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Commentary on the Parable of the Three Executioners

In the parable of the Three Executioners what are the incentives?

They could all agree to desist from the execution. But in order not to be the third to fire they would have to monitor one another. In order to be the second to fire they would have to monitor one another.

So that they wouldn't have to monitor one another they would have an incentive to murder each other. If one were to murder the others he could comfortably not execute the condemned man and live out his life however he saw fit. He could not claim the reward of the Emperor of Meshica but he would not have to worry about the execution.

If one were to murder only one other there would be an incentive to murder the third but there would also be an incentive to induce the third to execute the condemned. This could be done by feigning a first shot from the murdered executioner and waiting for the third to fire as a matter of course, thinking it the second shot. Or it could be done by tricking the third into thinking he was murdering someone else but substituting instead the condemned man.

At that point, the tricky executioner would not strictly speaking have to fire in order to avoid the condemnation of the Emperor of Meshica. Of the two other executioners one would be dead and murdered and the other would be executed for shooting first. But in order to claim the Emperor's reward they would have to shoot.

So the condemned man's best chances exist if one of the executioners murders the other two.

On the other hand, if the condemned man were to murder at least two of the executioners he would be clear. The remaining executioner could not kill him because of the resulting condemnation of the Emperor of Meshica for firing first. If the condemned man murdered all three executioners he would also be free. If we were to assume there are externalities to the act of murder it would suffice to murder only two of the executioners. Provided, that is, that the remaining executioner know and have good reason to know that the other two were dead. The balance of externalities between three murders and two public murders is a more subtle calculation that is context-dependent.

There is no reason the murder of the other executioners could not occur after the execution. So that one executioner, firing either first or last, would have a strong incentive to murder the others and then to tell the Emperor that he in fact fired second. Or an executioner at a time convenient for the action could execute the condemned and then after arrange to murder the other two.

This would also be a factor in the executioners' plans. It would generally tempt the executioners to keep constant watch on the others or at least on the condemned. Unless they were to murder the others.

By tradition the Three Executioners' names were Beinn, Gracile, and Zidane.

The condemned man's name varies widely with the telling of the tale. The most common variation simply says that his name is completely lost to knowledge because of a damnatio memoriae pronounced by the Emperor of Meshica.

The parable typically omits mention of the thing that would be most important for the mechanism to exist at all—some sort of monitor or arbiter who could confirm the order of shots. Presumably the addition of yet another person takes away from the neat symmetry of the tale. There is an awesome force to the idea of the Emperor of Meshica, and no intermediaries, enforcing the rules of the execution no matter where the condemned man may wander—even over continents and seas—rather than a sober representative of his going around officiously with spectacles and a stopwatch.

Some authors have written about the scenario of the Three Executioners addended by an Emperor's Witness. Naturally there is an incentive to win the Witness over to one's side. An executioner corrupting the Witness could simply execute the condemned man and claim a reward when the Witness falsely reported he was the second shooter. The Witness would have to be prepared to fend off attempts by the others to murder him—which might well be part of the pact struck with the corrupting executioner. The Witness could also try to strike a pact with all three executioners. This could offer protection from pre-emptive murder and also guarantee some share in the reward.

Other variants, as thought experiments rather than parables, have sprung up in the literature over the past 50 y. They are sometimes a sneaky joy to consider—in one's study while drinking tea and smoking yahl. The tale itself without complications is often better yet. Like three lines of a death poem beside the corpse of a disgraced courtier.

Inventing poetry

Because I wanted to think there was one person who over a lifetime invented all these poetic forms, who made them all the complicated and the simple, and not in any ascending order, but each one to its own purpose, sometimes a complex poetic form is like a banquet for the mind and then sometimes a simple form is like warm bread and a bit of honey, and it took an entire lifetime to invent all these poetic forms and many of them were not taken up, some of which were rediscovered later on and got names not given to them by this one person, and some of which were never again used, and some of which were used and are used perpetually and by names given to them by this one person, this one person whose name we can only guess at and whose life is at best adumbrated by their verse and by fragments of what others wrote, and this one person was a queer woman but who fooled the establishment and achieved some contemporary fame but whose downfall was nonetheless hinted at by dramatic irony, as if the imagination of a young queer boy studying poetry could have instilled dramatic irony into the amazingly complex breathing life of a person so many centuries ago, and I wanted to think this so bad that's that how it ended up being, and you guys I'm not even sorry about it.

