores of Afghan civilians who had taken refuge in a mosque, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Aznar announced a global boycott of American products. The United Nations General Assembly voted to condemn the United States, and Washington was forced into the humiliating position of vetoing a Security Council resolution declaring America guilty of "criminal acts of aggression."

Bush justified his attack on Afghanistan, and the detention of 19 men of Arab descent who had entered the country legally, on grounds of intelligence reports suggesting an imminent, devastating attack on the United States. But no such attack ever occurred, leading to widespread ridicule of Bush's claims. Speaking before a special commission created by Congress to investigate Bush's anti-terrorism actions, former national security adviser Rice shocked and horrified listeners when she admitted, "We had no actionable warnings of any specific threat, just good reason to believe something really bad was about to happen."

The president fired Rice immediately after her admission, but this did little to quell public anger regarding the war in Afghanistan. When it was revealed that U.S. special forces were also carrying out attacks against suspected terrorist bases in Indonesia and Pakistan, fury against the United States became universal, with even Israel condemning American action as "totally unjustified."

Speaking briefly to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House before a helicopter carried him out of Washington as the first-ever president removed by impeachment, Bush seemed bitter. "I was given bad advice," he insisted. "My advisers told me that unless we took decisive action, thousands of innocent Americans might die. Obviously I should not have listened."

Announcing his candidacy for the 2004 Republican presidential nomination, Senator John McCain said today that "George W. Bush was very foolish and naïve; he didn't realize he was being pushed into this needless conflict by oil interests that wanted to seize Afghanistan to run a pipeline across it." McCain spoke at a campaign rally at the World Trade Center in New York City.

Counterfactual exercises are fascinating to me. This one meets the essential requirements of plausibility, and departure from actual events in one particular. What if Bush had acted in advance of 9/11? The situation is carefully left the same - but the exploration of a different course of events throws the recent claims of many on the left into a very bad light. This is another tack on the post from the Queen of All Evil, that I linked to earlier. We really, really can't have it both ways. You can not simultaneously blame Bush for preemption and not being preemptive.

There is no question, that absent the horrible fact of the 9/11 attacks, there is really nothing that the current, or any president could have done that would have been adequate to the demands presented by the threat.

"We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say 'This is one of our bad days,' and pull the trigger."

Thus reads an ad placed in a local paper in St. Petersburg, Florida by the St. Petersburg Democratic Club. Club Vice President Edna McCall said her club is in direct contact with John Kerry campaign.

"We're all working together."

Conveniently abstracted by Spoons, we have the essentials of the recent testimony before the 9/11 commission of former FBI director Louis Freeh and former (thank God!) Attorney General Janet Reno. Here are the salient points:

• Janet Reno never specifically briefed incoming Attorney General John Ashcroft on the threat posed by al Qaeda;
• In her 8 years in office, General Reno was briefed about al-Qaeda, but was never told (and apparently never asked) the location of al-Qaeda cells in the country;
• Reno "never focused on just al Qaeda," because of the Oklahoma City bombing;
• Clinton's FBI Director, Louis Freeh said that the FBI was not given the resources it needed to fight terrorism;
• Freeh was aware that Bin Laden had issued several fatwas in the 1990s ordering his followers to attack the U.S.;
• Nobody thought investigating terrorism cases was the best response to Al-Qaeda's declared war on the U.S., but it was the best anyone could do "in the absence of invading Afghanistan";
• During Freeh's time in office, "We weren't fighting a real war [against terrror]";
• General Reno testified that the majority of the [Democrat-reviled] Patriot Act has helped counterterrorism efforts.

Again, we need to change the focus from assigning blame and partisan grandstanding to a more fruitful lessons learned analysis. These items indicate that prior to the attack, no one new about the attack. This is not surprising. MoveOn.org's poster in the DC Metro claiming that "Bush Knew" are moonbat fantasy. We need to stay far, far away from that sort of thinking.

What we need is a clear exposition of what policies hindered the collation of intelligence we had; what policies might, if implemented, increase the amount and quality of information we get; and what security measures might be both effective and appropriate for a constitutional republic. I have no idea, of course, what the commission's report will look like. But considering the behavior so far of all the commissioners, I do not think that I will be getting what I am hoping for.

