Creative Contortionist Ken

By -
Now Ken B. insists that RU486 only affects the body of the woman who takes the drug, and not the fetus, so it isn't using force against the fetus! It just so happens that the way if affects the woman's body is... surprise!... to make that body reject the fetus, which will then die.

So now we have a new way that it is OK with Ken for us to kill him. Ken is standing on the subway platform. You can't push Ken in front of a train: that would be using force against him. But you can shove someone else into Ken, knowing that person will knock Ken onto the tracks where he will be killed. Because, you see, your shove did not affect Ken's body (per Ken)! It only affected the body of the person you shoved. It just so happens that the way you affected the shovee's body resulted in Ken's death!

(Of course, you are guilty of whatever charge giving a stranger a shove that doesn't even injure them results in. But certainly you aren't guilty of murdering Ken [according to Ken]... even though you knew that was what would happen, and is indeed what you intended to have happen.)

Comments

  1. Prateek11:08 PM

    Using creative analogies is a reminder that the libertarian in you is not dead.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Samson Corwell11:41 PM

      That was what I thought when I read his two posts

      Delete
    2. Samson Corwell11:42 PM

      I think the "creative analogies" bit is just his nature, though, as he has used them in his arguments against libertarianism.

      Delete
  2. Prateek11:08 PM

    Hheheheeeh

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ken B2:29 PM

    Absurd comment Gene. I said that in the the early weeks RU486 affects no person other than the mother, not no other body. I never said it doesn't affect the fetus's body.

    ReplyDelete

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