Night Monsters

The night is a special kind of loneliness. Even if you have loved ones and even if your loved ones are right there sharing your bed—they're asleep. They're rejuvenating. Maybe having dreams of summer days and bright green fields of grasss or winning awards or getting what they truly want. You're awake and it's dark. The dark presses on you. You feel like the pressure brings out your true features, as if under a billowy cloak the talons and tentacles start poking the muslin. You can't wake them just to tell you you're not a monster. That would be mildly monstrous. If they awake you can ask how they're doing and hope very hard they want you to tell them they're not a monster. And in so ministering to them you'll feel a little less monstrous yourself. For a time. But they don't awake. It's still dark. You know the dark relents eventually but it won't for hours. It may as well not for days and years. It's like tar. It sticks to you. It has weight. You wallow in it so it doesn't come off. But you can wait in bed and the tide of tar will subside. In hours. So many hours. And less than a meter away, a loved one. Completely oblivious.

Demons’ Knowledge

The demons are born with knowledge, but not with memories. This is an unusual thought for us because our knowledge is strongly intertwined with memories of its acquisition. Moreover we are used to thinking of people who are knowledgeable, similarly as for those who are wise, as having taken time to acquire it. As having had much experience. But demons do not have memories.

They know of the beginning and the end of time. They know about the physical world and the mental. They speak in many languages and know of the laws of humankind. They know the movements of the stars. They can do sums on a board.

They are born from somewhere primal. Out of the muck. Out of standing brimstone fountains. Out of the litter of decay.

When they emerge they immediately wish to satisfy the strong lusts and impulses to destruction in their hearts. They know exactly how to accomplish it. And they pursue this satisfaction unto their utter end.

They are not immortal. Demons are very killable. Their flesh is not sinewy. It is in fact quite supple and fragile. Underneath the scales and tar. They are born and they die voluminously. Uncountably. Some scarcely mewling out of the muck struck down in misadventure. Fire, rock, heights. Splattered on points of Hell. Battered by another demon. Not infrequently tearing off their own limbs in the frenzy.

Some live to be very old. That they have knowledge does not mean that they do not also have personalities. That some are wilier or more canny. The more guileful are still prone to murder and be murdered. To drown in the lake of fire. But they may persist and feast on human souls if the taste in them develops. As though swirling in a glass.

It is their knowledge that tempts humans. Arrogant men and women who summon the Hellish host and trade their souls for scraps of arcana. Who marvel at the demon's powers who know not the simple parlor tricks the imps, experts at physics, wield as though magic. What humanity seeks over decades and centuries the demons are born with. Better understanding, greater technology. If they would only keep to the path. What humans desire from the demons the latter hold cheaply.

A Dream Every Night

The woman has a dream every few weeks which completely changes her outlook on life. It has the power that major life events do. She can't stop thinking about them for days. It goes on happening for years. Every few weeks. Every week sometimes. Once for a half a year it didn't. And she trod through life as through a stagecraft swamp. When she was pregnant it got so intense she could hardly take it. It was like the orgasms she had the night before conception.

Inquietus at Two Points

Inquietus at the coffee shop

The baristas are all young women, playful, cheerful, ingratiating. There are prettier ones and less prettier ones. One an absolute beauty; another with confident sexiness. The point is Inquietus comes as much to luxuriate in the smooth-complected youth as for the coffee and pastries. This is a mild creepiness, and a quiet one. But a common creepiness. That of seeking out ways to have young, pretty women be nice to him.

Inquietus hung over

Having woken but not roused and, with eyes closed, queerly savoring the liquid in his mouth. The odd chemistries and lumpiness of what had just been anodyne spit. And remembering that this mouth and these teeth would someday lie still. Unquickened with life. The juices would funk. His spit would ferment on his tongue. His tongue bloat and liquefy.

A blessing in this seaborn village

About a large group of men and women adrift in the sea. There are bits of driftwood between them as well. They drift on and endlessly. There is just enough in the sea to sustain them. There is enough even for the numbers to grow. More men and women growing in the sea. The memory of lands, or even of ships, dissolving into myths. And the numbers wane, too. When a person in this floating village dies they turn into clumps of driftwood. Their features are nearly clear at first. But with time they are eroded. The knobs and curls are scrubbed away by seafoam. The pith itself grows mushy and washes out. But they are also the new scaffold for the group. They are flotation and headrests. They are comfort in the great cold night with stars burning imperiously and a wind throwing breakers over your brow. When your time comes and you turn to wood you don't keep remembering per se. You don't speak to your daughters and grandsons. You can't hug them with arms gone to stems and soggy boughs. But you float and buoy them up and interlock with all the rest of the dead. Your great granddaughters can wrap their arms around your neck when they need to let their kicking legs rest. Your great grandsons can fashion rods and spears from your trunk. You are more and more a thing than a person. But that was always going to be the case. It is a blessing in this seaborn village that you are a useful thing unto the end.

