Author Topic: EP175: Reparations  (Read 36336 times)

evo.shandor

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Reply #50 on: September 16, 2008, 06:01:00 PM
So.... you don't have a problem with what is done in the story, only with the word used to describe it?
The idea of using time travel to provide aid and comfort to those affected by tragedy is a good one.  Imagine setting this in New Orleans after Katrina, or Antietam.  With other historical event travel stories having a violent streak ("We have to kill ________!"), so this idea is a good one.

But yes, to call in "Reparations" and to describe their actions as "reparations", and the subtext of "Isn't what was done so wrong" that we are compelled to send people back in time to make up for it boiled my blood.  I am not dismissing the effects of the bomb or the courage of the characters to face it (even if I did not like them), but I strongly disagree with the moral judgements I detected in the story and implied by the title.

Like I said in my original rant, call it "Mercy" (or whatever) and have there be a philanthropic motivation for sending them back, and my opinion would be very different.



MacArthurBug

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Reply #51 on: September 16, 2008, 06:14:34 PM
Fantastic. I went shopping with this story, and pissed off a bunch of the elderly people who usually piss me off by stopping suddenly in front of the canned peas to listen. This story caught me up fully and wholly. There was so much left unfinished, so much left unknown and unknowable. Marvey. This hit me, also, at a gut level- it made me sad .  Despite multiple attempts on the part of others, I didn't move from in front of the peas for quite some time. Thank you for this one!

Oh, great and mighty Alasdair, Orator Maleficent, He of the Silvered Tongue, guide this humble fangirl past jumping up and down and squeeing upon hearing the greatness of Thy voice.
Oh mighty Mur the Magnificent. I am not worthy.


slic

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Reply #52 on: September 16, 2008, 09:04:52 PM
It turns my stomach when we in the West look at our history and feel bad when you do not look a the larger context.  (Example: Yes, Europeans bought slaves in Africa, but it was other Africans who sold them -- plenty of blame to go around regarding the slave trade.)
I'm sorry but "they did it too" has never been an acceptable reason to do something in my home.
Do not put words in my mouth.  I am not saying it is acceptable.  I am addressing Western Guilt -- this sense that the West has been a force of destruction in the world and then pointing to examples like the slave trade.   The West was one of several players.  There is enough blame and guilt to go around, but I resent it when all of the blame is placed on Europeans/the West.
Fair enough.  I do have a different way of phrasing it, along the lines of just because others don't acknowledge their wrongs, but in earlier posts it seems you and I actually agree.  You just dislike what the story implied.

Let’s be clear: The bombs were used in a time of war against military targets...Also look at the alternative: an invasion of the Japanese isles, which would have killed many more civilians as well as allied forces...
For the record, I completely agree that dropping one bomb was absolutely necessary, and for reasons beyond just ending the war in the Pacific theatre.  However, I haven't yet heard a compelling reason for the second bomb.  Perhaps you can let me know your reasons.
The bombs were meant to force a surrender.  No surrender came, so a second bomb was dropped.  Certainly, while the first bomb was an agonzing decision, the second was that much harder.  Acknowledging all the horror they caused, I think both bombs were necessary.
They only waited 3 days between bombs (Hiroshima, Aug 6 and Nagasaki, Aug 9).  Word had barely got out about the true level of destruction by the 7th.  The Soviets began an invasion of Manchuria on the 9th.  Besides not having read of any military action to force the timing of the second bomb, by using the second bomb, the US in fact exhausted their entire supply.   Why couldn't they have waited a few more days?



evo.shandor

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Reply #53 on: September 16, 2008, 09:57:18 PM
They only waited 3 days between bombs (Hiroshima, Aug 6 and Nagasaki, Aug 9).  <snip> Why couldn't they have waited a few more days?
Jump in the time machine and ask them.

Look: You asked, I answered.  Two bombs were dropped and Japan surrendered.  We could play historical-second-guessing-armchair-quarteraback-pingpong all day long without knowing for certain how it would have played out.  Others have debated it, others will continue debating.

