Cybernethics / Cybernéthique

The foundation for the right of mothers to abort: MYOB. Mind Your Own (Goddamn) Business.

The only acceptable justice is retributive justice. Unless you're the fetus, you haven't been harmed by abortion and have no leg(al interest) to stand in court.

The only acceptable police is to repel a threat. You are not being threatened by abortion, unless your own mother wants to retroactively abort you.

If someone is to represent the fetus—the mother is next of kin and so far its only relationship. Any damages the mother may have to pay will be paid to herself. Any police intervention is for her to call or call off. Any punishment deserved is for her to enforce or amnesty.

Arguably, if a fetus is already viable, and the father agrees to cover the extra costs (including but not limited to medical procedures), he may be entitled to keeping it after it's been evicted from the unwilling mother's body.

Certainly, if the woman is married or otherwise in a contractual relationship in which she agreed to carry the child—she may have to pay damages for breaking an agreement. But unless you're the husband or other contracting party, this has nothing to do with you.

If the mother was part of your abortion-prohibiting church, you may indeed excommunicate her for her sin. Otherwise her religious choices are none of your business.

Is the fetus human? Of course it is. Does it have rights? None for which you have any standing to speak in its name—name that it doesn't even possess absent the mother's consent.

Is abortion "murder", thus justifying the intervention of Government? My, Government is the greatest of all murderers, by far, and shall especially not be allowed to intervene. Instead, it should be disbanded, all its officers tried, and many of them, probably, executed. Leaving no one to intervene. There are no magical angels "above" society who may speak for a nebulous "collective" that somehow has "authority" upon the mother and the fetus.

Even without a monopoly Government to speak in the name of The Collective, could non-monopoly enforcement agencies somehow speak in the name of the fetus? No one may anoint any "representative" for anyone else than themselves individually, so no one may claim to "represent" the fetus. There are only regular citizens who may or may not have a standing in any given case—in this case, none having standing except for the mother herself.

That's as far as the (Natural, Libertarian) Law speaks.

Now, is abortion morally the better—or less bad—option to pick in any given case, or ever? You're entitled to your own opinion. I certainly have opinions, weak or strong, in many cases. But in each case, the moral decision is ultimately the mother's moral burden to carry and not yours.

You may of course practice ostracism towards those you deem repulsive. Psychopathic wanton child-killers will no doubt find themselves banned from polite and even most of impolite society. But be careful what criteria you choose—or fail to choose—to apply regarding whom to mingle with or shun—for the circle of those with whom you do or don't surround yourself will be both your reward and your punishment.

You know boy, it's a bad strategy to pick fights with old men. Sure, in most cases, you're a muscular punk used to street fighting, while he's an old fool who's got no fight in him, so you'll beat him easily—so easily in fact that there's no glory in it whatsoever. But in some cases, you'll find an old man who has got some fight in him. And then he's the kind of guy who's got some fight in him, yet who survived to that old age. So he might have a serious drop on you in terms of fighting, whether he is a boxing champion or has a hidden gun. What more, he knows he doesn't have the stamina to win a drawn out fight against a young man, so he'll go directly for the kill using the dirtiest trick in his book, and he'll give no warnings. He doesn't care too much if he himself ends up in a hospital bed, a jail cell, or a coffin. You see, he's old already. His kids are grown up. His wife can continue without him. His heyday, his career, his love life, are behind him. He's ready to die. A long stay in a hospital, or a prison, will give him time to catch up with all those books he eventually intended to read, or write. A stay paid by his insurance, or by the government. Anyway, he hasn't got much to lose. And so he'll hurt you bad, and if not, you'll have to hurt him bad. Either way, if you're still alive at the end of the fight, you'll be in big trouble, with a lot of time to serve—in your case, the best years of your life. And all that for what? There's not much to win, if at all, in such a fight, and there's a whole lot to lose. Thus my advice is: don't pick fights with old men.

Leftists constantly harp about the evil of a supposed "American Empire" to denounce US foreign policy. As usual they are doubly wrong: the US foreign policy is precisely not an Empire, and not being an Empire is actually what makes it wrong.

Empire is power exerted to rule over the conquered. Hegemony is power without the responsibility of actually ruling to establish order.

There is an American Empire: it is constituted of the 50 States, plus US Territories like Puerto Rico. This American Empire is ruled by the unelected national socialist Bureaucracy of America, with a simulacrum of elections. Despite the cancerous growth of this Bureaucracy, American Culture enable Americans to resist abuses by their Bureaucracy, thanks to its strong sense of individual rights as notably entrenched by the American Bill of Rights. As a result, American Empire enjoys Order and Prosperity.

