Basically the story doesn’t get past the “wow!” factor — wow, they joke about 10′s of millions of deaths! wow, they ‘game’ on soviet vs. us world war! wow, they talk about… all sorts of extreme things.

Then the trivial moral polarization — yes, we know they were sometimes terrible people thinking terrible thoughts, and sometimes decent people thinking terrible thoughts. We KNOW that.

Instead of the moral superiority tone that pervades — yeah yeah we all agree RANDs worldview is toxic — gives us some news, connections to the past and present that aren’t dripping with that trivial sort of ‘wow’ that anyone who’s read any of this sort of exposition — and there’s a lot of it, beleive me — might gain at least one new crumb of insight.

I know BB has a policy of some sort on URLs in comments but this one of mine is directly related to RAND and it’s position in culture:

http://wps.com/projects/million/index.html

Sigh, it got all woozy on stuff like ‘but [some RAND researcher] joked as he discussed 10′s of millions of deaths’. So?

I get the ideological critique; I’m a cold war researcher and artist myself (see various at wps.com). Of course they joked about mass-death scenarios; in itself that means nothing. It’

More infos here…
http://www.simonsound.co.uk/podcasts.html

“Welcome to Mars

1947-1959

Ken Hollings presents a live twelve-part series of unscripted reflections on the fantasy of science in the early years of the American Century

With electronic sound production by Simon James

Between 1947 and 1959, the future was written about, discussed and analysed with such confidence that it became a tangible presence. This is a story of weird science, strange events and even stranger beliefs, set in an age when the possibilities for human development seemed almost limitless.”

And its worth listening to just for the sounds…