My English Diet
I have eaten more packaged sandwiches since September than I had in the preceding 45 years.
Popular posts from this blog
"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...
I've always (well, usually) been concerned re the position that obeying orders is no excuse for war crimes. What about self defense? If I kill someone only because otherwise he (or more likely, she) would have certainly killed me, I get off. OK, maybe if we're talking about me vs. 1000 of them, it's different. Any thoughts?
ReplyDeleteSelf-defense applies to killing the person who was going to kill you. It doesn't legally permit you to shoot A because otherwise B was going to shoot you!
ReplyDeleteInteresting--never thought of it that way.
ReplyDelete