Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

just finished reading reading chapterhouse

and after several books worth of bene gesserit's proclaiming how much their order castigates beaurocracy
odrade's observate that she could see the women going to task in terms of military rank and order

bug me

if your really trained to circumvent beaurocracy

i dont understand why youd fall into the use of those descriptions

Please come back when you have learned to write in English.

I don't understand what military rank and order have to do with bureaucracy.

While there is a great deal of bureaucracy in the military, it's not the same thing as the 'chain of command' of having standards.

my understanding is that the military is height of beaurocracy
as presently practiced

how is it you find a this distinction?

Well, it is a government agency and the bureaucracy comes from there. For the common soldier/sailor/airmen orders are verbal unless you're changing posts.

Is that thing still moving?

Bureaucracy is a result of the lack of adaptive pressure. If the constraints within which an organisation or group has to function are tight enough, there is no need for procedure to get people to do things a certain way. They do, or die.

Most militaries, whatever the country they represent, spend the majority of their time not fighting. Combat is something that lurks threateningly in the future, but until it happens, it's not obvious whether Type IIV shells are worth the extra money, because Type IV shells are clumsy pieces of shit. The only way to guard against that is to institutionalize the knowledge they do have: develop extensive testing and development procedures, drills to acquaint the men with the equipment.

They even develop rituals as proxies for qualities they want to encourage. Forcing recruits to polish their boots--obviously, no army has yet lost a war because their soldiers' boots didn't shine, but the shiny boots represent Obedience and Attention to Detail.

Militerism ?

Is that very precise boosterism?

fuck you grammer naxi's

beuraocreey seem to be a necessary evil
you cant built what we need without it

what was he getting at when he railed against it?

-I also appreciate good spelling.

Necessary evil is still evil and while bureaucracy is inevitable, its also a parasitic component to whatever entity (the government, the military) that it latches onto.
Freak nailed it when he said that there was plenty of bureaucracy attached to the military- support organizations, inspection teams, personnel offices- but the core military is not bureaucratic. And from what I've seen, we function a lot better when we are separated from those institutions- i.e. when on deployment/mission. Bureaucracies develop by filling up the interstices of an organization, taking over the functions that are secondary to mission accomplishment; the evil of bureaucracy is that, if not constantly opposed, human nature will drive the bureaucrats to assume more and more importance/power to themselves until they reach a point where the principle organization (lets say the military) has to justify their actions to the bureaucrats rather than the other way around. For example: someone going on foreign travel for a mil-mil conference has to explain to the stupid travel people why they should pay to fly him to the city of the conference instead of to a city on the other side of the country, which the bureaucrats still call by its pre-war name as if to ignore the fact that we lost that damn war and the new government changed the name of the city and I want a fucking ticket to the goddamn conference site and not to a non-existent city 500 miles away from it!

That's what is wrong with bureaucracy and not at all just a personal rant.

i think it was odrade
told skytale, we dont have beaurocracy
we simple do what needs doing

nice idea, but it seems terribly inefficent

like i said,
it really bugged me that when the chips were down, so to speak

a reverend mother
supposedly train alternately

started into describing her cadre in military orgizational terms

seems to me that if the end was near
she wouldnt subscribe to orgizational manner
her order was dedicated against

As we've already stated militarism does not equal bureaucracy. The two are very, very different. And an organization of people like the BG might very well be able to exist w/out bureaucracy.
A military group (a platoon, a squadron, etc) can do their mission w/out bureaucrats for exactly the reason Odrade mentions- a well trained unit has people that just do what needs to be done and people know their place and their responsibilities.
In fact, the more military a group is, the less they need bureaucratic systems around. It wouldn't and doesn't work today because people don't always understand what needs to be done and who should do it. But the BG's RMs are not like people today, they have a much better understanding of what needs to be done, what resources are needed to do it, and who in their organization is best suited for every role. They could easily fall into a militaristic model without needing a bureaucracy to grow up around it.
So Odrade is NOT railing against the system her BG are following; she's celebrating their success at following the one without the other.

distrans wrote:fuck you grammer naxi's

beuraocreey seem to be a necessary evil
you cant built what we need without it

what was he getting at when he railed against it?

Right, as if grammar is your only problem here.

Hey Freak, could you throw this one in the garbage; it is way past the due date.

leagued wrote:As we've already stated militarism does not equal bureaucracy. The two are very, very different. And an organization of people like the BG might very well be able to exist w/out bureaucracy.

Hmm, not entirely true, but let me apologize beforehand for arguing semantics about something that you obviously care about on a personal level. I am not (and will never be) a military man, but you've equated the military to the soldiers, and characterized it as a group that exists in opposition to the parasitical bureaucracy.