My interest is the story.



squidbait

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Reply #54 on: September 17, 2008, 12:17:43 AM
In short; I liked it.

The story did three things which I feel are the mark of a powerful story: it made me think, it made me feel, it made me wonder, "what happened next."

By not revealing the ultimate result of the narrator's transgressions; missing retrieval, and taking refugees back to the future, we are left to our own imagination to continue the world that Merrie has created.  This imbues it with more life than if the story had neatly tied up all loose ends.

In addition the story illustrated, for me at least, one of the more important concepts for a historian to grasp; the view of the past changes.

In the mid forties the view that the a-bombing of Japan was a necessary thing and morally just was nearly unanimous.  Today this view is an area of contention.  In the future it may be something completely different.

Moreover the story is a nice spring board into consideration of the classic question, "what duty or obligation does the present owe to the past?"  Do Germans born post WW2 owe anything to those slaughtered in the camps?  How about modern Americans to the slaughtered Indian tribes or those enslaved?  Britain to India?  China to the slaughtered inhabitants of Deneb 3?

"Reparations" also obliquely asks the question, "What use compassion against the flood?"  The minor first aid provided will no more undue the horrors of the bombing than giving a homeless man a dollar will end hunger in America.  Yet on the individual level...

All in all a strong story that wraps alot of emotional and interesting intellectual concepts into a short dramatic package. 

Thanks for presenting it.




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Reply #55 on: September 17, 2008, 07:38:28 AM
An interesting story, and one I'd have to hear again to get my head round the time travel paradoxes (or otherwise).

I don't think the story implied guilt, necessarily. 'Reparations' can just mean 'repairing' or 'making good' rather than 'compensating'. Look at it like this: if in 1945 the Allies could have made a magic bomb that took out the military-industrial infrastructure of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but left civilians intact, they would have probably done so. But there was no magic bomb, so they had to kill civilians. However, the time-travel technology of the story allows the US to go back and mitigate the civilian casualties. They are only doing what they would have done in 1945 given viable technology. If the story was 'anti-bomb', time travel could have been used to prevent the bombings in the first place.

I'm in broad agreement with Evo about the bombs being a necessary evil in a brutal war - they probably saved the lives of at least 1 million US servicemen (though some historians claim they were also intended as a 'shot across the bows' to Stalin). But I don't agree with Evo's assessment of the story's moral implications; I think it assumes too much.

I did think Steve Eley's choice of end quote was "interesting". Having said he would not tell us what to think about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he then quoted Enola Gay co-pilot Robert A. Lewis: "My God, what have we done?". He could equally well have quoted pilot Paul Tibbets: "I sleep clearly every night", and: "If you give me the same circumstances, hell yeah, I'd do it again."



eytanz

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Reply #56 on: September 17, 2008, 09:02:56 PM
You know, I wrote a long response to this one, explaining why I dislike it. As a time-travel story, I think it is a failure because it is too muddled. The fact that there are three pages of interesting, detailed debate about *what the heck happened* is evidence of this. As a story about personal sacrifice, it didn't work for me - I found the narrator really hard to empathize with, as she was aloof and opaque for most of it, and at the end when the walls broke down, the story just didn't show up what was there instead.

As a political story, well, I wrote a long post about why I disagree with its philosophy, but upon re-reading it decided that I was nowhere clear enough to make my point without risking a lot of misinterpretation. I may return to this later, if I can think of how to express myself better. For now, I apologize, but I'll have to sit this one out.



JoeFitz

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Reply #57 on: September 18, 2008, 12:01:20 AM
Interesting but still not quite there. It seemed a little cloying. I also disliked the connotation the title "reparations" implies.

The story did not, for my liking, discuss enough about why these time incursions were taking place. It seems to me that sending so many people back in time to offer aid and comfort to people who otherwise would have died would seriously affect the future population. Granted, the aid was pretty minimal - why not give the people modern anti-radiation medicine instead of the 1945 medicine? It seems the people at the time would not notice and it might actually do some good.




