(urth) Pirate Freedom notes

[Jerry Friedman]

>From: Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com>
>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?

Another good one, though maybe we should chalk it up to the
monastery, since novices have no need to talk on the phone all the
time.
 
>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
 
(That's plural.  The singular is "mafioso".)
 
> 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.

 
It seems to me that Chris was born either later than 2007, or in another universe.
(Or Wolfe was sloppy.)
 
>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:

[snip helpful quote]
 
>"a full member of our crew now, a made man".
 
He obviously knows the concept.  But my understanding, mostly from Wikipedia,
is that a "made man" has worked for the Mafia for years, has killed someone on
a contract, and has gone through a ceremony.  Chris gives no hint of anything
like that.
 
> (Is 'capeesh' the right spelling? I thought it was 'capisch'.)

Apparently it's "capisci" (familiar) or "capisce" (formal).  In English it's spelled
all kinds of ways.  By the way, if you ever need the answer, it's "Capisco"
(I understand)--or, I suppose, "Non capisco", though you might want to be
careful with that one.
 
I'd think Chris would know the Italian spellings, since thick as he may be,
he's good at languages.  Either he used an anglicized spelling so readers
would understand it, or Wolfe did regardless of what would be in character for
Chris, or the copyeditor did.
 
>> If there was one with the right gene combinations for considerably greater
>> height.
>
>Perfectly possible. Random recombination, after all.

 
Sure, but not guaranteed.  I was just picking a biological nit; it doesn't have
anything to do with the story.
 
>> 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.
...
 
>> 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?

 
Because he's interested in piracy and wants to talk about his
experiences with it last.  He's not so interested in Catholic scandals.
Or Wolfe is writing a book about piracy and the Catholic parts are only
incidental.
 
>> 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.
 
I don't see what that has to do with my question.  I hope someone who was
raised Catholic will answer it.  (Or has it already been answered on this list?)
 
Jerry Friedman