Now, That Really Is Draconic!

By -
Our word "draconic" comes from the law system established by Dracon of Athens around 620 BC. In that penal code, every single crime received the same penalty: death!

OK, that's pretty harsh.

Comments

  1. Jonathan Finegold Catalán1:39 PM

    I guess the 3-strikes rule no longer seems that draconic.

    ReplyDelete
  2. PH2:50 PM

    Isn't the usual form "draconian"?

    Anyway, I think it was most, but not all, offenses. See Plutarch's Life of Solon.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah3:16 PM

      My dictionary lists "draconic" as a synonym.

      "Anyway, I think it was most, but not all, offenses. See Plutarch's Life of Solon."

      My source is Ian Worthington.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 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...
Read more