Recent content by Thande

I can do rhymes Time after time(s)

I've never really understood the dichotomy that Japan's the only country that doesn't get the Bomb in the 1940s yet still somehow holds onto its entire 1942-era conquests (except the Japanese-occupied parts of China). Granted there's the whole thing about the Race not caring about islands, but...

I feel vaguely guilty for having double access to JSTOR, I get it once for being a Cambridge alumnus as an extra benefit of a service I pay for, then again because academia is also my day job.

This is just based on what Abraham wrote about it, of course he might have been economical with the actualité to schmooze Martin given the context I think in which he was writing.

This is my favourite paragraph I've written in an article for a while, I laughed out loud when I learned George RR Martin had once finished a story for someone else with writer's block.

Your moral judgement of them is irrelevant, the point is that the influence is inarguable. It is very easy to dismiss this pipeline as 'meme politics' today, in the same way that Gladstone doing mass 'American-style' politics in the Midlothian campaign was dismissed as mere mob politics...

It's true that a lot of AH is just another exercise in literary fun, in the same way most science fiction doesn't have anything too concrete to say about real-world science and engineering. But, in the same way that watching Star Trek inspired a generation of engineers towards flip phones and...

The nature of the in-group has changed somewhat, but not that much. Look at the Venn diagram between 'been on telly' and 'gets to (sometimes ghost)write highly-promoted novels in Waterstone's, usually crime novels'.

This also makes me realise I don't know how many members there are on Chinese municipality congresses for cities like Beijing or Shanghai. Obviously those are mostly rubberstamps but it'd be interesting to compare. Can't find anything for Beijing, but Shanghai has a wiki article and it has an...

NYC council made me have that realisation as well. 51 single-member districts for one of the biggest cities in the world. I was thinking "well this is like the London Assembly and obviously there must be some lower-level councils for the boroughs or something", but nope.

Wow, that second map really does show how cosy-codominion the 'nonpartisan' system can be.

Yeah, I guess that could work.

Great article idea. Interestingly Churchill at one point also planned to write some articles similar to Baen's later "Alternate Generals" anthology, where he imagines scenarios like "Ramsay MacDonald in the French Revolution". Roy Jenkins, his biographer, was rather glad he never wrote them...

Yeah, but 'Dominion' was invented in this context because they wanted to make Canada a kingdom but without upsetting the US. While I suppose some civil servant with a chart might later want Ireland to have the same title as the other 'white dominions' (but even then, Australia is formally a...

Very interesting @prime-minister ! But shouldn't it still be the Kingdom of Ireland if it never became part of the UK in the first place?