Mac Owens has an excellent and detailed look at the second half of the Vietnam war - the post Tet period. Owens discusses the value of the Combined Action Program or CAP that I mentioned in the comments to several recent posts here, and the progress that had been made in stabilizing South Vietnam in the three years between Tet and the Easter Offensive.

A sample:

Sorley examined the largely neglected later years of the conflict and concluded that the war in Vietnam "was being won on the ground even as it was being lost at the peace table and in the US Congress."

Most studies of the Vietnam War focus on the years up until 1968. Those studies that examine the period after Tet 1968 emphasize the diplomatic attempts to extricate the U.S. from the conflict, treating the military effort as nothing more than a holding action. But as William Colby observed in a review of Robert McNamara's disgraceful memoir, In Retrospect, by limiting serious consideration of the military situation in Vietnam to the period before mid-1968, historians leave Americans with a record "similar to what we would know if histories of World War II stopped before Stalingrad, Operation Torch in North Africa and Guadalcanal in the Pacific."

... Far from constituting a mere holding action, the approach followed by the new team constituted a positive strategy for ensuring the survival of South Vietnam. Bunker, Abrams, and Colby "brought different values to their tasks, operated from a different understanding of the nature of the war, and applied different measures of merit and different tactics. They employed diminishing resources in manpower, materiel, money, and time as they raced to render the South Vietnamese capable of defending themselves before the last American forces were withdrawn. They went about that task with sincerity, intelligence, decency, and absolute professionalism, and in the process they came very close to achieving the goal of a viable nation and a lasting peace."

... The Marine Corps approach in Vietnam had three elements, according to Krulak: emphasis on pacification of the coastal areas in which 80 percent of the people lived; degradation of the ability of the North Vietnamese to fight by cutting off supplies before they left Northern ports of entry; and engagement of PAVN and VC main-force units on terms favorable to American forces. The Marines soon came into conflict with Westmoreland over how to fight the war. In his memoir, A Soldier Reports, Westmoreland writes:

During those early months [1965], I was concerned with the tactical methods that General Walt and the Marines employed. They had established beachheads at Chu Lai and Da Nang and were reluctant to go outside them, not through any lack of courage but through a different conception of how to fight an anti-insurgency war. They were assiduously combing the countryside within the beachhead, trying to establish firm control in hamlets and villages, and planning to expand the beachhead up and down the coast.

He believed the Marines "should have been trying to find the enemy's main forces and bring them to battle, thereby putting them on the run and reducing the threat they posed to the population." Westmoreland, according to Krulak, made the "third point the primary undertaking, even while deemphasizing the need for clearly favorable conditions before engaging the enemy."

Read the whole thing, it's a keeper.

"Nader tells youths to brace for draft."

On my planet, which my people call earth, it is known that we have not had a draft for thirty years and that it would not only be political suicide to reintroduce it, it would destroy the lavishly equipped, intensively trained and stupendously lethal volunteer force we are so very proud of.

Nader needs to stop smoking the crack.

The Beeb reports that Canada - you know, the kindler, gentler, greener and morally superior nation to our north - is condemning to death hundreds of thousands of defenseless seals. The government defended the move as more humane - they're gonna shoot the little bastards instead of the traditional club to the head. It appears that crass economic motives are the motivation for this return to senseless animal cruelty, as commercial fish stocks were vanishing, and the cull was important for the local economy during a traditionally slow economic time of the year.

Me, I think them seals is commies.

How can you not club a face like that?

For more info on the mechanics of seal slaughtering, go see the Nuke Baby Seals for Jesus site.

At least, that's what Andy Rooney thinks. That's the actual title of the piece. I never liked the pretentious blowhard much before, but now I really can't stand him. Read this article, and bask in the awesome disregard and complete lack of understanding exhibited therein. Whenever I have seen an interview with troops in the field, they are constantly saying - in complete contradiction to Rooney - how they are proud to fight, knowing that they are preserving the liberties and safety of Americans back home; even of fat condescending fucktards like Rooney. This excrement is a classic example of the worst kind of liberal contempt for, and lack of comprehension of, the military.

For some useful perspective on the recent comments here at Perfidy, Rosemary, the Queen of all Evil gives us this:

The liberal complaints about Iraq and 9/11 are contradictory. You have made it impossible to please you.

