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by P. Quinn, certified Black Lister



To start off, I would remind my loyal readers that I have apologized numerous times for all sort of faults, oversights, overshoots, poor choices, complications and naughty words.

And of course I apologize for the following...

Furthermore, I am the only client répertorié noir, as they say, who has, so far, not only provided a full confession of his criminal thoughts, but also encouraged the legions of co-conspirators to reveal the full extent of their own thought-crimes.



For those of you who are freshly-engaged with e-philosophical work, I will first provide a few quick reminders of the situation at-hand.



First, the Socialist Freedom Party had the audacity to win a devilishly-convoluted Presidential election, running as candidate One who had proposed a hypothetically workable alternative to the "Defensive Dictatorship".



(As a side note, along with a large plurality for the SFP candidate, we saw that a majority of the 666 voters chose various Opposition candidates rather than the Establishment candidate.)



Next, the Bear Cavalry, one of the oldest autonomous militias in the eUSA, launched the Glorious Revolution of the 6th of December, which overthrew the Dictatorship and restored democratic rule to the e-United States. This move was controversial, even amongst the gang of reformers, revolutionists and role-playing idiots who make up the SFP.





Despite the disruptive nature of this act, it was a perfectly legitimate aspect of playing the social-internet game called "eRepublik" and, more importantly, it was necessary from a philosophical (literally, "love of knowledge") point-of-view because it contributed usefully to the honest and complete development of an eRepresentational ontology, to wit: the Democratic Rebellion inscribed a meta-structure for the re-presentation of the structured presentation in a normalized manner.






Sidebar: Apologies for the technical language. "Normalized" in this technical sense refers to a balanced situational state, where a fully representational meta-structure, ontologically speaking, maps completely the presentational structure (the "countable beings", if you like), such that all sets are meaningfully named (and hence thought) and there are therefore not any gaps between events and consciousness.

When there is no representation of a presented entity, then we have a singular imbalance ontologically speaking -- an "existence" lacking in "understanding".

And when there is representation without corresponding presentation, which is to say, a meta-structure is spoken which describes no countable display, no multiplicity of "events" commonly perceived as "one" (that is, a thing), then the situation is said to have an excrescence of re-presentation.

It is widely accepted by logicians going back at least to Frege that all countable multiples (think "realities") can include a void sub-set. This means that de-normalized situations can be said to "invite the void", which is similar, if you really think about it, to the Hegelian concept of the historical "moment" that is "less than nothing" but at the same time, and for that very reason, drives all innovation and meaning-full change. To address such gap thus involves either adjustment of the count or re-inscription of the meta (or both).







A side note: For those of you who are still around and attended my lecture series on e-Philosophy at the Free University, the following anecdote about Heidegger was accidentally left out of that series. I apologize for the oversight. (In my defence, the book I stole all that from omitted it, and I only recently found it in interview with the author.) I include it here as an important precedent for understanding these notes on Being and eRepublik:

"Heidegger and a hippo stroll up to the pearly gates and Saint Peter says, 'Listen, we've only got room for one more today. So, whoever of the two of you gives me the best answer to the question - What is the meaning of e-life? - gets to come in'.

"And Heidegger says, 'To think being itself explicitly requires disregarding being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground, as in all e-metaphysics.'

"But before the hippo can grunt one word, Saint Peter says to him, 'Today's your lucky day, hippy.'"









Anyway.


On an ontological level, the December 6th Uprising corrected the excrescences of previous meta-structures by accurately balancing the presentative situation representationally. To have NOT done so, to "let things be", would have been to foster the excrescent meta-representation, thereby inviting the (included but un-presented and un-presentable) Void to extend into the display, thereby inviting chaos, which is to say dispersal of the situation altogether. (In mathematics, it would be a paradox, which is to say, a game-ender.)



The ensuing debates and engagements have brought into display more countable evidence that a re-inscription of the situational meta-structure was overdue.


It's kind of funny, really. The attempts to ill-"legally" elide the "disruptive" (normalizing) voices of those who re-inscribed a meta-structure for the presentation of the game mechanic "democracy" provided its own self-parody in a way that barely requires comment. By using the language of "black list" and issuing not-so-veiled threats to "take over" the inscribing Party, the oligarchs of the meta-excrescence effectively shat their own e-bed. One might even guess that protestations against the re-inscribers perhaps best (or at least most amusingly) projected an anxiety regarding the situational gap when a Stalino-loyalist of the Tyranopublik innocently confused "censure" with "censor".


LOL.



The historico-political situation then unfolded in elections that not only reinforced the presentation-perception-as-one of the multiplicity of "opposition" parties ...




...but also concretely added to the count of the primary inscribers...



... thus accelerating the presentation/representation turn in the situation introduced by the (literally) un-popular "dictatorship" module, which initiated the de-normalization trend, in the direction of a useful re-inscription on the representational side following on from the "shock" of the presentational revolt. We can think this graphically, of course, but I will leave that as an exercise for the dear students.






To summarize: while the fundamental Aristotelean conflicts between so-called "rational" and "pathological" modes of e-Statehood -- monarchy/tyranny, oligarchy/aristocracy, democracy/republic -- remain unresolved, there can be no doubt that our study of the nature of e-being, of e-becoming, e-existence and e-reality, their categories and relations -- in short, our ability to carry on the Great e-Work of devising advanced existential graphs, has obviously taken on an interesting new vector.

For this contribution alone, membership in the "Black List" will likely be evaluated by future e-generations of e-philosophers and e-logicians as an honor rather than as a disgrace.