On 7/08/2013, at 9:17 PM, Jerzy Karczmarczuk wrote:
I am the last here who would quarrel with Richard O'K., but I firmly believe that such reasoning is a Pandora box.
The King, the government, the Pope, etc. have no power, only the interpretation of their decrees by "outer agents" _does_ things.
I regard the analogy as flawed because my sovereign [Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God Queen of New Zealand and Her Other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith/Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, Queen of Australia and Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth (I have dual citizenship, so she gets to be my Queen twice) ] is a moral agent, so is the Bishop of Rome, and so are my Prime Ministers John Key and Kevin Rudd. These people are agents in their own right; they and the people who follow their orders are _things of the same kind_. Maybe the analogy isn't that flawed. Julia Gillard found out that when enough people stopped saying "yes" to her, her power disappeared like morning dew. The official teaching of the Roman church is that contraception is not OK, yet the 2013 birth rates for Spain and Portugal were about 1.5. It really does look as though the Pope's power does rest on the consent of the people: if people don't like what he tells them, they don't do it. I leave it to other readers with a misspent youth to supply the name and title of the Science Fiction story in which "FIW" is the political key. Analogies are helpful if they help. Comparing IO 'actions' to plain old data like a magnetic card key and the Haskell environment to the reader helped _me_; if it helps no-one else, forget it.