Isocracy and Bushfires, Impossibility and Philosophy, Gaming and Reviews

[tcpip]

The first real action of the Isocracy network (inspired by brock_ulfsen has been to generate practical ideas on prevention of bushfires for the impending Royal Commission. So, if you have any great (or even not so great) ideas on the subject (cause, prevention, cure), please feel free to contribute. The network itself is growing at the rate I expected and would want it to do so (i.e., roughly one person a day). I will this opportunity to highlight 17catherines's efforts with the vicbushfirefund.

Next Sunday at the Unitarian Philosophy forum I will be presenting on "Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast", which discusses the (mis)use of metaphysics (logic, ontology and theology) in philosophy and modern criticisms of metaphysics from Hume, through to Kant and to Ayer and Popper. I will be concluding with the rise of epistemology, the need to separate theology from philosophy, and a universal pragmatism towards verification. Apropos a University of Hawaii lecturer in philosophy tries to explain what metaphysics is not (such things are actually possible in transcendent metaphysics because it doesn't rely on verification); hat-tip to erudito.

My review of the Zin Letters (a Finnish Glorantha 'zine) has been put up on rpg.net, and a review of Greg Saunders' Summerland should be there soon. Have just started a new PBeM based on the old Chaosium product Questworld but using Steve Perrin's Quest Rules. Karl B. ran a session of Gulliver's Trading Company on Sunday with good setting and character interaction; the FUDGE/FATE based system is slowly being bashed into some shape.

Comments

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

No, just common sense and personal observation. The smaller the area governed, the more easily it will be influenced by local pressure groups.

That's exactly the idea of local democracy.

If there's one state politician who'll be against increased airport traffic, it'll be the one representing the idiots who built houses near flight paths.

Or have had new flight paths imposed upon them by another authority.

I lived in Camberwell a couple of decades ago when the council signed on a redevelopment scheme for the main shopping area....

Camberwell had a similar problem in the past. The solution is the same.

A few hundred people owned large areas of cow paddock and market garden and vacant land and refused to sell them for housing partly becuase they believed the speculative value of the land would rise. Such people blocked Camberwell's growth and contributed little to its municipal revenue. At Camberwell junction and other shopping centres, owners of old woodon shops were paying smaller rates than the enterprising landlords who built expensive shops and attracted business to the centre. In residential streets, landlords who allowed houses to go unpainted paid smaller rates, while the landlord who improved his property and therefor the neighbourhood's appearance and land values was penalised for his enterprise with higher taxes. The reformers argued that a new method of municipal taxation would accelerate the pace of Camberwell's growth and improve the quality of the suburb. Calling for a referendum, they carried the poll after a fierce campaign and Camberwell and Caulfield became the first Victorian municipalities to tax the land and not the buildings. From 1922, the new method of taxation undoubtably forced many large landowners to release vacant land for house building..."

Geoffrey Blainey, A History of Camberwell, 1980, Lothian Publishers, p86