Why do we have the 9/11 Commission? The purpose was to figure out what went wrong and fix it, so we NEVER have a 9/11 again. That isn't what it is now, is it? It is now a Witch Hunt. Blame someone (Bush) besides Al Qaeda and burn them at the stake. What did they know and when did they know it??? Blah, blah, blah...

We already hear mumblings from people that want to know why we didn't prevent it. It is a circle of insanity. If the Bush Administration had, by some miracle, been able to prevent 9/11 how would anyone know it? Let's say they had vague info that some time in September, Al Qaeda, would do exactly what they did. What should the Bush Administration have done? Act pre-emptively to stop the attack, right? If they were successful what would the screams and complaints be?

...We all know that they hate us. I don't give a rat's ass why they hate us. They hate us and they want us dead. We have two choices:

1) Respond after we get hit and suffer casualities and fatalities. Of course, then we are back to hearing "What did they know and when did they know it?"

2) We go in kick ass and start taking hyphenated names. I'm all about self-defense. If I saw some punk on the street that said, "I'm gonna kill you", you can bet your ass that I won't wait for him to start. I'm prepared to fight and kill, if necessary, to save myself. That is what our country is doing. It's just a grander scale.

I'm sorry guys, but you can't have it both ways. You can't demand that we prevent the tragedy of 9/11, and then demand that we not act pre-emptively against the bad guys when we think there might be a threat.

That isn't possible. How can you stop people from killing you if you wait until they kill you?

We either kick the ass of the terrorists and terrorist friendly nations or we wait until they attack us. If we wait until they "do something to us" you cannot go back and complain that the government didn't stop it. Actually, you can do that and that is exactly what the Left has been doing.

Back in the day, when I was a Mac user, there was a game that I loved. When I switched to Windows, I thought that I would never play the game again. But a chance encounter in the Safeway led to a reunion... 

I was walking down the frozen foods aisle when I saw a guy wearing a shirt with this logo:

That rang a bell, but for a few seconds I couldn't place it. Then I remembered! 

Escape Velocity! Escape Velocity was a simple, yet addictive game. You start out with a small shuttle, with little cargo space and virtually no combat ability. But, if you're clever, you can make money through sharp dealing and avoid being killed or captured by pirates. You can use the money to upgrade your little shuttle, or save for a new and better spaceship. There were hundreds of planets, the Rebellion and the Confederation, pirates, aliens and bars.

All of what I just described would probably keep you occupied for a few hours. But the beauty of EV was the storylines embedded in an otherwise fairly simple yet wide open trading and fighting game. These kept your interest. It was a near perfect balance between the freedom to do what you want, and good narrative. A very clever game that focused on playability rather than snazzy graphics and eye candy.

For years, Ambrosia software vowed that they just wouldn't make a windows version of the game. But the guy in the shirt informed me that they had a new version, and that it had a windows port. One of the reasons (along with tax preparation) that I did little or no blogging over the weekend was the fact that this game now resides on my computer. So, for a good free (well, shareware) game, go right here and download it. 
 

No not that red. Commie red. Siberian Light links to a slew of articles about Russian space plans. It is, after all, Cosmonaut day in the motherland.

Among the articles he links, we see that a Russian company is claiming that it will put six cosmonauts on Mars by 2009. (2011 according to this AP story.) The articles are sadly lacking in details, but they say that they can do it for $3.5 billion. That would be a significant savings over the proposed NASA plan (anywhere from $30 billion to $1 trillion, depending on who you listen to.) The Russian space officials have declared this nonsense, and based on what I know of the current state of Russian technology and industry, I'd have to agree. They couldn't get to the moon in '69, so I don't see how they could get to Mars in five years now, especially given the economic problems they face.

A researcher at the Central Research Institute for Machine-Building, Russia's premier authority on space equipment design, said it would carry out the project with funding promised by Aerospace Systems, a little-known private Russian company that says it draws no resources from the state budget.

The program envisions six people traveling to Mars and exploring it for several months before returning to Earth. The expedition is designed to last three years in all, and would depend on a fully equipped spacecraft containing its own garden, medical facilities and other amenities.

Absent some idea of how they intend to do it, I will have to remain dubious. Still, more power to them! Maybe the Russkies and Chinese and Indians can force America to actually use its capabilities in a sensible and forward looking way, instead of remaining in a blinkered, stuck-in-the-sixties, bureaucratic mindset.