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Reply #58 on: September 20, 2008, 09:19:22 PM
9 days late, but that's the beauty of podcasting...

I think that this was the most moving story I've ever heard on Escapepod.  I had to listen to it a second time.  The characters seemed to have a real emotional resonance and the reading was also very authentic.

Steve mentioned the 9/11 comparison, but I humbly submit that there really is no comparison, as tragic and terrible as 9/11 was.

Keep up the great work!!



ryos

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Reply #59 on: September 21, 2008, 06:05:48 AM
I've read a bit about the effects of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was a study from the 50's that somehow got preserved on the Internet. It contained a number of striking photos of the effects of the bomb on the city itself. The one that's stuck with me most was of a permanent "shadow" cast by a pipe on a concrete wall; the infrared radiation released in the blast was so intense that it blackened the concrete, except where obscured by the pipe. That same radiation caused the fires that killed most of the people that died due to the attacks.

Another thing in that study that struck me was that a roughly equivalent amount of damage was caused by the firebombing of Tokyo. I did not know that.

Steve encouraged us to explore our feelings in his outro. How do I feel about what my nation did? Until now I wasn't entirely sure. After listening to this story, my feelings are a little more concrete. I believe that someone would have dropped the bomb - whoever dreamed it up first was sure to use it. I'm glad that it was America that invented nuclear weapons. What atrocities would the world have suffered had Hitler or Stalin gotten there first? For that matter, what would expansionist Japan have done with a nuclear weapon, during the dying days of WWII? Thankfully, we'll never know. Thankfully, only two atomic bombs have ever been used in war. The threat of mutually assured destruction has kept the rest at bay.

If you want a tie-in to 9/11, consider: those who employ suicide bombers may be the only ones careless enough of the consequences to use a nuclear bomb today. If that's not reason enough to take the terrorists down I don't know what is.

In that the story made me reexamine my feelings about the war, it was a success, but other than that I didn't much care for it. It just bothers me that these people are wasting themselves poking about in the past rather than living their lives when they were born to make a better future. Or are we to believe that the world had become perfect in their time, and there was no situation there in need of aid? Please. Mere technology cannot change the natural man.



slic

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Reply #60 on: September 21, 2008, 06:52:45 PM
It just bothers me that these people are wasting themselves poking about in the past rather than living their lives when they were born to make a better future. Or are we to believe that the world had become perfect in their time, and there was no situation there in need of aid? Please. Mere technology cannot change the natural man.
That's an interesting question.  It strikes me that there are people in our time and neighbourhoods we could ask.  Is what they did much different than people who travel out of country to help small villages instead of helping local charities?



Talia

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Reply #61 on: September 22, 2008, 12:05:47 AM
  It just bothers me that these people are wasting themselves poking about in the past rather than living their lives when they were born to make a better future.

I doubt the people they helped thought it was a waste. Those people were still people, trying to live, survive, whether they were in the rescuers' time or not. Past or present is somewhat irelevant, the time travellers were helping people.. innocent victims.

That's no waste.



mudguts

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Reply #62 on: September 22, 2008, 05:01:39 PM
This story blew my mind... at first, it started out as a simple time travel tale.. then it remained a bit mysterious until the end when the 'other' showed up and the story really became interesting.  It was like an audio version of 'The Usual Suspects'.  It just meandered along peacefully until the very end when it whacked you in the head with a shovel!

Well written.  Well read.  Well done.   

I definitely want to hear more from this author.

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WillMoo

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Reply #63 on: September 22, 2008, 07:03:43 PM
This story affirmed my belief that the vast majority of time travel stories are fatally flawed. Why go back and bandage the wounded when you could go further back and stop the event in the first place. Then you would have to write about how the land war in Japan cost far more lives in the long run than the two bombs did.

