Recent content by Plotinus

Thanks for such a detailed answer. I'll try to keep mine brief, partly because I don't want this to devolve into an argument about the relative merits or otherwise of the views in question. (That would belong in Off Topic, and this is World History!) I grant that too many examples is...

I honestly don't think that's an accurate description of "liberalism", and it suffers from the same issue dogging the OP's: a lack of examples. Certainly some eighteenth- or nineteenth-century people we might broadly call "liberals" believed in a pre-civilisation utopia, but who believes in that...

I hope this bump will be forgiven, but I couldn't resist noting that today is the twentieth anniversary of my posting the first version of this scenario. A lot has happened since then, for both Civ and myself. I don't think that today anyone would consider 76Mb an intimidating download! But it's...

We named our cat after Merlin (the TV version), even though I don't really like the way they re-interpreted the story by making Arthur into an oaf and Merlin into what Arthur should have been. Though I did appreciate the appearance of Glastonbury Tor at the end. However, Malory's Merlin is an...

Yes, and (I think more significantly) African Christian denominations. Just ten minutes of walking along the Old Kent Road or anywhere in that area will take you past more AICs than you can count on your fingers. But London also has significant religious minorities from earlier periods of...

The data on that is quite ambiguous. By some metrics, many (not all) Western Europeans are becoming less religious, but by other metrics they are not. It varies a lot from place to place, both between countries and within countries. E.g. England overall has become (somewhat) less religious over...

Just started the new Batman Arkham Shadow game. The excitement around this one really is justified.

You keep talking about "liberals", but you don't name any or give any concrete examples. Who exactly are you talking about? What evidence do you have that they all hated religion or were consciously dishonest in their aims? What about liberal Christianity? I mean, don't people like...

Heh, I thought the characters in the second book were worse than the first (e.g. the main character who spends much of his time on dates with an imaginary girlfriend, and when handed unlimited power uses it to search for a woman who resembles his imaginary girlfriend and then gaslight her into...

I read the first two and then gave up. I thought they were pretty bad, mainly because the characters were mostly quite repellent and not remotely believable.

That’s amazing, I had no idea! I imagine Chesterton would probably have approved.

I don't know why Chesterton isn't more popular today. I suppose it's because there's always a religious angle to everything he writes. Plus of course the Holmes stories have the (to us) romantic setting of Victorian London, while Chesterton suffers from being somewhat later. Although that...

Because for all his faults, Conan Doyle was a fun writer, and he managed to create a character who was truly compelling. There's a reason the Sherlock Holmes stories are still widely read today to a degree unheard of in any other popular literature of that period.

Yes, those are great episodes! Though they do remind me of another thing that annoys me about adaptations, which is making Moriarty a major character and ongoing nemesis for Holmes. He only appears in one story, and even there he hardly actually appears. (Another example of Conan Doyle creating...

Chesterton is always worth reading. And of course with Father Brown the mystery, and the solution of the mystery, are never really the main point of the story. Certainly Conan Doyle is more explicit in his imitation of Poe. Holmes refers to the Murders in the Rue Morgue more than once and...