Opinion8, sees violence from both Sunnis and Shiites, and is tempted to think, "A pox on all their houses," and so adapts an old Dennis Miller line:

Twenty-five million bad people just screw it up for the other eleven.

Murdoc has a good roundup of blog posts on the fighting in Iraq, and some good thoughts of his own here.

Seeing as Perfidy is letting its inner (or not so inner) geek hang out, lets just wallow in it, shall we?

No one, to my knowledge, has come up with a really good role-playing game system. The problem seems to center on the difficulty of modeling skills and the learning process. Other problems (such as combat, physics, various magical or super-technological systems) have been solved with varying degrees of success, usually with an attempt to balance ease of use with verisimilitude. The fact that these systems are used constantly in the game system puts a premium on the ease of use side of the equation, as overly complex games have a limited market, even among nerds and geeks.

However, the problem of character development remains. The game might have a slick way of resolving how successfully you apply your skill at safecracking, orcslaying, or starship piloting. But how does your character gain and improve that skill? The results have always been unsatisfying.

Existing game systems can be plotted on a spectrum ranging from D&D on one end, and original rules Traveler on the other.
D&D had by far the most simplistic advancement scheme. Characters had a class, which gave them a package of skills or attributes. (Well, really it mostly gave them a different table for resolving combat.) As the campaign progressed, gold expropriated from dragons, orcs and Enron translated directly into experience points. At certain thresholds, you would move up a level and all of your skills would simultaneously increase. This is not in any way realistic, though certainly satisfying to the thirteen year old who loves to say he has a 25th level Assassin.* The focus is almost completely on advancement in the game.

On the other end of the scale was the Traveler system. Characters were created using a system that closely resembles what actually happens in real life. You start out at 18, with nothing more than remedial skills. Then, depending on the career track you select, you enlist in the navy, army, marines, interstellar scouts, or go to college. Your pre-game life is divided into four year terms, during which you have an opportunity to gain skills related to your profession. You can keep this up as long as you want balancing your greed for more skills with the realization that you don't want to be having an adventure with a 90-year old alter ego. Once this process ends, you begin the game. Once the game has started, it is exceedingly difficult to gain new skills or even improve old ones. You are stuck with what you have. Again, this is much like real life. The focus here is almost completely on character creation. (GURPS used a different approach, but was similar in that the focus is on character creation.)

Most games fall somewhere in between these two extremes. How do you create a game that allows your character to start with some skills, yet allows skills to be developed in game? How do you create a system that allows character creation in some detail, without predetermining the character’s future existence? How do you design a reward system that isn't based on the easily quantified cash, but isn't based solely on the subjective judgment of the DM? Moreover, how do you find a system that simultaneously isn't completely subjective and doesn't require hours of anal-retentive bookkeeping?

The last campaign I ran before I gave up on gaming completely eliminated most of the game system. The only concession I made to traditional role-playing was to keep a combat system, which I appropriated from White Wolf's Vampire games. And I only did that because the players insisted. Most of the time they were rolling dice just to amuse themselves, though I allowed them to think that the results affected the game.

I dodged the whole question of character development by having the players play themselves in the campaign. If they could do it, their character could do it. This was satisfactory in most respects, but sadly puts a great deal of limitations on the types of game you can play. (Worked great for a present day Cthulhu game, though.) Rewards were largely moot, since the campaign lasted only a few weeks in game time.

I've tried to see through to a way to combine the pristine simplicity of that last game with the requirements of other types of campaigns, but so far without success. The thing is, if you have a group of decent players, the game system is just a framework. The campaign is more important. The problem with adopting the no-system system is that it becomes hard to balance character creation with the needs of the campaign. You can't have the characters that are too powerful. Further, in a long campaign, you have to have some mechanism for rewarding players with improvements to their characters. Gold and wisdom is not enough. This, really, is the only thing that needs to be systematized. Everything else can be done on the fly, given enough background information and some quick thinking. But I haven’t figured it out yet.