Vampires’ Consort

What you should know about vampires is two things:

I) They are intensely homosexual.

II) They are also accompanied by a host of demons who cannot be seen. The demons themselves possess most of the powers the vampires are said to have. They can move things across distances, they can transport the fiend through the air, they can conceal the vampire at will. There are between three and five of the demons. Besides their role in creating all the flashy, cool effects, they have another important job. They guard the vampire. At the end of all things, at the judgment of Heaven, the demons will work first and fastest to drag the soul of the vampire down into hell.

The Condemned

Three men follow another. They unwaveringly hold a pistol to the fourth man's head. There are the strictest of orders from the Emperor of Meshica: the first man to fire will be shot; the third man to fire will be shot; the second man will be rewarded with vast riches, fertile lands, and a title. The fourth man is condemned. A would-be regicide from within the royal family itself. He may wander anywhere in the world but the three men follow.

Redbeards

Although the Redbeard does go about burning libraries as determinedly as he can, there is actually a fellowship, of such. Men (nearly all men) who seek to destroy the libraries wherever they stand. They have quite independent ideologies. Redbeard himself is quite philosophical about the purpose of libraries as a staging for a knowledge sacrifice. But the author Benila in the Slattern Kingdom, having condensed everything she thought was worthwhile into her own volumes, sought the destruction of libraries as a completion of her project of expurgation.

Others were simply bandits, of course. Chaos agents. Punks and miscreants.

There were those dedicated to the idea that writing corrupted humankind by weakening the power of memory.

There were those who, seeing libraries as “the last uncorrupted institution of democracy,” and finding they could not corrupt them, sought their immolation instead.

There was no club and no meeting place. But for many of these intrepid burners the simple wearing of a red double ribbon was enough to identify them.

Medicus and Inquietus

Inquietus looks right at him. Medicus. His beard is long and perfectly shortened on the sides. He has a big bushy moustache. He is fit and slim. "Oh!" Medicus stands, then kneels by Inquietus's side. "I'm sorry you're feeling so down."

"It's not that I'm feeling down!" Inquietush yells in telepathic words. They cannot speak in this state and the telepathic link the different versions of me share is the only real saving grace for dialog here.

"It's not that I'm feeling down at all!" Inquietus gasps. "I don't feel sad. I don't feel hopeless. Not per se. I feel like I'm a complete fraud and that I can't do anything (not that I'm incompetent to do anything but that I can't initiate--- I lterally cannot bring myself to do something). I feel useless and purposeless and yet confronted with so much over-rolling time it's depressing to wonder how I'll fill it. Except maybe just as a constant fucking thumbs up every click of the clock. Thumbs up all the way to death and dis-existence. At least that way I'm not super-different from anyone else."

It will bother Medicus how fat Inquietus is. How druggy they are. How drunk and foul-mouthed. "Fuck your empathetic approach!" Inquietus would telepam; "This is just your bullshit ritual and fuck it to the ground!" It will bother him that Inquietus is watching random online videos and neglecting the Big Game.

But what Medicus can do is ultimately amazing. Convince a suicidal man to repair relations with his sister for support, get himself to a psychiatric hospital, find enduring, persistent, and competent therapeutic help. Some serotonin and maybe even epinehrine and dopamine potently packed and pulverized into pills for your protection.

grappled

When you can't sleep when you can't sleep what it's a mania that grips you mania doesn't grip like did Herakles of old really get wrestle-gripped grappled manhandled by the weird Greek personification of insanity come descended by Hera's command to pin the strongest in the world?

#poetry

Happy

Inquietus said "I am not a happy person. I am habitually neurotic and occasionally melancholy. At my best I can be fleetingly happy, spontaneously joyous, bright, witty, bawdy, and achingly empathetic. At my worst I am a single, naked, quivering nerve. That hurts from the strum of the wind or even of a comforting breath."

The human candle’s house

Like who wouldn’t want to kill themselves coming out of this. This was the sound, like the buzzing of a poked fly, that resounded in the ears of Barka throughout the search and interview.

The boy, the human candle, he lived here. Two days ago he was in this room. Barka turned down the grimy sheets. He took no joy in discovering the hardened medallions of semen-stiffened cloth.

