Greetings Fellow Advocates of Jean-François Noubel's The Transitioner:

I have gone through this site's entire “Who is Who” list and read everyone's introduction. Allow me to comment on two observations. First is the surprisingly encouraging caliber of the individuals supporting Mr. Noubel's undertaking. Second is the expected general sense of encouragement & positivism. Unfortunately, too many entries -despite an upbeat intro and promise of more to follow- have not been updated for over two years. Consequently, I beg your understanding if this commentary fails to substantiate the festive optimism traditionally sung by would be visionaries/futurist.

First, I'm in enthusiastic accord with the basic concepts promoted here. In fact, I'm frequently inclined to take a winning concept much further that those who seek virtue in compromise & middle of the road postures. For example, if we concede that burning select women to death for inconformity (i.e. witchcraft) is a bit excessive, then a laudable legislator might gain glory for advocating a more humane demise (per a propitious poison for instance). My closed minded objective however, would aim for nothing less than total tolerance (i.e. malicious targeting of no one). Admittedly, such full fledged commitments could be construed as radical – which is also an apt way to characterize the grand social architects like Hillary & Hitler. So how does one turbo blast an agenda to dimensions opposite of the spectrum occupied but all those goodly idealist committed to compelling everyone else into their superior world views? Well, it's not all that difficult – we just need to take freedom seriously. I like to view it as the not-doing (a Carlos Castaneda concept) of Social Engineering. This simply translates to an absolute unadulterated respect for individual volition — a fundamental inviolable prerequisite for a truly rational society. As meritorious this train of thought is, further consideration need be deferred to my blog, or Lysander Spooner's No Treason. The pertinent point here is merely to underscore the fact that most empowerment proposals offered as an elective freewill option to individuals will not only be personally well received, but may even be advocated more vigorously by me than its originator.

Originally:

Abstract:

Greetings Frederick Mann,

I would first very much like to thank you for the generosity of your response. The following is extracted from your reply with numbering ("#") added to your five questions; after which comes my answers.

This is a surprisingly heavy subject and has received an inordinate quantity of thought. Nevertheless I find little to expound on which promises to make this post our smallest to date. I probably carefully considered a score names but can only remember one now - “OnRecord” (OR for short). As a point of curiosity, I originally wrote up showMe.html using the name “GNU-foo”. Just before forwarding it to my hero, I did a little investigation on the Internet regarding that term (with hopes that it was not much used) and consequently discovered how naive I'd been. GNU.hope did not rhyme (with itself) but said a lot more than “GNU-foo”. Also I very much liked the sound of giving someone GNU.hope (thanks to the obvious sentiment conveyed). My main hesitation was that “hope” seemed a bit weak (as in ‘hoping 'n wishing’). Also while “hope” is only one syllable (a big positive), I'd still prefer less than four letters just to minimize the written size. To help address that concern I decided to swap the original hyphen (-) with a period (.) which proved to be esthetically nice as well.

That brings us to the “GNU” part. OK, after gawking at this screen for about an hour let me simply put it like this: For me, the people behind GNU and the whole free software phenomena represents the most avant-garde, beautifully courageous warriors on this planet. Moreover, this movement holds the most realistic hopes of significantly accelerating the advancement of our race toward greater rationality - whether they're clueless of this role or not.

Introduction: