R.I.P. Steven Den Beste

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Catbird
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R.I.P. Steven Den Beste

Post by Catbird »

I just heard about it this afternoon via Instapundit.

Back in the early days of blogging, think early 2000's, he was a daily read for me and many others. He would write the most erudite and well-researched walls of text on most any subject. One of my favorite posts involved explaining how the only reasonable and scaleable alternative to fossil fuels is nuclear or possibly earth core taps. I remember Connie DuToit declaring it a national priority to get him married so that his genes would be passed on to the future. Here are some of his favorite USS Clueless posts.

His popularity as a political blogger earned him so much attention and feedback that it hurt his psyche. He "retired" to write reviews of Japanese anime at Chizumatic. He would still get political from time to time.

He will be missed.



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"If at first you don't succeed, that's one data point." XKCD
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Cybrludite
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Re: R.I.P. Steven Den Beste

Post by Cybrludite »

Damn 2016 to hell. :evil:
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Darrell
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Re: R.I.P. Steven Den Beste

Post by Darrell »

Catbird wrote:I just heard about it this afternoon via Instapundit.

Back in the early days of blogging, think early 2000's, he was a daily read for me and many others. He would write the most erudite and well-researched walls of text on most any subject. One of my favorite posts involved explaining how the only reasonable and scaleable alternative to fossil fuels is nuclear or possibly earth core taps. I remember Connie DuToit declaring it a national priority to get him married so that his genes would be passed on to the future. Here are some of his favorite USS Clueless posts.

His popularity as a political blogger earned him so much attention and feedback that it hurt his psyche. He "retired" to write reviews of Japanese anime at Chizumatic. He would still get political from time to time.

He will be missed.



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Big +1. He will be missed. I used to read him daily.
Eppur si muove--Galileo
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JustinR
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Re: R.I.P. Steven Den Beste

Post by JustinR »

Damn. :(
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Catbird
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Re: R.I.P. Steven Den Beste

Post by Catbird »

I was going through his archives and I found another favorite I'd forgotten about. It's an essay about the horrors of war illustrated as well as one can without experiencing it, and why it must be done sometimes:
Part of why I had insomnia last night is that my thoughts were full of the ways in which wars had changed men, good men, our men, who had gone to fight for us.

I'm Viet Nam generation, or just on the young end of it. Men one year older than I am served in that war, but my year missed the fun, and we were very glad. My year of eligibility for the draft was the first year after they stopped drafting people. (But my draft lottery number was 346, so I knew I wouldn't go anyway.)

I knew a lot of men slightly older than I was who did have to go. I spent many beery/grassy evenings hanging out, and sometimes they'd tell me stories. I met a guy who was an MP for the Air Force, which in practice meant that he was infantry holding a defensible perimeter around an air base in South Vietnam to prevent hostiles from getting near enough to the valuable stuff (jets and bombs and fuel) so that they could fire mortars as them. He saw combat more than once; he was under mortar attack.

I met a guy who was a scout. He talked about seeing a hill which had enemy on it, and after warning a Marine platoon about it, watching them advance up it anyway, losing one killed.

I went to college with a guy who had been on an aircraft carrier. He never fired a shot; he spent his time in theater repairing teletypes. But he did seem to think more than a bit about the Forrestal disaster, apparently in a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God kind of way.

I worked with a guy after I got out of college. He was good looking, friendly, maybe a bit quiet, a loving father and good husband, and a good engineer. Someone else told me that he'd enlisted in the Marines and had been in a firebase, which is nobody's idea of a good time. I was told that he had nightmares, and kept waking up in the middle of the night screaming....continued
"If at first you don't succeed, that's one data point." XKCD
rightisright
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Re: R.I.P. Steven Den Beste

Post by rightisright »

Well that blows. He certainly had a way to make the most complex subjects understandable. Sucks the nitpicking know-it-all douche bags so prevalent on the 'net contributed to the cessation of his (non-anime) blogging many moons ago.
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