Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

Category: off-topic ranting

  • Tyranny and Structure in Role-playing

    Noisms at Monsters and Manuals has written a comparison of gaming systems with political theories, dichotomized into “top-down” games (D&D 3rd Edition) and thinkers (Marx) and “bottom-up” games (OD&D) and thinkers (Hayek). Noisms makes it clear what side he falls on (he’s a “bottom-upper,” oo-er), which he characterizes as “the right” (vs. “the wrong”), but…

  • Photos from the End Times…

    The Guardian today has a series of pictures from deserted buildings in Detroit, USA, where the economy (particularly, I suspect, the housing sector) has been slowly collapsing. These pictures are exactly how I imagine the world after a zombipocalypse. Who leaves a library deserted but full of books, except someone fleeing a zombie assault? I…

  • New Opinion on the Tory Health Reforms

    Recent revelations in the UK have shown that the UK government’s intended efficiency savings aren’t working (shock!) and it faces a huge funding shortfall. This is hardly unexpected, and probably the first of a range of such reports that are going to start filtering around Whitehall soon, but it has spawned a disappointing tirade from…

  • Will the Tory Education Reforms Reduce Inequality?

    On the weekend I spent an hour in a bathtub with a dyed-in-the-wool conservative[1], discussing the merits of various solutions to the world’s problems – not a very fruitful discussion, since we disagree on many things, but we are easily able to agree on the horrible situation the UK faces, and during the discussion I…

  • Faustus’s Position on the Legalization of Heroin

    This post has come about because over at Crooked Timber I was outed as one of the authors on this paper, while defending the prohibition of heroin (I’m the third author on that paper, and have a brace like it[1]). I don’t usually like to reveal my identity on the internet, because … well, because…

  • why the Tory Reforms of the NHS Won’t Work, Part 2

    In a previous post I noted some reasons (that I hope are largely practical rather than ideological) why the Tory reforms of the NHS won’t work, based on my superficial understanding of them. Yesterday I discovered that the Tories have introduced a second – and in my opinion completely mad – reform of the NHS…

  • My Favourite Two Journal Articles

    Today, while preparing lessons, I was reminded of one of my two favourite journal articles of all time, which reminded me of the other one, and  thought I’d give a brief review of both of them here. One is an example of the kind of research that is often sneered at for its social sicencey-content,…

  • A Brief Look at the Mathematical Theory of Chess

    Professor Quiggin at Crooked Timber has introduced a discussion of what President Obama will do after the next senate elections with the title “Zero Dimensional Chess,” which led some of the bigger wankers in the audience to wonder how 0-D Chess could occur, and from there to ponder the deeper details of the mathematics of…

  • Stranger Hobbies Than Ours: Budgies

    Recently the Guardian had a news report about a prize budgerigar breeder whose birds were killed or nicked in an act of industrial (sport? Hobby?) sabotage, and now they have a follow-up (with pictures!) of a budgie fanciers show in the UK. See any parallels?  

  • Godwinned

    Trying to find the famous Grim Reaper HIV/AIDS advert from Australia in the 1980s, I stumbled upon this miracle of rhetorical power. I think it’s safe to say that this is the pithiest example of the craziness of AIDS-denialism that there is to be found on the internet. Could you be more offensive and more…