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Nick:
> Ah, sodomy.
= fundamentalism?
> Me ex cathedra has to tell Me as formalist to shut up. God,
> do I hate this language
>
> Bob is correct as to how the BPFK was constituted. It was with the
> understanding that change shall be reluctantly essayed, and that yes,
> the backwards-compatible kludge shall prevail over the elegant
> innovation. For all that I think that the Lojban handed us by our
> forebears is often a pile of doodoo, I accept these constraints on
> anything we now say; because the Lojban we have been handed is a social
> fact
>
> If this means I too have to lose the battle for a Collective, then I'll
> lose it. The ontology is good and virtuous, and an excellent basis for
> any pedagogy I intend to essay. But if it's not regarded as backwards
> compatible, and if the current system is regarded as merely
> underspecified rather than contradictory, then it must fail, for the
> good of the language community. If what the BPFK comes up with is
> rejected by the community, we are well and truly fucked
>
> I am contravening fundamentalism by going along with the Excellent
> Solution; I admit this. Fundies are full of surprises, and it's also
> surprising who isn't quite fundie; John, for example, has accepted
> Unique (though not under that name.) That's why I'm looking for
> kludges. I'm trying to get both a cleaner solution and a solution that
> is basically compatible with CLL. Which is why I think a kludge with an
> extra collective has a damned sight better chance of success than a
> scheme where {lo} turns into substance, contrary to what CLL has
> proclaimed, justified just because Bob has a shaky command of predicate
> logic
Could we, I wonder, agree that the BF takes an ultra-fundamentalist
line? That way I can simply tune out of BF issues where I think the
fundament is pooey, and thus stay sane. And by removing the ideological
component from debates, everybody else might be able to stay a bit
saner too. My intention would be to stick around in the community
in the hope that much of it will become dissatisfied with Lojban
Mark I and want to change to Lojban Mark II.
> And if you reject that desire for backward compatibility even as a
> statement of desirability, And, then I'm sorry, but that means you're
> outside of what the Board has constituted the BPFK as doing. And you
> already know from the vote that this is a vote you'll lose. The list of
> articles is already there, in the Board Statement and my manifesto; if
> you want it to be formalised and put to vote, that too can be done
I'm almost coming round to that point of view. But I'm not quite there
yet, because most of the leading active Lojbanists are here in these
discussions and are expressing revisionist sentiments. (And those who
aren't here are known nonfundamentalists.) So I don't want to back
away just when Progressivism seems as though it might be able to
gain a critical mass.
> And if you lose that vote of Confirmation --- as I believe you will ---
> you may choose to withdraw. For the good of the language, I urge you,
> as strongly as possible, not to. A kludge with some sprinkling of
> Excellentness is still better than the status quo. Without formalists,
> we will indeed be left with doodoo
I'm in two minds on this one. If I work to improve Lojban Mark I,
I might in effect to reduce the chances of there being a demand
for Lojban Mark II. I think that the sooner the Loglan project
moves on to Lojban Mark II, the better for the project, so in
that sense kludgey fixes are perhaps detrimental: it's a bit
like Microsoft Products -- because Microsoft kludges them up so
they're just about good enough, there isn't the demand for
anything better, so we all end up with the barely adequate.
Do I really want to help to bring about Microsoft Lojban?
> I hate this, because I think the status quo CLL gadri are muddle-headed
> bozosities, and the Excellent Solution is pristine and shiny. And I
> hate it because, right now, I think of [Prominent Revisionist's Name
> Censored] much more highly than [Prominent Fundamentalist's Name
> Censored] as an interlocutor. But this isn't about liking; this is
> politics. I want Lojban to profit from the Excellent Solution. But it
> cannot adopt it without compromise; that is politically unviable. We
> have no mandate for Lojban Mark II. We have a mandate for Lojban Mark
> I, with a little cleaning up. That remains so, and I recognise that a
> revisionist BPFK cannot command community support
>
> P.S. I mean it that I hate this, and I mean it that the status quo I'm
> compelled ex officio to defend is a pile of doodoo. Life sucks
What you say is reasonable, and I wouldn't at all hold it against
you if you felt that, now that things have become clearer, you don't
want to lead the BF when it is constituted as a fundamentalist
enterprise.
As you know, if I could be sure that there is no chance of Lojban
ever evolving into what I would like it to be -- a true realization
of the formalist goals of the Loglan project -- then I would very
happily walk away and get a large chunk of my life back. I don't
want to be hanging around here as the mere propagator of aimless
dissent.
Nor do I want to thwart Naturalists or those like Lojbab who want
to see *a* loglan come to life, regardless of its merits from a
formalist perspective. So like you I am very unsure about how to
proceed.
--And.