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...
Your post left me with the suspicion that something else was at play.
ReplyDeleteIt turns out that following the completion of the Tour Montparnasse building in Paris in 1972,
"Its simple architecture, gigantic proportions and monolithic appearance have been often criticised for being out of place in Paris's urban landscape and, as a result, two years after its completion, the construction of skyscrapers in the city centre was banned."
My understanding is that similar height constraints exist in other cities. For instance, in Washington DC no building is allowed to be taller than the statue of Freedom on top of the Capitol Building.
In Jerusalem the story is that no buildings are allowed to be taller than 10 stories (there are a few exceptions).
And to bring this full circle, "In Paris Gustav Eifel got himself into a lot of trouble when he built the tower because it was taller than the Notre Dame cathedral."