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I just came across an article from 1934 where the author actually imagined wars fought with giant robots: http://paleo-future.blogspot.com/2007/05/gigantic-robots-to-fight-our-battles.html Professor [Felix Gaston] Gauthier disclosed in his address that two pacifistic-minded nations are today...

The author also seems to imagine that S.M. Stirling secretly is on the side of the Draka, just like him: Didn't Stirling say somewhere that he created the Draka as a sort of though-experiment, trying to imagine a villanious totalitarian empire that was genuinely successful?

Well, with a constitutional democracy, you can have certain rights in the constitution and make it necessary to have a really strong majority (a lot more than 51%) in order to change that. Still not a guarantee of course, but a lot better than just "majority rules".

My guess would be it deters certain kinds of premeditated crimes while increasing the rate of more spontaneous "crimes of passion" (and suicides too). Wikipedia's article on gun politics, which of course should be taken with a grain of salt, says in the section on "Domestic Violence":

There's a big difference between pulling out a gun when angry and belligerent (and in many cases drunk or on some drug) and pulling out a gun when scared. And remember, I was talking about multiple hijackers, with several pointing guns at windows or holding controls to a bomb--if you shoot one...

Premeditated violent crime might become rarer, but spontaneous shootings arising out of bursts of anger would probably be a lot more common (not to mention more suicides arising out of passing moments of despair). And on the subject of hijacking, a group of hijackers who were willing to die for...

What if it hit a window though? That link is from a roleplaying game, so I'm not sure I'd totally trust what it says about wallets or heavy clothes stopping them--this page from an explosives and weapons forum says the Glazer safety slug was able to penetrate a car door, for example. Maybe the...

Well, this is the sort of obscure academic book that you probably wouldn't be likely to find in most American bookstores either...so regardless of where you live, your best bet is to order it online (and like the other Tetlock book, it's available on amazon.de).

I didn't know that. But given his posts, presumably he'd have no problem reading the English version himself? In any case, the previous counterfactual history book edited by Tetlock, Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics, does not seem to have been translated into German (an...

Translated into what? By the way, an early draft of chapter 2, "Counterfactual Thought Experiments: A Necessary Research Tool", fairly different from the one that appears in the book, is available online: http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/gesint/lehre/2002_2003/counterfact/lebow_ch2.pdf

Is anyone else on librarything? Here's all the books in my collection tagged "alternate history".

Apparently the visual representation of the Maya is pretty accurate, but the characterization of their culture as decadent bloodthirsty death-worshippers (who in the movie practice human sacrifice on a mass scale like the Aztecs, which has no basis in history) is causing a lot of Maya scholars...

You can read the first five chapters online here: http://www.hatrack.com/osc/books/empire/empire_01.shtml

"Civilization" began right around the time the current interglacial period started (for the last several million years, the earth has been stuck in an ice age most of the time with occasional warmer interglacial periods lasting a few thousand years). So no ending of the ice age, maybe no...

Well, it's certainly possible to be comfortable with naked dudes in a sort of locker-room setting like those panels, but still have a negative attitude about gays. Sure, Lawrence is generally useless in the comic, but the lisping in the thought-bubble in panel 4 was specifically meant to mock...

So, I'm sure Ness' lisping mocking of Laurence in panel 4 was just meant to tell us something about the character's attitudes towards gays, and in no way reflects the views of the comic's author? And the "pink gay nazis" thing was just thoughtful world-building, obviously.

While you're correct that he had nothing to do with the Manhattan Project aside from sending the letter to Roosevelt, that second part is badly wrong. The theory of general relativity, which explains gravitation in terms of curved spacetime, wasn't introduced until 1915, and it is that theory...

Did you read my comments above? Once again, Wilmott clearly did not intend it to be realistic. The whole point was for the history of the C.S.A. to be like a twisted mirror of the real history of the U.S.A., think of the Mirror Universe of Star Trek for an analogy. This wouldn't work nearly as...

I disagree, an AH story can certainly be evaluated on its likelihood given the point of divergence. I just don't think it's fair to criticize this particular movie on those grounds since it was never intended to be a plausible AH in the first place.

Again, do you think the director really intended the scenario to be realistic, or are you just referring to hypothetical "idiots" in the audience? If you've seen the movie, would you disagree that it is clearly satirical?