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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4707515" data-attributes="member: 4937">I was 13.  I may be odd, or else I'm too young, but I never was terrified of nuclear war.  I never consider it a very likely possibility.  I figured the odds I was killed by a nuclear weapon to be somewhat less than the odds of being killed by a lightning bolt or a catastrophic asteroid strike (the later based on the geological evidence being a good deal higher than most people suppose).  Rather, even at 13, by understanding of the 'Cold War' was that it was primarily a memetic war - that the two sides were firing dangerous ideas at each other in the form of philosophy and propaganda.  And, that these ideas killed people.  Both sides sought to undermine the culture of the other side, to subvert and weaken their social structures, and ultimately to convert the other side over to its favored ideology once they other side had been sufficiently morally, culturally, and ideologically weakened.  So what I was desparately afraid of may seem a little bit strange, but I was terrified by the memetic war and felt it likely based on what I was seeing that we might either lose or else even if we one we'd find ourselves mortally wounded in a nightmare world of memetic plagues and unexploded memetic weapons.So my response to Watchman was to consider it just another indirect memetic attack by someone who was unconsciously running memetic programming he'd picked up in the course of the war.  As artistic and well done as it might have been, I saw it is fundamentally disconnected from reality - not because it was a fantasy - but because Miller didn't seem to realize that it was.  Miller seemed to really believe that he was writing in a time when we were edging closer to nuclear war, when the actions of his own government and that of the American government could be characterized as the actions of insane tyrants bent on global holocaust.Crazy as it was, I was much more terrified of a civil war in the U.S.A, or a Soviet invasion, or some combination thereof, as the U.S.A. fractured into peices that hated, detested, and feared each other.So in any event, I don't know that it has alot to do with your age, how you respond to Watchman.  As to how someone who didn't even live through the 80's, much less the 50's (Duck and Cover!) or the 60's (Hell no, we won't go!!) responds to Watchman I have no idea, but I admit to being very curious.</blockquote>

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