"The latter part of a wise man's life is taken up in curing the follies, prejudices, and false opinions he had contracted in the former." -- Jonathan Swift
That's an interesting counterpart to the beginning of the famous poem Rabbi Ben Ezra:
"Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made: Our times are in His hand Who saith "A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!''"
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...
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...
Wow, rob, you have learned nothing in your time away, huh?
ReplyDeleteIt just seemed such an obvious joke I couldn't resist.
DeleteYou don't think this post was the least bit pompous ?
Rob, your animosity caused you to miss my joke: "And the same goes for my life!"
DeleteIn other words, this happens with wise men, and ALSO WITH ME.
Oops. Yes, I totally missed the joke.
DeleteBTW: My initial comment wasn't driven by animosity just by a (mistaken) attempt to be humorous.
Ok, cool. Welcome back.
DeleteThanks.
DeleteThat's an interesting counterpart to the beginning of the famous poem Rabbi Ben Ezra:
ReplyDelete"Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith "A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!''"
So Gene, does that mean in the third half you'll embrace atheism? ��
ReplyDeleteMerry Christmas!