This is way too obscure a reference for Command-Post.

Somehow, I wonder if GW has that killer/military instinct that Ender had...and who is his Bean? Cheney? Powell? ...no, it has to be Rumsfeld.

No, I think maybe Rumsfeld is Ender, and GW is Bean...

Deciding on my own rule of thumb, that anything on the internet ought to at least entertain if over one thousand words, there are some interesting and entertaining hypothesis our dear writer has provided to grab a pick in hand and go mining for the ever ellusive bejewelled 'point'...

//That is why I decided to borrow the title of Mr. Card’s latest book, as it seems remarkably appropriate. Liberals are marginalized, isolated, and dominated by Libertarian and Conservative thought online. They live in the Shadow of the Hegemon.//

Well, thats about as obscure a reference I have ever read online without actually looking for it...
Seems his pet theory is how the internet is being taken over by right wingers forced to debate along a libertarian lexicon, erm...ok.

then here...

///This leads to a seeming uniformity of opinion and thought; those who attempt to speak up for their non-conservative beliefs can be shouted down by the horde, or inundated with so many contradicting arguments that they cannot hope to respond. This is, of course, assuming that they even get a voice at all, and considering who owns the media and who gets funding it perhaps isn’t surprising that those who defend disproportionate wealth and power receive wealth and power in turn. ///

Damn, seems think tanks are responsible for power sycophants becoming powerful.

Huh? I thought that power came through transactions of the symbolism of power through the universal codifying symbolism of money, but what do I know? I am a peon. Who isn't on the internet? Andrew Sullivan? Matt Drudge?

////Several bloggers have written about how Liberal bloggers are hard to find, and they certainly lack the sense of community, sense of identity and famous proponents that Libertarian or Conservative bloggers take for granted. The Liberals have no one with the cachet of Instapundit or Sullivan (although Josh Marshall comes close.) It was those writings that prompted me to start this site, so that I could in my own small way attempt to respond to this dominant ideology and make a contribution to Liberal thought online....////

Uhm, I thought that it was because most liberal perspectives have finally been thoroughly proven to be morally bancrupt as ideas and never worked well when put in practice. I may be wrong, but if you describe yourself as centrist, then you have to eventually find yourself desperately clinging to the only sane ideology remaining. Time will not wait for anyone except the truly annoying.

But it could at least be 'entertaining'.

A primary point that I was making was that Demosthenes (in Card's books) was the mother of all warbloggers. I had never thought of it that way before, but I think it's true. Perhaps, in that sense, Locke was the father of the lefty bloggers. Both of these things can be viewed as positive.

Anyway, I was fascinated by Card's hawk-Democrat musings.

knitting a conundrun: That's funny. I'm curious, if George W. Bush is Ender Wiggin, does that make Karl Rove = Colonel Graff?

Methusala: One of the the things that made Card's article interesting to me was that I would have never guessed that the author of "Ender's Game" was a Democrat. I mean, that book is basically a long testement to the wisdom of preemptive war. Anyway, at least it makes sense that Card is a hawk-Democrat.

What is truly needed to revive the Dems is that they look to history. In fact, they need to get back to the civil war type of Dems.

We are now locked into the beginning of the longest war of my lifetime, under a crucial test of the values of our moral based system. What we need now is a two party system, that seems to be able to work together, to preserve our union. War Democrats will get elected, but they need to surgically remove the liberal cancer that is feeding off the vast political middle's belief in live and let live.

I liked that article but had not read the book. I can almost understand the drift of your point, but only had time to read your mission statement. Please accept my ignorance and apology. I thought that your mission statement was an interesting hypothesis and decided to plumb it for personal pique. Perhaps you could give me a synopsis of the book? Could you elaborate your point about think tank politics leading to power? I have little faith in academe for providing a useful viewpoint. They simply have never seen times like these.

I would like to see or hear, or read something that compares the Bhagavad Gita's Arjuna to America's role in the Global War on Terrorism. That we should not be engaged in a war of revenge or for any personal gain whatsoever, besides the freedom from want of personal safety and the freedom that god provides when we are through doing what it is that He requires of us. By the virtue that we are the only people on the planet with the providence to do something about it.

