The Game is afoot... (7th July 2007)

"Stories from the Diogenes Club" seems like a useful vehicle for a blog. But adding postings or comments is a bit like "pushing the bus you are riding upon" as I think sociologists Berger and Luckmann wrote in their book "The Social Construction of Reality".

The idea seems to be all the effort has some purpose, some sort of journey is undertaken and you are the better for it. Maybe others riding the same wave we surf will also be the better for it.
But the idea that wrongs may be righted is a little optomistic.

However, words have a potency to achieve truth and justice, to dismiss error and ignorance. If a blog has any utility at all let that be it. In the realm of ideas. Whatever codswallop is spoken about eternal verities.
Sir Isaac Newton said, "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a little boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in it, now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
This was a scientist who manipulated his data to fit his theories, but a man is a man for all that.
One pretty pebble I have found on the shore, whilst gazing at the great ocean before me (that is my internet screen) is a site that has the potential to solve a mystery in a manner that by passes the age of great men...like Sherlock Holmes or Mycroft.
I am talking about distributed detective work. It is now, with the internet, the age of the anthill...of micro production and micro consumption working to a remote purpose. Not with some great need for survival of the individual at stake, but with the solution to a problem for others. It is task that can be taken on as a hobby, as a leisure pursuit. If it leads nowhere, no matter, otthers will stand on our shoulders and solve the problem if we are true to the facts.
Maybe others in this Diogenes Club of ours are alert to crimes and even opportunities for crime not yet in the public domain. It seems a shame this is yet to be shared on line.
Another Diogenes Club in another incarnation has come to the conclusion it should use the internet to try to solve unsolved crimes. And is using the now world famous abduction of little Madeline in Portugal as a test case.
It is not just the police who should be crawling all over the case. Ants show us the way, just like web-crawling robots.
See the Madeline/Mycroft/Diogenes efforts here at:
http://mycroftholmes.wordpress.com/2007/05/30/the-opening-gambit/
Another Holmes, Oliver Wendell Holmes, said "Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; you may kick it about all day, like a football, and it will be round and full at evening."
At the end of a meeting of this Diogenes Club, (Stories from the Diogenes Club) we can all go home with a full stomach and the taste of fine beverages on our lips, and the sport of the evening has harmed no-one. But has it done any good?
How much braver to follow Diogenes example and puncture the bubble of falsehood. We should be drawing attention to civil and criminal wrongs and the enslavements of others. And doing so collaboratively...one man cannot turn all the stones over on the beach to see what creatures lurk underneath. Hundreds may.