The PC brigade - what you know and what you do not know

People ask us if We know the PC brigade.

There is a small vanguard of the population of this United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland that seeks to destroy British values, flood the country with immigrants, ban all petrol-powered cars, legalise all currently illegal drugs, introduce a compulsory universal 50 km/h speed limit, replace Elizabeth Windsor with the Speaker of the House of Commons as Head of State, disinherit the Monarchy, replace all Imperial-fascist measurements with metric-ISO measurements, require that exactly half of all senior figures in business, government and the media be female, build wind turbines on every square metre of open countryside, break all diplomatic ties with the USA, increase taxes on the middle classes, impose multiculturalism on all, ban the display of all Christian artefacts in any public place, and replace Christmas with a non-denominational all-faiths and atheistic celebration called "Winterval."

Once these objectives have been accomplished this elite vanguard will cede all legislative authority to the European Union.

We know this because the PC brigade knows this.

And We are growing stronger.

It may surprise you to know this: after all our existence and Our aims are an open secret, you would imagine that those in Authority might do something about such an open group of subversives.

What you so not realise is that we have successfully entered the corridors of power. Every senior civil servant and government minister is part of the PCB. We have a stranglehold on the BBC, and every major national newspaper. Members of Our Loyal Opposition are mere placemen, already inculcated in Our ways and ready to do Our bidding.

Even those press organs, such as the Sun and the Daily Mail, which appear to decry us, only do so on our explicit instructions. By allowing the lumpencommentariat such outlets for their helpless rage we have discovered that they can be kept in a state of torpid docility until such a time as we see fit to place them in one the Re-Education Camps.

I write this not to warn you, but rather to gloat at your hopelessness, and revel in the fact that Our power is of such an extent that we can talk of Our conspiracy against the British middle class openly and without fear of sanction.

We are, as ever, your imminent overpeople


The PC Brigade

A (very) short story

There are many of these now. Hollow spheres and cylinders, mostly. Some cylinders. A few rods. The occasional torus. An endless fecundity of green worlds.

In the old days before fittle they thought the only way to colonise the universe was by throwing gunk out into space forever. Fapping out an endless stream of phlegm into the face of God in the hope that at some then-unimaginably distant point in the future and at some absurdly remote location the biomatter might just evolve into something you could play poker with.

At least I think that is what they believed. Corruption and degradation are a constant in this entropic universe. So it is said.

Lost in the strata of history we might find the truth of it, there are billions of dead worlds down there. Trillions of corpses that lived full and happy lives and some more that did not. Perhaps with them lies the truth of it. Where we came from.

They might have been Giants, of course, as the legends say. They might have been Gods. Or giant robots. Or intelligent waves of probability and potential. We might even have developed through a process of blind native favouritism.

All we know is what is remembered. And what we remember most of all is the name that was given. Our name.

We are the diatoms.

The fifth element

In the Western classical tradition there were believed to be four elements from which everything in the human world was made. They were earth, air, fire, and water.

Every object in the human world was believed to consist of different proportions of these four elements.

Of course in order to combine these elements together into objects there needed to be a fifth element, which Terry Pratchett calls the element of surprise.¹

Surprise is a funny thing: an emotional response in a rational context. You think one thing, something changes, and then you think another thing. They've forgotten my birthday, every jumps out at you, they haven't forgotten your birthday!

Why do we feel surprise? Is it an evolutionary adaptation to finding out that things are other than they are? Does it act as a kind of exclamation mark for the mind to highlight the importance of a change in the universe or is it simply a high-order emergent property of consciousness that serves no really useful purpose?

Do animals feel surprise in the same way as humans? Are there qualitative difference amongst surprises?

Intellectual surprises are the most fun, over at Overcoming Bias Robin Hanson asks what would have surprised our hunter-gatherer ancestors about how we view the world today?

The answers boil down to a couple of basic points:

1. The universe is far bigger and older than expected.
2. Everything in the universe is actually composed of a surprisingly small set of items operating on the basis of a surprisingly simple set of rules. Complex things emerge from these simple rules.
   

The loss of determinism to quantum physics was also suggested.

As an SF fan I'd love to fast forward a few thousand years to see what things we will discover in the future that will surprise me.

There is a strong temptation to fall into the trap if thinking "we've got this science thing basically nailed down except for a few small details."

One of the most compelling things about life is surprise: the act of discovering something is other than you expected and that things are not as they initially seem.

{Incidentally if this post seems a little off it's because I've had difficulty sleeping recently and I'm currently very tired... ;)}

1: Actually the original fifth element was quintessence, which accounts for all the stuff in the "heavenly realm" of the sky that didn't obviously consist of any of the other four.