Nikita, I would question your understanding of the "moral" of Ender's Game. I don't believe that Card is endorsing the solution Ender chose for the war.

Robin:

I would respectfully disagree. Certainly the tenor of the conclusion of "Ender's Game" was that Ender made a difficult, painful choice - destruction of the enemy homeland - but the right choice. The bottom line of the book (and of Ender's decision): if the choice is between the survival of them or the survival of us, the choice must be us.

Now, you would be correct to indicate that, based on Ender's later understanding, a friendship was possible between the humans and the buggers, and Ender helped foster this new friendship. This part of the story is in "Speaker for the Dead," of course.

But this doesn't change the basic idea behind Ender's actions in "Ender's Game." The main problem in "Ender's Game" was the initial inability of humans and buggers to communicate. Also, buggers were indiscrimiately killing humans (based, again, on the inability to communicate problem). So, the choice between "them" and "us" was very real. And Ender made the right decision. This is a basic, evolutionary decision.

It seems to me that "Ender's Game" is, in part, a discussion about the painfulness of this decision - but also its rightness.

This same type of decision is certainly applicable, on a smaller scale, to the "them" versus "us" decision being forced on all civilized people by terrorists, and their indiscriminate killing of civilians.

"Indeed, Card's "Ender's Game" - in which the Earth destroys a distant planet to prevent further war"

The key word here is distant, as we all have the same air & water anything that happens in Iraq actually happens to all of us earthlings.

Also did the distant planet have oil, Bush's only "help" country's with oil.

Sophia: and the buggers had plenty of technology that was useful. So what?

Here's a few questions:

Do you wear glasses?
Do you go to the doctor and/or dentist?
Do you use a computer?
Do you bathe?
Do you eat?
Do you wear clothing?
Do you do anything in the modern world? Or do you live like a Quaker?

Because everything we do relies at some point for oil. EVERYTHING! Either at the supply, manufacture, or transportation level for all modern products. So here's the final question: Do you like your living standard? Would you sacrafice most of that standard?

Right now we are so dependent on oil that our civilization would come to a grinding halt should all oil, both in storage and in the ground, disappear. It would take quite a while for us to restart everything. Maybe we'd be able to, maybe not. But right now oil is as essential to the people of the West as oxygen.

And now imagine a certified lunatic, or at least someone who you consider a certified lunatic, in charge of most of the world's oxygen. AND he had previously made attempts to grab more. AND he has shown he wants to build powerful weapons so that he has that very ability.

What would YOU do?

As for the Book, Rice is Bean, I think (four letter name, a food, need I say more?). OK, maybe Petra, but with the smarts of Bean:)

Sorry, but you guys are way off on the whole "Enders Game" theme. Basically, the story involves a child prodigy of a military stategist & tactician who was subjected to particularly fierce competitive stress. The battles become more one-sided and the rules get grossly slanted to the other side, but Ender, consumed by the need to win, is victorious in all of them. In the final battle, Ender comes up with an Armageddon manuever that destroys the Enemy fleets, their homeworld and the Friendly fleet as well. But he wins.

Only then it is revealed that this was not a game and the lights in the tri-D tank were real ships, crewed by real people, fighting [and losing!]against an implcable foe. The entire series of games were all a vast talent hunt - an act of desperation. Ender not only posessed the genius to win the game, but was also free to be compltely ruthless, by virtue of his not knowing it WAS a game.

Card's following stories dealt with the moral costs of those actions and Ender's payment of same.

Count ourselves lucky that GWII is NOWHERE as pressing as that terrible scenario and NOBODY had to make such dreadful decsions as were made in that deceptively simple tale.

My great-uncle lost more men from his company in the first 30 minutes of the Battle of Stalingrad than all of CENCOM has yet lost in Iraq. What you are looking at is easiest war in history - can you fathom what the hard ones were like?

SF Trivia: Ender's motto was "The Enemy's Gate is DOWN" He generated a psycological advantage from perspective alone!