I won't even go into the "white guilt apologetic pap" that was the center of the story.  ::)



veganvampire

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Reply #64 on: September 22, 2008, 11:24:01 PM
About the outro: Steve, you said it.



ieDaddy

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Reply #65 on: September 22, 2008, 11:50:14 PM
Didn't really care for it - not sure what the overall point of the story was.

There was too much paradox once you got past the initial layer - if she had brought back the 2 individuals then future self would not have been allowed to go back in order to bring the 2 individuals back from the past.  So future self had to be altering the timeline along a parallel time where she had not brought them back?  it sort of falls apart when you think too hard about it.

And like others said, time travel aside, if you're already messing with it, why not the big events too and pull something like a Stargate: Continuum with an altered timeline world? 

But, at least it was nice reading.



contra

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Reply #66 on: September 23, 2008, 12:11:51 AM
I took it that the reason they went for the new person on the controls, is that they wouldn't want to admit a screw up like this.  Bringing a future version of someone back?  Massive screw up.

Thus they would be willing to hide it, and get the timeline fixed.  Thus there is no paradox where things do and don't happen.
Since the future self knows what is gonig to happen (that the past self is saved in 3 days), they can be sure that this chain of events will happen. 

I'm not going to get into the bombings themselves.  They caused unspeakable horror, and may have saved lives in the long run.

America should be the ones doing reparations in this one, noone else.  After all it was them that dropped the bomb.  That should be caring for the wounded they caused.
While Europe should be responsable for the firebombings over there, and all the killing fields thoughout history that have blooddied almost every inch of the continent. 

While the death toll of the pacific war jumped greatly that day; for the war as a whole, it didn't jump by much... and in the grand scheme of the world for number killed in war for the last 200 years, it was hardly a blip. 

---
Mike---Glasgow.  Scotland.-->


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Reply #67 on: September 23, 2008, 04:16:49 AM
Amidst all the scientific notation and hot-blooded nationalistic fervor, I would like to point out a different perspective on this story.  But first, thanks Steve, for purchasing this story and running it.  You seem to choose all 'our' stories by some kind of innate sense of feeling and although I don't like every story, I find that most of them are either fun or thought provoking.

To those whose heads didn't explode trying to figure out the logistics of meeting oneself on a road outside of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, I'd like to offer that the time travel angle was just a vehicle for the story and not the central part.  Some might say, "Well that's what makes it SciFi", but think about it this way - if you lived in an age when time travel was normal, and you told a story involving time travel, wouldn't it be just plain fiction?

To the marine who bleched all over the page above, I'd like to ask why the word 'reparations' makes you feel so guilty?  One meaning of the word 'reparation' is "restoration to a good condition", which is all the little team of volunteers (repeat - volunteers) was doing.  And this is exactly the reason they didn't go back just a little before so they could cut the throats of the pilots who dropped the bombs.  When you can't go back and change something so big in history, the best you can do is go back and take care of some of the little things.  Maybe ease one person's pain for a few days.

Which brings me to a conclusion.  The point of this story was about sacrifice.  Once I stopped trying to figure out the "how" of this story and just accepted the story at face value, it dawned on me that it was all about the protagonist's own sacrifice for that one little boy.  Love and sacrifice, baby.  Not guilt through service.  That's what it was all about to me.   Nice job, Steve.



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Reply #68 on: September 23, 2008, 04:00:02 PM
Time travel stories, while sometimes cool, don't pass the mustard with me. Among the other reasons noted above, what really stands out to me is: Is the future unchanged by these time travel excursions? They mention keeping tallies and data collection and "next times." But eventually this organization will cease to exist. They will have helped all the wounded they possibly can, eliminating the need for such a program in the first place. Imagine a scenario with a junior technician who would join the team when there are more than 5000 lives to save, but once that number hits 4999 or less he doesn't care enough to do it. If he's manning the controls on that exact mission, who's going to be there to throw the switch to bring you back? When time traveling, you really can't go home again.



