Ideas for Enhancing the Site
These are just ideas to be considered. I am not even sure about all the views they express, let alone whether, where and how to slot them into the site. Feel free to make suggestions.
Some of them correspond to scattered comments on what "I hope at some point" to do.
I will deal with them in no particular order, if and when it seems useful enough.
Somehow integrate all the comments on Bible passages towards a more comprehensive Commentary.
Turing on implications of Godel.
Curves and angles. Do evolved and designed viability look different in general, or is one a subset (e.g. round vs square, analog vs digital)?
Glory.
Elaborate on the integration of habits into Subjects.
Deontic Ethic.
Supreme deontic principle? Subtlety? Integration (unity in diversity)? Property as diversity of culture?
"Worthy ends are conducive to our proper ultimate goal. To have them is a trans-modal principle, not a modal standard."
Utilitarianism (teleic ethic, ethic of consequences) exalts one modal standard above all others. The standards never conflict. Higher standards supply the goals for which action aims.
Principles for judging actions. (1) The proximate trumps the remote. (2) Commission trumps omission. E.g. terrorism vs collateral damage.
Action vs reflection, wide vs narrow. AGIL.
Emergence. Statement of Law(N+1) presupposes terms of Law(N). Multi-inception, seed, reproduction.
Refinement/edification in all modalities. Individuation?
Randomness of human action. Humanity as work-in-progress vs Fixed Nature.
Organic weal as basis for higher modalities? Genome? Without the higher modalities man could not survive (see Lorenz)?
Does the genome code for form and behaviour? Can it? (Sheldrake)
"Religion should play no part in politics." (This could be a new "your POV", or included under "I am not religious".)
The sabbatical principle.
Economy: Rationality, Money, Growth.
#A Dims of national (combined gang/victim) fiscal stance: debt (red vs black), restraint (consume vs invest).
#B Dims of gang fiscal policy: borrowing (tight vs slack), current spend (high vs low), (capital spend vs tax cuts).
#A is function of #B, e.g. tax cuts lead to victim invest that partly offsets lost gang invest but partly boosts consumption.
Selling vs donating body parts.
Caveat Emptor vs Utmost Good Faith. Hard bargaining.
Humour. Amusement is joy in newly discovered possibilities, e.g. newly observed connections between words and meanings.
Leadership.
Divine guidance. e.g. seeking confirmation.
Geometry of Political positions
Dim 1: How far does a regime control society (mainly by taxing and regulating)?
Dim 2: On how long a leash do weremen keep women?
Dim 3?
Dirigism: Egalitarian, Nationalist.
Conservatism.
A temperament may be adventurous (keen on change or risk) or cautious (not so keen).
An opinion may be reactionary (for reverting to a past state), conservative (for maintaining the present state), progressive (for continuing the present direction of change) or none of those (for setting course towards a new state)
Temperament affects opinion but need not determine it.
Conservatism and reaction. Conserving natural growths by removing artificial structures.
Gradualism re the legit, radicalism re the illegit.
Positive role of habit.
"Conservative" Statism
Civil liberties. "Staying alive is not the only good", as I heard someone say on the BBC. Portillo (contra the claim that saving lives justifies govt snooping): "In WW2 we sacrificed millions of lives for freedom".
Safety nets breed negligence.
The welfare state usurps altruism, thus encouraging the people in self-indulgence.
Let us protect folk against the bad conduct of Fate and of others, but not against their own (including their negligence such as under-insurance). Sadly the latter is an inevitable consequence of every attempt to achieve the former.
Mitigating Statery
Representing is not resembling.
Selling votes.
If we are to vote, let us vote for one we know personally, i.e. indirect representation. PR for local electoral college?
Political elite (and therefore the sheeple) vs the cognoscenti. All 3 panelists on Talking Politics 20080105 agree that Iraq-Pak are naturally (bastard) feudal and that the West should work within that, not try to impose a western-style democracy that will not be appropriate for generations if ever.
Proportional Representation. With mass communications, viewpoints rather than geographical areas are now the natural constituencies.
Satire. Sin is to be swamped but never eliminated, unifying tragedy and comedy?
Regimes favour Otherworldalism because it soothes their victims into thinking there is no need to resist encroachment in this world since it is the other world that matters. (Noteworthy point, but where to place it?)
Examples of recalcitrant Attitudes (Humanism etc) leading to violation of modal standards.
Popular showbusiness pursues the pragmatic object (achievement), in the form of audience ratings, rather than the semiotic object (clarity).
The pursuit of achievement encroaches on sportsmanship (pursuit of beauty through competition). The quality of game has suffered, even as technical excellence has risen.
The natural musical scale consists of frequencies with simple ratios between them. Much modern art music has abandoned the natural sclae, pursuing an epistemic question ("what is possible") rather than a cosmetic one ("what is beautiful").
Having ceased revering God, folk have begun to revere other things "The Nation" or "The people" is one of these. When I compare the pious emotion with which politicians speak of "democracy" (or "the will of the people") with the inherent absurdity of the idea, I am reminded of the prophets' mockery of the worship of wooden idols. But football is the most popular object of reverence, and obituaries now mention football clubs more often than any other kind of reverence group.
Strands of modernity: criticality (good), physicalism (bad). Need to disentangle them.
Black Swan.
Short termism.
"Conduct disorder".
Wokery.
"The criminal base has grown" (Farage).
Except in capital cases, "reasonable doubt" is empty. The correct answer to "Is he guilty?" is "x%", and the correct penalty is a function of x and of the 100% penalty. Criminal vs Civil is an accident of history.
The adversarial method. On 29-Jun-2014 on BBC's The Andrew Marr Show (18 mins in) Keir Starmer (DPP of England 2008-2013) said "I don't think this case was determined by, as it were, the rates of pay of super-clever lawyers." Maybe not, but obviously some cases are, or the lawyers would be paid less and super-clever folk would move to other occupations.
In English prisons officer-inmate ratio is 1:2.
Sentencing is unduly influenced by motives instead of foreseeable consequences.
"Closure" and "justice for".
Varieties of "Islamism": Islamic traditionalism / Koranic literalism (which could be "schizo-doulic"), Islamic politics ("life is Islam"), Islamic imperialism (forced conversion).
Elaborate on the relationship between Docetism and Biblicism.
Commission drawings illustrating theses? Invent a character?