In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights
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...
You might be interested to know that Pinker discusses this in 'The Language Instinct'. Except, linguistically it isn't any different than that of the many words that English speakers use to describe snow.
ReplyDelete"Except, linguistically it isn't any different than that of the many words that English speakers use to describe snow."
ReplyDeleteDid you follow the link in the post?
Yes, I had. It is an extreme case, indeed.
ReplyDeleteI was talking more along the lines of "cold", "fluff", "powder", "hard-pack", etc which obviously aren't words for snow, they are merely words describing snow (but are often used in the place of snow) This (as far as I know) is where the whole "50 words for snow" thing came about originally. Basically, mistaking the words of the Eskimo language, as used above in English, as actual words for snow.
The article that you linked to has Nevin going WAYYYYY beyond that, which is plain idiocy. However, I have the feeling that he might have been doing so tongue in cheek (i.e. he was being purposely ridiculous).
No, Joseph, I mean that what I linked to contained a debunking of the "50 words for snow" idea itself.
ReplyDelete"The Eskimo Snow Vocabulary Debate: Fallacies and Confusions"
ReplyDeleteby Mark Halpern
http://www.rules-of-the-game.com/lin003-snow-words.htm
I read the article more along the lines of "the 50 words for snow thing is incorrect yet people keep bringing it back. Here is an extreme case of such".
ReplyDeleteObviously, I know that there aren't 50 words for snow in the Eskimo language. However, I wanted to also give an example of how such a confusion could have come about even if it was journalists who perpetrated the myth (not linguists).