mcdowella

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• Commented on In defence of Traditional (Eurocentric Quasi-Medieval) Fantasy: #1 I'll read what I like
  The answer to such questions these days is generally "Google" - nice quote though, and I had no idea until then who it was. I think the main blow actually reading history gives to traditional fantasy is the amount of...
• Commented on In defence of Traditional (Eurocentric Quasi-Medieval) Fantasy: #1 I'll read what I like
  Traditional fantasy is an ideal laboratory in which to examine what is colloquially termed "Feudalism" - that is, a hierarchical society linked by personal commitments in which the higher provides protection to the lower in return for service. Many of...
• Commented on Cloud cuckoo politics
  If you're looking for a voter this will actually sway, I'm one. I live in a LibDem/Conservative marginal, and previously voted Conservative, at the last election because the LibDems had a very redistributive manifesto - probably more redistributive than Labour....
• Commented on Ask the Author
  R.M.Meluch's Merrimack/Romans in Spaaaaace series is great fun, and has hordes of spacegoing monsters with unknown/magic technology suppression fields who have the decency to be vulnerable to swords. The first novel tells us that the Roman Empire never fell, just...
• Commented on Ask the Author
  (This is mostly from reading the Laundry files prior to The Rhesus Chart) Do you defer to the sensitivities of your audience? I notice that Local Conservative Associations have so far been uniformly evil, but, in contrast to some truly...
• Commented on On the lack of cultural estrangement in SF
  Partly prompted by this, I have bought and read OGH's Neptune's Brood (so I guess this blog is doing its job :-)). I'm prepared to believe that it has a satisfactory level of cultural estrangement, but I appear to have...
• Commented on On the lack of cultural estrangement in SF
  This week's (Dec 6-12 2014) Economist contains something of a defense of suburbs - it also seems to be up at http://www.economist.com/suburbs. I think it boils down to saying that lots of people from a variety of cultures think they...
• Commented on On the lack of cultural estrangement in SF
  Bujold's view of a semi-post-human future is the Cetagandans. The males, although intensely competitive amongst themselves, and on first glance running that society, are in fact largely the proving ground for genetic experiments directed by the elite females, and Cetagandans...
• Commented on An age-old question
  Long life at a price? Let's suppose that research on diet and exercise produces scientific consensus around a regime not too far away from current best advice, but with enough of the gaps filled in to offer an extra 20...
• Commented on An age-old question
  I think that personality changes are less important than changes in situation. Until somebody has gone through the education system and put in a few years on their first job there are a lot of options they should be investigating...
• Commented on Leading question
  I suspect that "He who does not work, neither shall he eat" came from experience with primitive communism/communal living in the early church. Apart from running out of money when the second coming didn't arrive on schedule, they appear to...
• Commented on Leading question
  I think there are trends already which will lead to more government/quango control, and which are not altogether bad. We now have an supposedly Independent Central Bank, medicine availability choices by NICE, and now people talking about taking the politics...
• Commented on Unwelcome reality excursion
  I would expect a BDPR security expert to be pretty scathing about surveillance as reported by Snowden, on the grounds that it just isn't the best solution, either for the stated problem, or for any other remotely plausible goal, short...
• Commented on Not a Manifesto
  There is some interesting info on the Roman empire at http://archive.org/stream/municipaladminis032553mbp/municipaladminis032553mbp_djvu.txt. The following points to both dysfunctional dictatorship decisions and agricultural resource exhaustion: ..forced Diocletian to make contributions in kind a fixed part of the tribute from the provinces. This...
• Commented on Cameron v Churchill
  Talking of blunt instruments, would anybody like to analyse the Banksy mural at the top of http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-29446232? Apparently it has been destroyed as racist. I see a load of pigeons looking very stupid, because they are protesting against a swallow,...
• Commented on Cameron v Churchill
  I don't think the current legal and media uproar restrictions on speech are achieving their stated aims, because fine distinctions are being lost when the restrictions percolate down to everyday speech. The main observable effect is that some "bad words"...
• Commented on The referendum question
  240: "There's no reason why a nation of 5 million people can't run its own currency, unless it wants to be a major financial trading hub in someone else's currency" Umm... Scotland has a significant financial sector - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-29140457 -...
• Commented on The referendum question
  Describing a plausible league of nations that functions adequately, as opposed to a single state with localism, would be an interesting exercise in World-Building. Note that the EU, which is closer to this, is distinctively different from the US. In...