The nonaggression principle

By -
The problem with this "principle" is that by itself it is almost completely empty. Of all political persuasions, probably only fascists, who glorified violent conflict as ennobling, would not agree to it: communists, liberals, conservatives, and not just libertarians, all will sign on to the NAP.

Because communists, you see, believe that grabbing property and calling it your own is aggression! And liberals think that not paying your fair share of taxes is aggression. And conservatives (in the old sense) think not deferring to established authority is aggression.

Of course libertarians disagree with all of those positions. But the disagreement is not whether aggressing against the innocent is good! The disagreement is about what constitutes aggression.

Libertarians are not the only political faction against aggression... they are the only political faction who defines aggression the way they do.

Comments

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