GeekLethal's last post prompted a user comment from the Three Armed Man. TAM suggested that the criteria outlined by GL really point to Dork, rather than Nerd. This raises the perennial semantic dilemna, how do we define these terms? Saturday Night Live once had a sketch called, “Geek, Dweeb or Spaz?” Where contestants had to determine which category the panelists fell into. This is the question we need to answer.

The jargon file defines geek thusly:

A person who has chosen concentration rather than conformity; one who pursues skill (especially technical skill) and imagination, not mainstream social acceptance. Geeks usually have a strong case of neophilia. Most geeks are adept with computers and treat hacker as a term of respect, but not all are hackers themselves — and some who are in fact hackers normally call themselves geeks anyway, because they (quite properly) regard ‘hacker’ as a label that should be bestowed by others rather than self-assumed.

One description accurately if a little breathlessly enumerates “gamers, ravers, science fiction fans, punks, perverts, programmers, nerds, subgenii, and trekkies. These are people who did not go to their high school proms, and many would be offended by the suggestion that they should have even wanted to.”

Originally, a geek was a carnival performer who bit the heads off chickens. (In early 20th-century Scotland a ‘geek’ was an immature coley, a type of fish.) Before about 1990 usage of this term was rather negative. Earlier versions of this lexicon defined a computer geek as one who eats (computer) bugs for a living — an asocial, malodorous, pasty-faced monomaniac with all the personality of a cheese grater. This is often still the way geeks are regarded by non-geeks, but as the mainstream culture becomes more dependent on technology and technical skill mainstream attitudes have tended to shift towards grudging respect. Correspondingly, there are now ‘geek pride’ festivals (the implied reference to ‘gay pride’ is not accidental).

Nerd is defined in this way:

nerd: n.

1. [mainstream slang] Pejorative applied to anyone with an above-average IQ and few gifts at small talk and ordinary social rituals.

2. [jargon] Term of praise applied (in conscious ironic reference to sense 1) to someone who knows what's really important and interesting and doesn't care to be distracted by trivial chatter and silly status games. Compare geek.

The word itself appears to derive from the lines “And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo / And Bring Back an It-Kutch, a Preep and a Proo, / A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!” in the Dr. Seuss book If I Ran the Zoo (1950).

Sadly, the file does not have entries for spaz, dweeb or dork. But I think the time has come for a definitive taxonomy of the various subspecies. We can move toward this goal by outlining the salient characteristics of each type:

Nerd: the nerd is base type, from which all the others are derived. Nerds are bright, and lacking in social skills. They have odd interests. They are dilettantes, and usually end up consumed by counterproductive pursuits like the SCA, Star Wars collectables, and Star Trek conventions. Some nerds can achieve purpose in life translating the arcane thoughts of the geeks to the mundane normal people. Nerds are hapless, though they often have a goofy charm.

Geek: the geek is the most competent of the subspecies. Geeks transcend the limitations of the nerd through focus. Geeks have real, and often marketable skills – usually in the tech/computer fields, but in theory these skills could be in almost field. Geeks have social skills, but they are not the natural, inborn manners possessed by most people. Geeks learn to deal with others the same way they attain mastery of any other skill; by observing the humans around them, and deducing rules and patterns, and through experimentation. This sometimes leads to embarrassment when a rule is over generalized, or applied incorrectly. Geeks are often odd, but have an edgy competence about them.

Dork: the dork is the nerd’s dimmer younger brother. Dorks can’t fit in. Unlike nerds, they can’t even get laid at SCA events. Dorks are strange, but without the redeeming semi-charming goofiness of the nerd, or the skills of the geek. The dork’s attempts at humor or charm always come off as vaguely (or, let’s be honest, often extremely) creepy. Dorks are annoying.

Dweeb: the dweeb is the nerd-lite. Not so odd, not so bright, in many respects the dweeb is both a substandard nerd and a substandard normal person. Dweebs don’t fit into the everyday world, but neither are they completely at home in the clannish, ritualized worlds of the nerd. Where a nerd knows that he won’t get picked for kickball, the dweeb will keep trying. Dweebs are misfits.

Spaz: the spaz is the nerd on crack. Your everyday nerd is quiet, sedentary, and overweight. The spaz takes the basic nerd template and cranks it up to 11. The spaz is hyper, annoying and restless. The spaz is the only type more likely than the dweeb to be chosen as the spare.

Hopefully, this tentative classification scheme will be of use.