Look to the West: Thread III, Volume IV (Tottenham Nil)!

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Makemakean

Thande said:
The only substantial references in there are 'his own family' (a running gag about Lloyd George from the British politics threads) and 'the sun is God', which were the OTL last words of the artist JMW Turner. The rest is mostly extracted from a lunatic on a bus for that authentic flavour.
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Oh, when I first read it, I thought it was a reference to the double-meaning sun/son, like in that Star Trek episode when they find this planet with a Roman Empire and this small sect worshiping "the Sun", and Spock being somewhat confused by this because the Terran Roman Empire didn't have any sun-worship cult, only for them to realize that it was the Son, they were referring to, and that the Sun cult was really that planet's version of Christianity.

Then when you told me it had to do with days of the week and Norse gods, I figured it must have been something that Ian McKellen-guy said. Tuesday = Týr, Wednesday = Odin, Thursday = Thor, Friday = Frey, Saturday = Saturn, Sunday = ??? What god is the sun? Oh, the sun is God!
 
Thande

Thande

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Makemakean said:
Oh, when I first read it, I thought it was a reference to the double-meaning sun/son, like in that Star Trek episode when they find this planet with a Roman Empire and this small sect worshiping "the Sun", and Spock being somewhat confused by this because the Terran Roman Empire didn't have any sun-worship cult, only for them to realize that it was the Son, they were referring to, and that the Sun cult was really that planet's version of Christianity.

Then when you told me it had to do with days of the week and Norse gods, I figured it must have been something that Ian McKellen-guy said. Tuesday = Týr, Wednesday = Odin, Thursday = Thor, Friday = Frey, Saturday = Saturn, Sunday = ??? What god is the sun? Oh, the sun is God!
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Your aptitude for exegetical hypothesis generation is superlative, but no. A coincidence.
 

Makemakean

Thande said:
Your aptitude for exegetical hypothesis generation is superlative, but no. A coincidence.
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This is the reason why I don't read stuff like Finnegans Wake, because I'd probably be able to find all sorts of meanings, only none that Joyce ever intended to put there.

Anyway, after the Hugh Grant deduction, I think it's pretty fair to say that the one time that I actually manage to correctly deduce your thoughts from very little information has come, gone and will never come again...
 

Makemakean

ChrisH said:
Smallest Marx Child: "Teacher says every time a bell rings an Engels gets its' wings".
Karl: "Only through exploiting the labours of the proletariat."
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Smallest Marx Child: "It's ironic really, seeing you could only spend your life writing all of this stuff because your great fan Engels kept sponsoring you, and he in turn got his money from his parents, who got his money from-..."
Karl: "What are you trying to suggest?"
Smallest Marx Child: "Nothing! Nothing at all."
Karl: "That's right. Nothing at all."
 
Thande

Thande

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Makemakean said:
Anyway, after the Hugh Grant deduction, I think it's pretty fair to say that the one time that I actually manage to correctly deduce your thoughts from very little information has come, gone and will never come again...
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I am still bitter about that, btw :p

Also there needs to be A Christmas Carol parody involving Adam Smith in order to balance It's Karl Marx's Wonderful Life.
 

Makemakean

Thande said:
I am still bitter about that, btw :p
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...and I am still smug about that, btw. :p

Thande said:
Also there needs to be A Christmas Carol parody involving Adam Smith in order to balance It's Karl Marx's Wonderful Life.
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Took me a little digging, but found the website that gave some spins on A Christmas Carol as told by other people than Dickens that this post made me think about:

Ayn Rand: The ruggedly handsome and weirdly articulate Ebeneezer Scrooge is a successful executive held back by the corrupt morality of a society that hates success and fails to understand the value of selfishness. So Scrooge explains that value in a 272-page soliloquy. Deep down, Scrooge's enemies know that he is right, but they resent him out of a sense of their own inferiority. Several hot sex scenes and unlikely monologues later, Scrooge triumphs over all adversity -- except a really mean review by Whittaker Chambers. Meanwhile, Tiny Tim croaks. Socialized medicine is to blame.

Milton Friedman: Scrooge is actually a reasonable fellow who pays his ungrateful employee Cratchit a comfortable middle-class salary by the actual standards of mid-19th century London. After his haunting, Scrooge spends Christmas telling everyone what he learned from the past, present, and future: the UK should embrace a bimetallic monetary strategy.
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CaptainCrowbar

Admiral Matt said:
I felt like I was missing references the entire time I was reading Sanchez' last words.
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I have no idea whether Thande had it in mind, or has even heard of it, but all the time I was reading about Sanchez's "Final Society", I couldn't help thinking of the Final Empire from Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn books (despite being personally fairly sympathetic to Sanchez's political philosophy).
 

Makemakean

Although the Empire of North America is nowadays thought of as synonymous with the practice of multi-party representative democracy and coalition-building government, this was not always the case. The ENA has gone through several party regimes, from no organised parties to one-and-a-half to two to two-and-a-half to many. The characteristics of these regimes (sometimes referred to as ‘Political Systems’ by the Americans—not to be confused with the actual constitutional methods of governance) are here briefly described.
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Something I just realized now is that I've always assumed that Thande was always intending for America to introduce some sort of proportional representation or at least preferential representation in the Empire of North America to allow for this to become true, but now I am increasingly starting to think that - in line with Thande's opinions on the topic - that most probably is definitely not gonna be the case.

It wouldn't surprise me if the intention is to keep the electoral system rather non-uniform, eventually settling towards something with FPTP on the countryside, and in the cities some sort of STV type arrangement with multi-member constituencies (wasn't that how it used to be in Canada, by the way?), and then have the political climate modelled on Canada and India. Volatile and with countless of parties and impossible coalition haggling going on all the time.
 
Alex Richards

Alex Richards

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I think I know now why Nugax included all those rivers in his old ENA map.

Alaska looks so empty without them, even including a lot more settlements than he did.
 
Thande

Thande

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You may be interested to know that I have completed updating the laconic TL, which despite its name is now 78,000 words long in itself...

And you know what that means.

COMING SOON
 

1SaBy

I am glad that you waited with this until after I was done with my finals. :D
You don't know how much I am looking forward to this.
 
Thande

Thande

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TheBatafour said:
I'm almost squeeing in anticipation!
Also: first post!
Also Also: I am TheBatafour, and this is my favourite timeline on the website!
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I love how my TL coaxes lurkers out of lurking, it's happened before :D

Volume V will arrive in a day or two. In the meantime I have to decide whether Eurovision is Societist or Diversitarian. The latter, I think.
 
TheInnerMoon

TheInnerMoon

Thande said:
I love how my TL coaxes lurkers out of lurking, it's happened before :D

Volume V will arrive in a day or two. In the meantime I have to decide whether Eurovision is Societist or Diversitarian. The latter, I think.
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The song contest? Seeing as how they stop countries from voting for themselves, you'd think it's societist (creating supranational unity), but then again, it's a way for countries to express nationalism, so yes, going diversitarian is best I think.
 
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