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Saturday, June 28, 2014

THE GUARDIAN CONTINUES TO DO ITS BIT FOR THE BRUTISH EMPIRE

The eidtorial in The Guardian is on the assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand.

But guess what?

Yep. No mention of Freemasonry.

Here it is in full (but published late yesterday):
What if that bullet had missed Franz Ferdinand's heart tomorrow? What, for that matter, if the ice-pick had done for Stalin, not Trotsky? What if Gordon Brown had called his election in 2007? Like futile fantasies of going all-out at Scrabble, by deploying just one different letter from those you've actually got, such counterfactuals miss the point. Proper historians are snobby about the pulp re-rendering of the past they generate. Philosophers have no such qualms. It was Leibniz who introduced the idea that many possible worlds existed in the mind of God, and it has taken philosophers down the rabbit hole ever since. Voltaire attacked the notion in Candide, satirising Dr Pangloss for defending the world as we know it as "the best of all possible worlds". But even shorn of the God bit, possible worlds remained a surprisingly rich seam. In the 20th century, Saul Kripke used them to develop a new language about logical necessity: a statement is said to be possible if it is true in at least one possible world, and necessary if it is true in all possible worlds. Others, such as David Lewis, argued for a more Doctor Who-like option, that possible worlds exist as real alternative realities. This is known in the trade as modal realism. But so what? Somewhere, out there, there may be a possible world in which the first world war never started, where the bullet missed. Or maybe the bullet missed and the war still happened. These worlds may not be unthinkable. But that's about all that can be said for them.

[source : Unthinkable? What-if worlds, Editorial, The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/27/unthinkable-what-if-worlds, 27th June 2014]

We should add one more 'What if?': What if Freemasonry was banned?

Oh, what a wonderful world this would be.

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