By contrast, the vast number of foreign countries upon which the US exerts its world-wide military influence is the American Hegemony. It is made of many semi-independent vassal states that are only loosely controlled by the American bureaucracy, through vague treaties, massive bribes, the occasional coup, and, at the expensive and untenable margin, military intervention. These vassal states are themselves instituted as caricatures of America, each ruled by its own unelected national socialist Bureaucracy, with its own simulacrum of elections. But this system is deeply dysfunctional.

First, the populations in most of these vassal states lack the cultural defenses that can keep their own bureaucracy in check. Nepotism, tribalism, corruption, massive graft, are the necessary consequences of socialism run amok in these nations, followed by poverty, squalor, political oppression, crime and civil unrest. But even in those nations that do or did historically possess cultural defenses against bureaucratic power, such as in Europe, East Asia or the near East, these defenses could at best resist the domestic forms of bureaucratic power; they could do nothing against the foreign forms of bureaucratic influence from the American Hegemony's Bureaucracy.

The Hegemonic Bureaucracy has been slowly but steadily promoting its choice of policies all over the vassal states as well as at home: inflation under a dollar standard, economic controls, victim disarmament, suppression of nuclear energy, leftist political correctness, anti-white racism, "social" policies, censorship of right wing "populist" ideas and promotion of all left-wing "popular" ideas — except where they clash with American Hegemony e.g. by promoting affiliation to Russia or China, or by aspiring to the "independence" of local mass murderers.

While the American Hegemony does not have Power to directly enact its favorite policies in vassal states, its Influence is beyond feedback from either the American defense mechanisms (the soap box, ballot box, jury box, and cartridge box), or the vassal nation's defense mechanism (weaker than in America): American Bureaucrats are simply out of reach of any of these mechanisms, as they relentlessly promote their agenda, with copious funds to promote their friends and hound their enemies. If anything, the principal limit to their influence is that the same lack of feedback, by detaching them from reality, keeps them generally incompetent as well as generally nefarious. (Mencius Moldbug also noted another factor that contributes to bureaucratic influence, foreign or domestic, being nefarious yet competent in nefariousness this time: bureaucratic promotion is based on success as measured by short term impact, which is easily achieved by promoting destructive policies and not constructive policies.)

Empire can create Order and Prosperity. Its claim to fame may have been the world-wide abolition of slavery. Hegemony only sows Chaos and Collapse.

If only the world-wide interventions of the US military were covering the Globe with an Empire rather than a Hegemony! At least it would create a chain of feedback and responsibility in the ruling bureaucracy. Unhappily, the American Left instead succeeded at purposefully dismantling the French and British Empires, to replace them by this American Hegemony, putting Europe under its nefarious influence, and establishing in its former colonial possessions a collection of national socialist regimes. In these new puppet regimes, legitimacy of power doesn't stem from any objective superiority of the Rulers and their Law, but instead from the ultra-racist principle of the race of the local genocidal dictators being established.

Much of the evil in the world, including the massive poverty and occasional famine resulting from political oppression by murderous men of low IQ, is the direct consequence of the US Hegemony as spread over the Globe by the American Left — which is by no means a endorsement of Russian or Chinese Hegemony as alternatives offered by the more extreme Left.

After some sad news, Jacques Brel has everyone in the assistance sit around, and invites whoever volunteers to say something to turn sadness into gaiety. The group thins down as the speakers are not Brel himself singing. Another group of latecomers forms as audience to the few that stayed in the first group. One of the "speakers" heckles me to speak about Glow. I am wondering what story I can tell of how someone made me happy when I was sad. I am surprised to hear myself instead talk roughly as follows.

“If you have any creative talent (the audience laughs uncomfortably at the lack of modesty from someone unknown), you have to believe in yourself. And I don't mean that you should have no criticism for your own ideas, quite the contrary. I mean that you have confidence in the value of your work, of this painful process, of what comes out of so many refinements and failed attempts due to this constant self-criticism. If you have any creative talent talent, by definition, what you end up creating will be original. It will be personal to you. Unique. No one else will have seen it. No one else will have conceived it. No one else will have any idea of it. No one else might even be able to understand it. It will be a most intimate part of you. And yet, if you want your talent to not have been in vain, you now will have to sell your creation. You will have to find a public, and make your creation not just yours anymore, but theirs. And that's just as painful as the creative process. Sometimes more. But if you succeed the pain will have been worth it.

