My English Diet
I have eaten more packaged sandwiches since September than I had in the preceding 45 years.
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"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness
By
gcallah
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I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights
By
gcallah
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Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
Well... ok...
ReplyDeleteBut if I looked like a Paki and wore heavy, out-of-season clothes, and the law ordered me to surrender, I'd surrender. Wait a few days before passing judgement on this one. Something about his behavior was indeed suspect, if the press can be trusted.
Sure, something about his behaviour was suspect.
ReplyDeleteAnd he was then shot five times while he lay cowering, unarmed, on the floor of a train.
Typical government waste: use five bullets when one would do the job!
ReplyDeleteBut seriously, it does appear that the only way to stop a suicide attack in progress is to destroy the brain of the attacker before he detonates the explosives on his person.
These suicide attackers are going to do everything for urban living that they did for tourism. Getting from place to place is going to be one huge pain in the a--.
I've thought about the victim's behavior in terms of what I'd do were I in possession of a controled substance, or, say, had just left my boss' house where I had been playing hide the salam with his wife. I'm facing loss of a job and/or deportation so maybe the rational response was to run? That is, it *was* a rational response before the state decided to pre-emptively kill terrorism suspects.