I've got to agree with OldFan--Nikita demosthenes completely misses the point of Ender's Game and any comparison of that situation--in which the Solar System had already been invaded more than once and millions of civilians killed by enemies who had no idea that the people they were killing were indeed people--with the current one is ridiculous.

Sofia, your ignorance of where oil comes from and the role it plays in the global economy does not surprise me, because I've seen your other posts. I should only be surprised if you aciually posted something you knew something about. Ask yourself three questions:

If the Gulf nations didn't sell their oil, what would they do with it?

If the US produces 40 - 50 of the oil it consumes every year, and gets 80 - 90 of its oil from the Western Hemisphere, then who is buying Gulf oil, and what effect might that have on those countries foreign policies? (Hint: these countries' initials are, in order of importance, G, F, B.) If the US is so hell-bent on controlling the world's oil, then why did we invade Afghanistan, and why have we not invaded Canada or Mexico or Venezuela?

Why do you question American motives, because of oil, but you don't question Russian, French, or Chinese motives when it comes to weapons sales?

PT, for all of the things you say oil is necessary for, there exist substitutes. Not cheaper, and not as efficient (yet). But it is not true to say the West would grind to a halt without oil. It would just become more expensive, dirtier, and less efficient, but standards of living wouldn't drop all that far. Your statement reminds me of a 16th century Englishman wondering what will happen when the trees are all cut down. Of course, he'll start mining coal.

OldFan, thanks for clearing up the misinterpretation of "Ender's Game." At least, the "Ender's Game" I read is the same one you read! This simple example shows how easy it is to misunderstand and/or disagree over the simplest concepts or "facts."

Today is the first time in a while I came over to see what is going on here at the command post. I'm sorry to say that this whole "Ender Wiggin" thread looks a lot like the kind of academic crap you see over at the Howard Dean sites. What's happened to you guys?

For what it's worth, Orson Scott Card is a practicing Mormon who also writes for various LDS publications; he's also been repeatedly called a virulent homophobe and identified as a closet communist (although he refers to himself as a "communitarian").

This knowledge makes re-reading the Ender series interesting and enlightening... especially with terms like "bugger" for the aliens. But it makes comparisons of Bush et al. with Card's characters a bit more tenuous, does it not?

Before I begin I do realize that the last post on this topic was quite a while ago, but just now coming across this topic I figured I would add my two cents or a bit more.

I do believe that we've chosen the wrong characters to portray here. Instead of Bush being Ender perhaps he is another Peter Wiggin, the inventor of Locke and the proclaimed Hegemon of the World, defiant ruler who looks first and foremost to his own needs while playing his little political games. We must also remember that to begin the debate on Locke and Demosthones we need to recall that both are born from the same mind, only typed by Valentine's hand posting Peter's warmongering letters as Demosthenes. He used the rage of the populace to incite them to act and then gave them the 'voice of reason' to follow and look up to as chaos started to take hold. Bush is like Peter, using his political and economic contacts to guide the puppets of the nation where he wants them to go.

Ender doesn't exist in this picture. To conjure up thoughts of Ender we've got to find the one character in this vast game who can and will empathize with all of humanity, because it is not supposed "varelse" we are battling with, but another of the same race, at most human "raman." We pretend to try to communicate with these "terrorists," but we refuse to use a language that they understand. If we cannot get them to understand "plain English," we will just bring the universal language of war to them.

There can be no Ender here because Ender sees the consequences of his actions and it breaks him, makes him sick. He choses to love his enemy by knowing them completely, because only then can he defeat them. We refuse to know our enemy by anything other than that. He/she is sub-human to us, using "us" collectively as a country.

While we are here lets be fair to the Formics, they did not know that humans were a sentient species because they could not form a bridge to communicate with them. To them we were the mindless/queen-less drones fumbling around without a hive to protect, without a purpose. The people who fight us today are as bad as we, in that the ability to communicate exists, but the refusal to do so on cultural grounds prevents this.

I don't wish to ramble on about the topic, so I will end here by saying look to the correct characters in either story, fact and fiction, before we make comparisons that may or may not exist. If anyone sees this and would like to communicate further on the topic email me: quietsouls@hotmail.com subj: Locke'sKey

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