There was a desk made of two boards hung across the remnants of two short bookcases. Two schoolbooks lay accidentally on its surface. Another book, a library book, was open with a piece of string lying prostrate in its gutter. The text was a story about the invincible Gartastrong. Small words and small sentences. Barka flipped pages. Stories of at most eight grafs. Heroes hit a snag then overcome. The boy had made no marks in it. Nothing in the margins. No notes within the folds.

Barka wore the full tunic and rully suit in wool. Still he felt the drone of heat steaming off his body. It felt like being in anything less substantial would be chilly. There was a window opposite the desk and bed looking onto a courtyard of sorts: a patch of metal and concrete with squat condenser toadstools popped up here and there, all enclosed by the heavenbent brick walls of the flat. If you could see the sky it would be gray.

Like who wouldn’t.

#incandescents prose

Caving

Looking for the right word. This is shorthand. (All words are.) The process is looking for the word with the best prospect for leading forward to an interesting thought. While composing one is spinning a thread. Or one is caving in an intricate system. Even to begin entails picking up a thread and following it. And at various points it seems like there’s a stop, and a search for a missing thing. This is no construction of a missing road piece. This is a confrontation with choice. Which thread? Which path in the cave? There are forks upon forks. The choice is made which leads to the windiest and deepest spelunk. The choice is made with imperfect information—seeing only so far as the next turn, throwing lantern-light on a few meters, at best, of schist and slate walls, rivulets, crawling floors, whiffs of damp. It’s heuristical. At best. When we have misled ourselves, we make good. We backtrack. It’s not expected always to choose right. It works to our favor, even after we have trod a whole path, to go back to a point and consider trekking an alter route.

Alice, Bob, and Eve

Alice meets Eve. Alice tells Eve that she shouldn’t think of the identity she has made for herself, which includes belonging to a certain community, as any sort of ingrained and unchangeable aspect of the self. It’s as silly to say “I couldn’t be another way; I wouldn’t be true to myself” as it is to say, “This rock cannot roll because then it wouldn’t be true to itself.”

Eve takes the lesson to heart and drastically changes her ways. She forsakes her community, partakes in taboos, and abjures what she formerly believed.

Alice meets Eve again. Alice is shocked. “It’s foolish to act out in ways like this,” she says. “But you said there was no self to be true to.” “But it was at least comforting and wholesome,” Alice counters. “You shouldn’t believe that you can’t change because of a fixed inner nature but one shouldn’t just change because there is suddenly no moor; there was never a moor and that fact didn’t force you to change.” Eve thinks again on her change and becomes rueful.

Alice secretly has much riding on Eve remaining in her community. So although Alice believes all she has told Eve, and really wouldn’t mean for anyone like Eve to change so drastically unless they really wanted to, she is also desirous of Eve returning to her old ways for her own benefit.

The community has a hard time accepting Eve back. They desire a great favor from Bob, who is in love with Alice but wants to punish her for thwarting his advances. Bob by giving the community what they want can get them to accept Eve, which will benefit Alice to Bob’s chagrin, or he can withhold it and spite Alice, leaving Eve separated from her community and the community itself in turmoil.

Bob is induced by Eve to grant the community its wish on the promise to murder Alice, whom she now blames for everything. When confronted by the murderer, Alice tries to defend herself by telling Eve it is “not like her” to murder people. Eve murders Alice. Then consumed by guilt she kills herself, but her note implicates Bob. Bob is imprisoned and reneges on his promise to the community, which collapses.

Politique

A political discussion television show in which the hosts have buzzers with which they interrupt guests at every instance of using a buzzword, a thought- terminating cliché, a commonplace, or a meaningless trope.

In a variation, everyone has buzzers but a dedicated person has a metabuzzer and serves of referee of buzz-outs, either allowing them or overruling them.

And people who are buzzed lose the chance to speak for a predetermined period of time. And people who incorrectly buzz lose the chance to buzz for a period of time, which can be gamed by others; or alternatively only lose the chance to speak for period of time.

First remove all elected positions and replace with positions by lot.

Now those people will need professional help making the complex decisions needed by a large modern government.

Next rigorously professionalize the political advisor class. You will need to make sure that people are promoted based on merit and do not get ahead by political machinations.

Now see that even the meritocratic system becomes thoroughly corrupted by politics.

The taint of politics is uneraseable. You can dilute it, to an extent, and you can rinse it into various corners. You cannot bleach it out.

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