It's perfectly possible for a group of soldiers to exist and operate without bureaucracy. Generally, such organisations are called freedom fighters, terrorist cells, gangs, mercinaries, or millitants--pretty much depending on your perspective.

A military is a group of soldiers operating with the support of a state, deriving their increased liberty to take lives from that state. That in itself is an important legalistic formalization of "might makes right" that is deeply entrenched in ritual, custom and yes, paperwork.

it feeds on attention

Naïve mind wrote:

leagued wrote:As we've already stated militarism does not equal bureaucracy. The two are very, very different. And an organization of people like the BG might very well be able to exist w/out bureaucracy.

Hmm, not entirely true, but let me apologize beforehand for arguing semantics about something that you obviously care about on a personal level. I am not (and will never be) a military man, but you've equated the military to the soldiers, and characterized it as a group that exists in opposition to the parasitical bureaucracy.

It's perfectly possible for a group of soldiers to exist and operate without bureaucracy. Generally, such organisations are called freedom fighters, terrorist cells, gangs, mercinaries, or millitants--pretty much depending on your perspective.

A military is a group of soldiers operating with the support of a state, deriving their increased liberty to take lives from that state. That in itself is an important legalistic formalization of "might makes right" that is deeply entrenched in ritual, custom and yes, paperwork.

I prefer the term "operational units" over "soldiers" so that it encompasses things other than groundpounders (ships, submarines, tank brigades... mainly submarines) but essentially yes.
And the battle against bureaucracy is not one that is expected to have any kind of victory. Its more like picking weeds out of your garden/lawn. You know that they'll be back and you won't get rid of them; but if you don't make your antagonism clear then they'll just run amok.
I agree that the military, by its nature as an extension of the state is always going to be enwrapped with bureaucratic systems- particularly in any society sane enough to demand high levels of civilian oversight. I accept that, its important and its logical. But any organization with power is always going to try and protect and- likely- expand its power; this is the human nature I was referring to. All groups are made of individuals, and individuals have a deeply rooted tendency to seek to expand their own power, which sometimes means expanding the authority of the group.
Any large military needs the bureaucratic support systems to function, but there will be a constant pushback against them to prevent bureaucratic mission creep. We are not going to move away from this anytime soon, but it doesn't stop the bureaucrats from being a parasite on the system, even if they are a benign parasite. the "battle" is all about maintaining a proper tooth-to-tail ratio and preventing a slavish devotion to paperwork-for-paperwork's sake from overcoming the fighting force. Former SecNav John Lehman talks a lot about "nuclear creep" in his biography and the "Brotherhood of Rickover" mindset infiltrating the rest of the Navy with its devotion to inspections, rigorous accounting, paperwork, etc. The introduction is a pretty interesting overview of his fight to prevent this bureaucratic takeover of the Navy and about his firing of Rickover.

Hi Omph'!

'Lo dere, mate.

i had no idea,
from my understandin, rickover designed the nuclear reactor which has never failed or broken down

am i wrong about that?

kinda cracy to think he was a fail

The story of Rickover is very complex. In some ways an absolute genius, in others a fairly power-hungry asshole. I don't think the claim that his pressurized water reactor never broke down is true but it depends on what you mean by "broke down"; it is true that we have never had a major reactor accident of any kind from them though the molten salt reactor designed under his purview had much less success.
I would not label him a "fail" by any means, just someone who had that tendency to continually expand his power in spades.

surely these finer point wernt lost on frank
do you think he used them, these terms, simply because the general reader would identify with the sentiment

or because he was actually try to convey the desperate position the bene gesserit was in?

that in these crimstance,
beaurocrat order had its value

distrans wrote:...general reader...

What do you mean by that?

The general fiction reader, the general SF reader, the general FH reader?

Freakzilla wrote:

distrans wrote:...general reader...

What do you mean by that?

The general fiction reader, the general SF reader, the general FH reader?

Take all the people that have read Heretics and CHoD and average out their height, weight, level of skin pigmentation, eye color, hair color/length, IQ, level of interest in: politics, cooking, reading, physics, mathematics, economics, carpentry, surfing, etc...
That would be the "general reader" in question since this thread started w/ a discussion of FH's writings in the final two books.

In that case, FH said he did not write to the lowest common denominator.

so my gf was this lawyer
and i noticed she would walk away from questions that confronted her
she would say
nobody whos got a good education would ever ask that question

she had a point

but i had to tell here

my hillbilly uncles can take a room full of people who your way of doing thing meant walking away from, and answer there question, effectively spinning them likes there no tomorrow

and you people with honest answer
are voiceless
in these places
where the greatest numbers
are being persuaded