Cybernethics / Cybernéthique

Play it: And a Pony! in MP3 (take 3).
Music & Lyrics by Faré. Original insight by Gavin.

Update: slightly improved lyrics and a better take with the correct melody.

J'interromps vos programmes habituels pour vous rappeler qu'aujourd'hui, nous commémorons la façon dont l'Etat nous protège de la mort violente par des criminels. Dieu-L'Etat notre sauveur. C'est clair, sans l'Etat, ce serait l'anarchie.

Dans une discussion rationnelle, chacun explore la structure conceptuelle de l'autre -- mais aussi la sienne propre, qui restait souvent implicite jusqu'à être révélée par la confrontation. Cette structure est caractérisée par ses distinctions et ses identifications, c'est-à-dire par la façon dont on distingue ou identifie les situations en leur appliquant le même concept ou un concept différent. L'interlocuteur rationnel tente de comprendre ces distinctions et identifications, avant de pouvoir juger si oui ou non elles lui sont pertinentes -- c'est-à-dire propres à faciliter et améliorer le processus de décision et d'action humaines.

Philippe Gouillou propose des lois de discrimination positive en faveur d'une minorité défavorisée, les cons. Quant à moi, je pense qu'ils sont déjà sur-représentés parmi nos élus, et parmi les destinataires de divers privilèges légaux.

Mais il y a une minorité opprimée pour laquelle je suis prêt à me lever, minorité sous-représentée à la chambre et sur-taxée: les François-René Rideau. Nous sommes à peu près 1 pour 60 millions en France, et moins de 1 pour 600 milliards à la chambre, soit une sous-représentation par un facteur 10000 au moins. C'est scandaleux, et je réclame une loi pour arranger ça: il faut un quota minimum strict de François-René Rideau à l'assemblée à raison de un pour 60 millions de députés.

Comme Ayn Rand le dit dans son livre La vertu d'égoïsme, une société est libre si elle protège la minorité contre la majorité, et la plus petite minorité, c'est l'individu.

With Dubya promising to spend zillions of dollars to send a few privileged civil servants to Mars, I am irresistibly reminded of this quote from one of my favorite books, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, by Neil Postman (RIP) and Charles Weingartner:

Consider this: The first hole ever dug on the moon by a man-made machine is now done. It is the most expensive hole in the history of the human race. Now what does that mean? How do we know whether this is one of man's noblest achievements or if it is a game being played by a small group of lunatics for their own amusement -- at our expense?

Postman hits the nerve, he knows what questions to ask, what assumptions to question. But being a depraved leftist, he can provide no justifiable criterion to answer. Ayn Rand does, in her essay Collectivized Ethics, as included in her essay collection The Virtue of Selfishness. Too bad it's not on the web yet, but here's a purchase well worth it: concise, compelling, to the point. And no, I prefer not to retranslate to English the relevant excerpt back from the French translation on my laps.

By way of GNXP, here's a great speech by Michael Crichton about the intellectual fraud that is consensus science and any form of consensus being used as an argument in science.

Someone fnord who was interested in epistemology and whom I directed fnord to part 5 of my essay and then told about the FNORD didn't get my last joke about it. I guess I fnord won't be able to make my point through unless I make it blatantly fnord obvious. So read the following development for more illumination.

The Fnord has this feature in common with the Tao, which is that whichever fnord that you can see isn't the true fnord.

At one point, spinemasher questioned my sanity. Well, actually, yes, I'm insanely passionate about the logic part of rationality. What can possibly be insane about that? Well, the insanity is in my neglect the other crucial part of rationality, properly prioritized goal-setting. For instance, with this current discussion, I wasted my time clarifying notions of logic for someone who is obviously unable to make any sense out of it -- because his priorities have shifted away any involvement of logical thinking from such discussion. All this while I could have spent my time more wisely at other activities.

The Democrats cry, "The emperor should subsidize the poor!", Republicans argue, "No, the emperor should subsidize the rich!", Libertarians respond, "The emperor wears no clothes", while Terra Librans ask, "Why do they call that naked man emperor?"

Googling my way and chasing links to find stuff related to my article on Government and Black Magic, I had already discovered this excellent article on the Nature of Government by Frederick Mann (well, actually, I had found an older version on the site of the APFN -- see my post below about the hallowcinotion that is government). Well, it's only one in a vast body of interesting documents from Terra Libra (the homepage of which I located thanks to the links from libertocracy). There seems to be a gold-mine of documents to Clear Your Mind from the statist pollution. As for the quote above, it's from an article named the Terra Libra Shift. Another site I found along the way is Revolution, ammo for freedom fighters, but I much prefer the name of the site Build Freedom -- because it makes it obvious that Liberty is a paradigm of creation and harmony, whereas talking about fight is already buying into the paradigm of destruction and conflict of the enslavers.