(urth) Pirate Freedom notes

[Gwern Branwen]

On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 9:23 AM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net> wrote:
> I agree that the mention of Cuba comes across as very odd, a bit like a
> 1950s judgement transplanted to the 1990s, or something like
> that---disconnected and out of place. I took it as a hint to not take the
> history stuff (aside from timelines) too seriously, since we can't tell
> whether Chris ends up in our own past or in the past of a future that is
> itself a consciously made-up "alternate history" that is not our own. That's
> the best way I can put it.

That's charitable, yes. If we go by Thalassocrat's timeline, he
claimed IIRC, that Chris was born in 2007?

If he really was, then the monorails are not very strong evidence of
being in an alternate world since there's still time for monorails to
go up depending on how late he's talking of them, or Wolfe back in
2007 could've been optimistic about monorails. (We've already seen how
bad he is at predicting the future, and from my personal experience in
collecting and judging thousands of predictions, people really stink
at predicting infrastructure developments.) And for that matter, the
wristwatch thing is strange for another reason: at least in 2007,
(male) kids were stopping the wearing of wristwatches as celllphones
spread; should we chalk this up to it being Cuba, even
free-of-Communists-Cuba, or Wolfe being Wolfe?

Much more important would be the embryo selection / genetic
engineering and possible cloning: human cloning would be pretty much
impossible for even a rich mafiosi to do in 2007, genetic engineering
almost as hard, and embryo selection doable but very expensive: while
genome sequencing has been falling exponentially (is now ~<$1000 a
genome, projected to hit $100 2014-2015) that also implies that back
in 2007 a sequenced genome would probably cost scores of thousands of
dollars and the more embryos you sequence in order to implant only the
embryos with the most height-linked alleles, the more you're going to
pay out. For a few dozen embryos (which would let you pick an embryo,
on average, with 5 or 6 binary variants set as you please), that's
going to run you a few millions. Hard to imagine a mafiosi caring
about height *that* much.

On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 10:55 AM, Jerry Friedman
<jerry_friedman at yahoo.com> wrote:
> But Chris is not a "made man" in the Mafia sense, as I understand it.  He's
> never been part of the Mafia.  But I don't remember him saying such a
> thing and it's not at Google Books.

Does he ever explicitly say he was not a made man, even honorary? He
does seem pretty handy with a knife as his father taught him...

The Chris quote is:

    "When the fight was over, I had the men come up to Jarden and me
one at a time. I shook hands with each of them, told them how well
they had fought and how much I appreciated everything they had done,
and got Antonio to clean out any wounds and bandage them. Antonio
himself was next to last, because he had been busy with a couple of
wounded men. I had Simoneau and Yves holding lanterns so he could see
what he was doing. I shook his hand like I had everybody else's and
told him he was a full member of our crew now, a made man. "If you
want or need anything, if you've got any kind of problem, you come to
me, capeesh? You'll get a hearing and fair treatment." I was leaning
on the handspike when I said that, and to tell the truth I was just
about tired enough to fall down without it."

"a full member of our crew now, a made man". (Is 'capeesh' the right
spelling? I thought it was 'capisch'.)

> If there was one with the right gene combinations for considerably greater
> height.

Perfectly possible. Random recombination, after all.

> The other clue that Chris is a clone (or has a genome created from
> scratch or something) is that he never mentions his mother.  He doesn't
> even say that he's especially tempted to go to New Jersey and see the
> mother he never knew.
>
> However, I don't think this is proof.

Me neither. If it were a more normal character, this would be a good
argument from silence since mothers are important to most people, who
would be homesick either at the monastery for years and years and not
even allowed home. But this is the ultra-oblivious Chris we're talking
about. His silences mean essentially nothing because he's as thick as
a brick.

> That's a good point.  I think it pretty much settles the question.

I should note that the height thing could be usefully employed in some
sort of progressively refining time-loop like in _New Sun_: the old
Chris-father thinks back and decides additional height would've been
useful and made his life easier and pays for it (but would he be
willing to pay enough? see previous). Severian benefits from his
height, doesn't he, which gets him unearned respect and deference.

> Also, we've all heard endless condemnation of the molestations and
> the cover-ups.  There's no need for either Wolfe or Chris to join in
> that.  What Chris does comment on is what's important to him, namely
> violence (and non-violence).  He gives the reader, who already condemns
> the church for the molestations and cover-ups, an /additional/ reason
> to condemn it.

Chris, however, spends the entire book lecturing us on how pirates
really are, what life was really like, how the websites and movies get
it wrong, in passage after passage. His speech is just another
lecture. Personally, I've heard plenty in the past about female
pirates and how pirates were democracies, and I was mildly surprised
at Wolfe not being contrarian and asserting that pirate vessels were
just as bad... Chris was content to lecture us with these old tropes,
so why not the scandals?

> By the way, in our reality, did American Catholic priests teach boys to
> "act like sheep"?  Did they discourage fighting even in self-defense?

What lesson should one learn from the Church's insistence on settling
out of court and using non-disclosure agreements? Doesn't sound like
standing up for oneself or punishing the guilty.

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net