Because your idea is so personal to you, so foreign to them, you will have to relentlessly explain. Explain all those things that are so obvious to you, and so unobvious to them. Most of the explanations won't work, because they don't speak to them. And soon, you may find yourself trying to expose your most intimate thought processes. There can be a pornographic aspect to exposing yourself that way. Sale is hard—unless you've created something the value of which is already obvious to others (although, in the case of Jacques Brel, this involved indecently exposing his own foibles as part of the songs created themselves).

And at the same time, you may find that most of the explanations may try at first are not necessary, but counter-productive. Indeed, you will be tempted to explain how you came up with your ideas, to describe this process that brings you so much pain and joy. But people don't care a damn about your creative process—at least not until after they see already greatness in your work. Instead, you will have to go the other way around, and understand enough of those other people to figure out the appreciative process by which they will see value in your work. You will have to understand how they think. How that may be in ways identical to yours, or how that may be in ways very different from you. And if you have any creative talent, some of your ways will have to have been different. You will have to examine not just your own psyche, but theirs, the discrepancies and commonalities, and incorporate that into your joint effort to create and to sell. You will have to examine and expose not just your own intimacy, but also theirs. And you will have to bridge the two. And that's uncomfortable, too.

Most people picture “genius” as some innate ability to explore ideas further than other people can, in the same known directions that everyone tries. I would call any such raw ability intelligence, and certainly, intelligence matters. I've met creative geniuses with much more intelligence than most humans, including much more than me. But maybe as important as intelligence is perspective, that makes you explore in directions that other people don't try to explore. Alan Kay often says that “Perspective is worth 80 IQ points”. Indeed they may not explore because there's nothing there worth exploring within their reach. And maybe you're better positioned to go that direction; maybe you don't need go far, just look at the same things differently; maybe you have guiding principles that allow you to sift through the mud and find gold. Often, you will have to confront some taboos: maybe you found something original by going in forbidden places; maybe everyone goes to those forbidden places, but few dare bring anything back; maybe they go places and bring back things, but the taboo forces them to speed along and not go through the long process of ensuring what they bring back is valuable; maybe the taboo prevented many from realizing the value of what they and you brought back. In any case, your creation will be original because in some way, you did something different, that others wouldn't, couldn't or shouldn't do.

And so there you are. You have found your creative niche, from which you know how to extract these nuggets, that you have learned to refine into something with value that others understand. Inas much as you weren't successful yet, you have to keep trying, harder and better. Inasmuch as you were successful, copycats hurry to extract all there is from the same vein, while you get bored selling the same thing over and over and over. Unless you struck it big and your ambition is smaller than your success, you're back to trying harder and better, looking for another domain where you may or may not also find success, until either your talent and inspiration dry out, or you die without having been able to fulfill your potential.

A creative career is full of sorrow, failures, regrets, missed opportunities, pain and hardship. But it can also be full of joy, success, enlightenment, serendipity, pleasure and sometimes even comfort. You should cherish the family, close friends and colleagues with whom you can genuinely share your adventure. But above all, you must believe in yourself, be confident in the process of learning and creating, find your joy in this mostly lonely process itself, and not settle for mediocrity.”

In my morning dream, I was inside a computer role-playing / adventure game, but following the instructions in the manual didn't have the expected effect. Interestingly, said manual had funny text alignment and spacing—It turns out, to leave space for extra text that only appeared when heat was applied, and deeply changed the meaning of the text. This mechanism was not only a copy-protection measure, it was also part of the game itself and of its story, discovered as you played. Leaving your hand long enough on a page might reveal text on that page and the page behind it, making you wonder why the text wasn't exactly what you remembered.

In France, there are always enough polling stations. Schools and town halls are polling stations. More people whose ballots to count? That's automatically more people to run polling stations and count the votes. The very notion that some areas may be disenfranchised by lack of polling stations is inconceivable.

In France, people must show ID to vote, and must register in advance where they will vote with their ID, so multiple-vote fraud is almost impossible: it would require complicity between multiple government services, that check the one-to-one-to-one correspondence between people and identity documents and polling stations. Even then, a cheat there would leave quite a paper trail, especially as polling stations record who voted. For that effort, each cheater with duplicate identities could only go to so many different polling stations in a day. Massive fraud would be hard to pull off, and even harder to conceal.

