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• Commented on A hypothesis
  "I find the US obsession with Iran to be at best, hypocritical and at worst plain war mongering." -- 'cause the mullahs are such lovely peaceful people, always so cooperative......
• Commented on A hypothesis
  "So it's OK for the West to overthrow governments as long as we can come up with a good excuse, but if Putin does it he's the New Hitler?" -- yup, pretty much. Ask a Pole about it....
• Commented on A hypothesis
  "looks like a mix of the old kleptocracy and neoNazis." -- dang, Radio Moscow on repeat...8-)....
• Commented on A hypothesis
  "that while the "intraspecific predator" might sound somewhat attractive, it's not necessarily the driving force in the evolution of sociopathy." -- true, you don't need to be a sociopath to kill, though sociopathy does make it much harder to condition...
• Commented on A hypothesis
  "I imagine that if you're in a unpredictably violent relationship and see no way out, knowing the violence will continue, you'd become depressed." -- well, sure, but the reference was to violence in general....
• Commented on A hypothesis
  Sociopathy is probably a bundle of mental states, and accordingly doesn't have a universal cause. BTW, why should violence cause depression? Not in my experience. It's -frightening- and unpleasant, but not particularly depressing....
• Commented on A hypothesis
  Absolutely correct. The jails are full of stupid people with poor impulse control. Smart sociopaths have very good impulse control and are good at long-term planning; that's why they survive, and in fact often achieve positions of power and wealth....
• Commented on A hypothesis
  On the door to the cockpit: no, we shouldn't modify the policy. Two reasons: a) there's no way to tell how many -other- 9/11 style suicide-hijackings there would have been without the locked, strengthened doors. It's inherently impossible to quantify...
• Commented on Time tourism: some reaction shots
  The whole concept of critiquing "privilege", of course, contains some assumptions that require unpacking. For starters, it assumes that there is a possible state of affairs -without- privilege. That is, without privilege (some people being advantaged over other people in...
• Commented on Time tourism: some reaction shots
  Mixed, but on the whole, rather less than in upper-class circles. Often rather more choice of mates, but more closely bound to the iron demands of making a living. One literate New England farmwife of the 1820's whose diary I...
• Commented on Time tourism: some reaction shots
  Time travel into the future is structurally different from time travel into the past, from a writing standpoint. The future is more conventionally SFnal. Time travel into the past is like writing historical fiction with a different p.o.v. character. Time...
• Commented on Time tourism: some reaction shots
  It's probably easier for a lefty to get published by Baen than for a conservative to pass muster at some more "metropolitan" publishing houses, which is about what one would expect. It's my experience here in the US that many...
• Commented on Time tourism: some reaction shots
  More generally, is it actually true that time-travel stories are more likely to have male protagonists than other SF stories of the same vintage? I really don't think so. I've been writing time travel since the 1990's, lo these 20...
• Commented on Time tourism: some reaction shots
  "And more recently, an author like Ken MacLeod is rather different politically than just about every author published by Baen." -- as opposed to, say, the Trotskyite labor activist Eric Flint? He really is an unrepentant old-fashioned Trotskyite, you know....
• Commented on Time tourism: some reaction shots
  If you want an example of what a woman in the 1600's could get away with if affluent and determined and prepared to run a lot of risks, take a look at the life of Hortense de Mancini....
• Commented on Time tourism: some reaction shots
  In time travel, it's important to keep in mind that there is no "past", just "pasts". Which is to say, people and cultures differed just as much in the past as they do today; usually rather more so, since the...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Iron Sunrise
  As for the science in science fiction... I've always assumed that it's basically bafflegab anyway. It should be consistent and, if it's science fiction, -feel- like science (no blood sacrifices and gnomes) and that's all you can really ask for....
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Iron Sunrise
  On buying habits: my agent and my publisher tell me that the reason for the (quite spectacular) jump in royalties is the increasing habit of people reading one book, liking it, and then going out and buying everything the author...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Iron Sunrise
  When betting what's going to be read in 25 or 50 years, keep in mind that books won't go out of print or become physically hard to find, which is what has always happened to most fiction.(*) I spent 10...