[PLUG-TALK] topic of the day ... discuss!

Russell Senior russell at personaltelco.net
Tue May 7 20:30:15 UTC 2013


>>>>> "Paul" == Paul Mullen <pm at nellump.net> writes:

RJ> And just why should I not believe is personal liberty and freedom?

Paul> Didn't you just endorse compulsory voting a few e-mails ago?

Hey, while we've veered onto voting, I just want to mention an
author/engineer named Nevil Shute (which was a pen name, his real last
name was Norway).

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevil_Shute

He wrote a whole series of (typically) engineer-centric or
aviation-centric novels in the middle of the 20th century.  Several of
them got turned into movies, including: _A Town called Alice_, _On the
Beach_, and _No Highway_.  We had a matching set of the books, and I
read all of them in my younger days.

Shute was an Englishman who, after the war, became disenchanted with
the UK and emigrated to Australia.

In the novel _In the Wet_, 

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Wet

he proposes a scheme of multiple voting, where everyone starts out
with one vote, and you are awarded additional votes for various
achievements (some of the details are maybe dated now): education;
earning a living overseas for two years; raising two children to age
14 without a divorce; being an official in a christian church (recall,
this is in a british context where this might seem more plausible);
and a special dispensation from the Queen.  He clearly sensed that the
rabble had too much influence and wanted to weight power according to
virtues he thought were desirable.  While his analysis of the problem
might not survive modern scrutiny, just the idea that an accepted
"system" of self-governance is merely a contrivance of fallable
humans, and that different systems might have different, possibly more
desirable properties, was something of a revelation for me at the time.

Another (wonderful) book by him that I can't help mentioning is
_Trustee from the Toolroom_, which centers around a fictionalized
pre-internet precursor to today's "maker" community.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trustee_from_the_Toolroom


-- 
Russell Senior, President
russell at personaltelco.net



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