Where Am I?
St. Paul and I Agree...
Taxation is not theft: "Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves." -- Romans 13 The key idea implicit here, and the one that turned me on the subject of whether or not taxation is theft, is that "every soul" owes obedience to the "governing authorities." Now, if that is a debt I truly owe , then, when those authorities levy the taxes they need to do the job of governing, I owe them those taxes, and attempts to collect them certainly do not constitute acts of theft. And obviously it doesn't matter at all, from this point of view, whether or not I "signed" any sort of "social contract." (In fact, the history of political thought since the Reformation can be read as an attempt to find a secular rep...
Manhattan, near Little Italy.
ReplyDeleteI was wrong, you're in Philly.
ReplyDelete1. Philadelphia City Hall, courtyard, looking south.
ReplyDelete2,3. South street between 4th and 5th, looking north.
You a Philadelphian, argosy?
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DeleteNever been there... I figured it out with google/tineye to see if I could. I can't resist a challenge.
I figured it must be somewhere in NY or Pennsylvania based on reading your blog, and the street signs are in English. So then I googled 'beyond the wall' which seems to be a defunct poster store headquartered in Pennsylvania with at one time 5 retail locations... anyways there are still addresses for it online, with one in philadelphia, which Google Maps street view confirmed as image #1. From there, the birdseye led me immediately to the location of #2, by the distinctive black roof of one building.
#1 was the hardest, although a city hall was actually my first guess, The shot from inside the courtyard threw me off the scent, since the architectural ornament is quite different on the inside (and i was assuming a shot from a sidewalk). I tried to track it down from the art-deco skyscraper in the background, which only lead me back to the city hall, which I had already discarded. So I reverse-image searched it on tineye and google image search, which turned up one almost identical but unlabeled shot. "visually similar images" eventually got me the answer.
If you ever come to Toledo, OH (before I move away, of course) I'll give you a tour of the highlights.
Nice work, Argosy!
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