h a l f b a k e r yThe phrase 'crumpled heap' comes to mind.
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A special award, given posthumously in cases, to
those who were tasked with having their finger on the
button, were given the go ahead and so said no.
I know of two people for starters who would get this,
both
happen to be Russians, which would make this American
conceptualized award useful
as an olive branch to some
extent.
One is Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov, a Soviet Navy
officer
during the Cuban Missile Crisis who prevented the launch
of
a nuclear torpedo and thereby prevented a nuclear war.
The other is the apocryphal account of Boris Yeltsin being
told to launch when a Norwegian rocket was thought to
be
a sub launched ballistic missile heading towards Russia.
Not sure if that one is true but evidently the Arkhipov
incident is verified.
I'm sure there are others and we all owe a great debt of
gratitude to these people since they, you know, single-
handedly saved hundreds of millions of people.
Seems like it would be a nice sentiment.
Actually, come to think of it, isn't there a Nobel Prize for
world piece? If so these guys should be given one. Seems
like this should already be baked but if not, it would be
nice.
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Annotation:
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//isn't there a Nobel Prize for world piece? // Yes,
but but it has to be a large piece. |
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Actually I don't think giving it to a Russian would act
as an olive branch. By giving it, we would
essentially be exposing the recklessness of the
military command organization whose orders had
been ignored by the winner. |
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Not that this is necessarily a bad idea, but it seems
there could be a lot of implications both good and
bad. |
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I think there should be some credit given to disobeying
bad orders. In the case of the Soviet Navy guy, the U.S.
was conducting depth charge drills at least at a distance
far away enough from the sub that it had the choice of
whether to fire or not. Clearly the choice to not fire was
a good one. |
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But I see what you're saying. A Russian commander
getting one of these medals from the U.S. might not want
to wear it during a victory day parade. This would be
more like a hippie-dippy "citizen of the world" award. |
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An alternative might be a monument someplace. Seems
like we should be able to somehow say "Hey, thanks for
not blowing up the world!" |
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How about giving everyone in the world a voucher for
£100, redeemable in a year. Anyone who blows the
world up forfeits their voucher. |
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Do we get back pay? I haven't blown up the world for as far
back as I can remember. |
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//“Saviour Of The Universe”// |
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I think the jury is still out on that one. It seems
unlikely that we'll hit a big crunch, but the whole
dark energy thing means that we'll be in line for a
heat-death. The saviour of the universe is going to
have to do a pretty delicate balancing act. |
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"This award is to Lieutenant Bartleby, who preferred not
to." |
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Savoir of the Universe Award, awarded to the brainboxes
who knew about Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov before he
became the sort of jazzy fact that slides across your
facebook with the regularity of the passing seasons. The
Savoir of the Universe Award is shaped like a croissant, a
glass of wine a smug man. |
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That's uncanny, I was just about to post the exact same
thing, almost word for word. |
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"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" |
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//who knew about Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov before he became the sort of jazzy fact// |
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So now we're being hipster about historical facts as well? I knew about Vasili Arkhipov before it was cool? |
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I'm perfectly at peace with the concept of knowing about
Vasili Arkhipov and NOT being cool. |
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Maybe we should award the Soviet Death's Hand system an ongoing award for continuing to not annihilate western civilisation, even though it is designed, and perfectly capable of doing so at a moments notice. Just nominate it on a continuous ongoing basis right up until it does, in fact, annihilate western civilisation. |
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We could foist award upon accolade onto the lab technician, who actually did his or her job and didn't release Superflu from their government run underground lab last week. |
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I think we're on the wrong end of the scale here. |
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// So now we're being hipster about historical facts as well? I knew about Vasili Arkhipov before it was cool? //
pretty much, yeah, for certain values of "we". The internet makes knowledge of facts worthless - all facts are there for the taking, all the time, facts like the VAA one are piped into your face whether you want them or not and so on and so on - so the only cachet left to extract from fact-knowledge is to claim / evidence that you held the fact currency before the fact currency was devalued due to the web's quantitative easing. This cachet is pretty weak; a prize will buff it up. |
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I knew that it was cool to know about Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov before everyone else before everyone else. |
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I for one did not know anything about Vasili Alexandrovich
Arkhipov, and on reading this, thought he might be that
cosmonaut who could be heard cursing his spacecraft as he
burned up on reentry, but that was Vladimir Mikhaylovich
Komarov. |
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I think we should award a ton of fishbones to the Soviets for having such a piss-poor system of launch code authorization. |
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Before I red zen_tom's anno, I knew nothing of Vladimir Mikhaylovich Komarov and thought on reading his name that he might have been the Russian who wrote that mucky book that Peter Sellers was in. But that was someone else. |
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//Vasiline Makfin Gerslipov// |
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I have never heard of Vaseline Arse Whotsit, I still know nothing at all about him or her (assuming it's the name of a person), and I am as cool as feck. |
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If you knew everything, would you know that you knew
everything? How could you tell? |
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Can the set of knowing everything contain itself? |
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Give me the award. I was going to summon a demon who'd
eat the world for breakfast, fart it out in the afternoon &
light it on fire while laughing. |
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So give me the award for saving the world please. |
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Oh, it had to be nuclear destruction? OK, another demon
was going to eat the world & fission it in his belly, OK? |
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The last programming mistake in C |
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.
.
.
if ( state = WAR ) launch(); |
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you are all very cool in my book, but I didn't know I had a book until I read this. |
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