GoCaptain

GoCaptain

  • Commented on How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love Focus Groups
    'If changing the look of my website doubles my audience, I'm 100% OK going with "soulless data" over auteur theory.' Auteur theory isn't about independendently minded artists with a personal vision. It's about professionals working in a business delivering a...
  • Commented on Over-Extended Metaphor for the day
    See "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" H P Lovecraft: Algol....
  • Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
    You're overlooking the scale factor. You run a vast empire for a couple of centuries obviously you're going to knock off 50000 or so now and again. Including 50000+ white South Africans, by the by. When you have control of...
  • Commented on Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
    I don't think the Germans were allowed to give colonial empire a proper go. German colonies were nonexistent before 1870 and nonexistent after 1918. And what these colonies totted up to seems to have been pretty much buggerall. The British...
  • Commented on Trotskyite singularitarians for Monarchism! A political speculation.
    'Hmmm, militarization of the youth? You mean like the Boy Scouts of Baden Powell?' Boy and girl scout movements were independent of the state which is why both fascist and communist regimes suppressed them. And also murdered boy and girl...
  • Commented on Trotskyite singularitarians for Monarchism! A political speculation.
    Well, exactly. This is why smoking is good for the chest. :)...
  • Commented on Trotskyite singularitarians for Monarchism! A political speculation.
    What? Including the rosy-cheeked maidens? Ahem. I may have to rethink this. How does it go now? True Thomas, he pulled off his cap And bowed low down to his knee All hail, thou mighty Queen of Heaven For thy...
  • Commented on Trotskyite singularitarians for Monarchism! A political speculation.
    I imagine they think the forelock-tugging peasant will, relieved of the necessity of political thought or thought of any kind, be free to concentrate on the folk singing, knocking back vast qualities of ale in huge tankards, slapping the buttocks...
  • Commented on What scared H. P. Lovecraft
    It seems unlikely. I've just been reading Michel Houellebecq's 'H P Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life' and happen to have it to hand. Lovecraft's view of Freud is dismissive: 'puerile symbolism'....
  • Commented on The cult of justice
    I doubt if respect for the awful majesty of the law survives much contact with it. After a recent interview with, God help me, one of my lawyers, I texted a friend, 'In Albania I'd deal with this with a...
  • Commented on The cult of justice
    I'm fairly dubious about explaining human by analogy with that of other primates. Chimpanzees are strictly socially controlled and a single social misstep can get a chimpanzee beaten to death. Not a hippie commune. I think you're trying to sell...
  • Commented on Making history personal
    I was born and grew up not far from the roman amphitheatre at Caerleon (fortress of the legion) where the 2nd Augusta was based from about 75AD. There's also a nice museum incorporating the excavated legionary baths. The baths came...
  • Commented on Upcoming appearance: Frankfurt Book Fair
    The Spanish Prisoner is always an interesting story....
  • Commented on Marking time, more thoughts
    'and in fact it did mean unemployment and impoverishment for a lot of people, and it would have really sucked to be one of the farmers who found themselves to be surplus to requirements' No, it didn't. In the first...
  • Commented on Marking time, more thoughts
    'Remember when married women didn't have jobs?" We make take a lesson from these women, together with aristocrats and hunter-gatherers (males). What did Jane Austen do all day - apart from scribble, scribble? I've been taking a look at her...
  • Commented on Marking time, more thoughts
    Well, obvious answers: early retirement, limited working hours, extended free education and training, expanded and extensive state services. What?...
  • Commented on Who ordered *that*?
    "Getting the US 'out of the Empire business' has happened previously. It yielded the US entering the First World War in 1917, and the Second in 1941." I think it's worth noting the importance from a parochial British point of...
  • Commented on Monarchy versus the Panopticon
    'Restrict his dating pool to people (of whatever gender he's interested in) from a not-dissimilar background wrt. security. Children of other heads-of-state being the prime candidates. other heads-of-state being the prime candidates. This would, if anything, be a reversion to...
  • Commented on Crib Sheet: 419/Rule 34
    Well, there's an older idea of unity of consciousness. Even God can't be three persons (it's a mystery). I don't follow Dennett because I can't follow Dennett, can't follow his argument. But an AI could model indefinitely many personalities or...
  • Commented on Crib Sheet: 419/Rule 34
    What I find interesting, well, a bit interesting is that in the twenty-first century with all the fabulous tech and so forth it's still useful to have a knife, even a simple not mutlitool sort of thing, just a simple...
  • Commented on Crib Sheet: 419/Rule 34
    'Pope-Emperor of the Internet' Smmfff:)...
  • Commented on Crib Sheet: Saturn's Children
    'I think Sir Christopher Wren & Robert Hooke might disagree with you, ever so slightly.' And I meant no disrespect to these fine fellows. It's a complex story....
  • Commented on Crib Sheet: Saturn's Children
    ' the whole concept of applying scientific knowledge, for the advancement of industry and manufacturing, was pretty much foreign to the ancient Greek philosophers' It was pretty much foreign to everybody until very, very recently. Technical progress was largely artisanal...
  • Commented on Lies, damned lies, and popular beliefs
    People aren't good at stats. I'm pretty hopeless. I think the operative concepts are medieval, too much, too many, not enough. Do you think there's too much crime? No, not enough....
  • Commented on A Bad Dream
    'GoCpatain @ 51 You have just echoed Benjamin Disreali' I did? Well, good on me. I knew I was echoing somebody. 'GoCaptian@ 3 Yes, but define “whackjobs”?' Well, I can't define whackjob but I know one. I'm a whackjob about...
  • Commented on A Bad Dream
    'Compared to say, foreign policy or domestic intelligence -- something that Obama is little different from Bush on.' Just on foreign policy. Really you can't have a foreign policy subject to fundamental revision every four-five years. If you do your...
  • Commented on A Bad Dream
    I'd call it not being ruled by whackjobs. There are real issues of policy: Abandon nuclear weapons - those whacky unilateralists Withdraw from EU - those whacky anti-europeans There is an tendency to converge on policy but for good reasons....
  • Commented on Blogging for Orbit
    Hot Jupiter!...
  • Commented on Crib Sheet: The Jennifer Morgue
    'it seems Iain Banks has passed today (My source is Neil Gaiman's blog)' Ah, Christ. Confirmed elsewhere, also Greg's post. Ah, Christ....
  • Commented on Crib sheet: Accelerando
    'But would he see the implications for literacy?' I'm not sure people saw the implications for literacy until well after the advent of printing, possibly not until the nineteenth century. The subversive possibilities were grasped pretty quickly though....
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