In France, there are no complex ballots on which one needs to do markings with the right kind of pen. No confusion as to how to mark ballots. No manipulation by making some names come first or appear multiple times. No subjective judgment to declare which ballots are valid and how interpret them. No need for expensive untrustworthy machines to process them in a timely fashion. Instead, voters are sent one clearly printed ballot for each of the available options. The same ballots are also available at the polling station. Each voter goes in an isolation booth, puts his ballot of choice in an envelope, then gets out of the booth and publicly puts the single envelope in the ballot box after his ID is verified and name is checked off by assessors of multiple rival parties. When the boxes are counted, in public, only envelopes containing a single unadulterated unmarked untorn uncrumpled pristine genuine ballot are counted as valid. The process and the criteria it applies are fairly clear, objective, hard to get wrong, and hard to dispute.

In France, ballots are cast in transparent ballot boxes in front of everyone. The boxes stay in full view of everyone until they are emptied and the ballots counted the same day at the same site by many people of all parties. The counts are reported immediately by phone in presence of the assessors, who also sign the report, that can be checked thereafter for each polling station. There is no opportunity for anyone to stuff ballot boxes or insert fake numbers in the counting. There is no counting by "machines" that can be pre-programmed or hacked to cheat. There is no keeping ballot boxes overnight where they can be tampered with. There is no set of privileged people with access to ballot boxes who can do a switcheroo or a stuffaroo.

In France, there are no "mail in ballots", where anyone with suitable access could insert or delete thousands of ballots with no way to assess afterwards the integrity of the process. If for some reason you cannot be present on the ballot day, you can register in advance to give your voting proxy to someone you trust to vote for you. But no one may be delegated more than two proxies, thus closing an obvious venue for massive fraud.

In France, it's the people themselves, not the communist "civil service", that runs the elections with every step along the way checked by many people from many rival parties. The only exception is the one-to-one-to-one correspondence between voters, IDs and polling places, but that's not massively gamable without detection. Therefore, the count of the ballots is widely considered trustworthy by everyone and never contested, while requiring no advanced technology whatsoever beyond opaque envelopes and transparent ballot boxes. French people watch with deep contempt and appallment the baroque, expensive, unfair, seemingly absurd, and completely untrustworthy process used in the USA.

AND YET, in France, the communists still cheat and still conquered Power, in an irreversible tight grip. It's just that they don't do it by tampering with the count. They do it by completely controlling the schools, the mass media, the campaign finances, the "civil service", and the courts. Thus, they can brainwash people, spread their uncontradicted narrative, defund any opposition, harass any opponent out of being able to afford a living, and fine or imprison the occasional overly active opponent. If people vote "wrong", they will just force a re-vote until they vote "right" at which point the change will be made irreversible (as for the European Constitution).

In the USA, the communists control schools and media, but not so completely that they can totally hush opposing ideas: churches, a few exceptions like FOX, and now the Internet, break their stranglehold. Communists control the Democratic Party, the "civil service" in all cities and at the federal level, but don't control (all) the courts, so can't arbitrarily oppress their opponents. They control public funding, but there is just too much private funding that they cannot control, so they can't just defund their opponents. That is why they resort to tampering with ballots using a system OBVIOUSLY DESIGNED to enable fraud.

What's even more "funny" is that both voter registration and mail-in votes make a mockery of ballot anonymity—and then in modern times, preferences are obvious on social media and via the massive government surveillance. Since anonymity doesn't meaningfully exist, a trivially simple and obviously cheat-proof process would just be to make all votes public and count them, then leave enough time for losers to triple check that it was all legit. So, really, the complexity of the process is not even justified by anonymity as it is in France. (Whether anonymity is itself a good thing or not is another question.)

In the end, you have no way to trust the process. Not only that, it is obvious that SOONER OR LATER the process is bound to be exploited. You can be naive and believe it wasn't exploited YET (but then, you better provide an explanation compatible with the existence of gerrymandering). However you are stupid, evil or crazy (alternatives not exclusive) if you believe it's a trustworthy process the results of which you and everyone else should blindly accept as the basis for Political Sovereignty.

Elections are a sham. Always have been. Always will be. Like France's only serious and honest presidential candidate, ever, said: "If voting could change anything, it would have been prohibited long ago." (« Si voter changeait quelque chose, il y a longtemps que ça serait interdit. » — Coluche)