wakela

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Reply #69 on: September 26, 2008, 11:53:19 PM
I had the distinct feeling that this story wants me as an American to feel guilty about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  So in that sense it wants me to think about the bombings the same way Obama wants me to think about the Iraq war.  They want me to think until I agree with them, not until I reach my own conclusion.  Otherwise the story would have acknowledged the complexity and subtlety of the atomic bombing issue.  And why should every American go back in time to aid the wounded, and not ever person or every citizen of a nuclear power?  The purpose is not to discourage nuclear war or to aid the suffering, it's to punish Americans.  So I feel like I'm being told what to think.  One sentence about other countries doing the same kind of thing or why no one went back to stop the bombing completely would have alleviated this.  But the story sabotages it's own message by soft peddling the horror of the bombing.  The story mentions "injuries" and "the wounded" but the reality was extraordinarily horrible.  Flesh sliding off bone, melted eyes, etc.

The story did get me thinking, though.  The most interesting part for me is that time travelers still allow the bombs to be dropped -- the war to be started for that matter.  Also, most of the injured in this story were not being cured, they were being given temporary comfort.  Most of these people will die of radiation poisoning.  So I wonder if other countries were time traveling to give reparations, were Germans going back to aid inmates of concentration camps, but not to free them?  Were citizens of some kind of future Al Qaeda  nation coming back to comfort those trapped in the World Trade Center even though they were sure to die within the hour.  Is it worth it to do this? 



wakela

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Reply #70 on: September 27, 2008, 12:09:38 AM
My Hiroshima experience.

I was in Hiroshima about ten years ago with a friend of mine.  Both of us are Americans.  We had been to the atomic bomb museum and we were sitting on the curb in front of the Atomic Bomb Dome, a building left standing as it had been after the bombing.  It's a haunting, skull-like building, and we were silently absorbing the heaviness of this place.  A group of high-school girls stood across the street listening to a lecture.  It was clear that this school trip was just as boring to them as ours are to us.  One of the girls spotted us, waved, and nudged her friend.  They both waved and gave us big smiles.  After the lecture they called us over to pose for pictures with them in front of the Dome.  About a dozen girls crowded around us for the picture, grinning and giving the peace sign.

 



JoeFitz

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Reply #71 on: September 27, 2008, 02:37:41 AM
To the marine who bleched all over the page above, I'd like to ask why the word 'reparations' makes you feel so guilty?  One meaning of the word 'reparation' is "restoration to a good condition", which is all the little team of volunteers (repeat - volunteers) was doing.  And this is exactly the reason they didn't go back just a little before so they could cut the throats of the pilots who dropped the bombs.  When you can't go back and change something so big in history, the best you can do is go back and take care of some of the little things.  Maybe ease one person's pain for a few days.

I respectfully disagree. "Reparations" does have that literal meaning, but it is loaded with connotations of righting a moral wrong. Reparations are owed, not voluntarily given. These volunteers, moreover, were not "restoring" anything. The story has little discussion about why it was any sort of sacrifice to participate in these time journeys, and that was disappointing.



evo.shandor

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Reply #72 on: September 29, 2008, 01:53:27 AM
I'd like to thank wakela and Joe Fitz for eloquently stating what I was trying to say, but I only ended up belching a vitriolic rant while they used much more measured tones.

Thanks guys.



Planish

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Reply #73 on: October 04, 2008, 09:21:53 AM
Paradox? What paradox? They ... um ... used a Schrödinger Time Travel Machine. You shot your grandfather AND did not shoot your grandfather. Yeah, that's the ticket.

The wave function collapses one way in the "normal" universe, and the other way in a second universe. The altered (superposed) universe that was created is pinched off, looping forever, and inaccessible from the "normal" universe like, a Klein bottle. Each trip into the past pinches off another branch. This assumes that time travel does not necessarily permit the ability to jump into parallel time tracks within a multiverse.

Sure.

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Reply #74 on: October 08, 2008, 01:37:55 PM
"Can not run out of time. There is infinite time. You are finite. Zathras is finite. This is wrong tool. No. No, not good. No. Never use that."