Those silly medieval people…

By -
Who thought that just beyond the boundaries of their known world, the cosmos was full of monsters!

Oh wait, never mind…







Comments

  1. Ken B4:34 PM

    Yes. This is something I point out too. There are more crazy ideas afloat now than in the Middle Ages, and with less excuse (illiteracy for example).

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ken B8:16 PM

    So on a site I frequent, one member asked why are super hero movies so popular, since they are so childish and stupid. (I told him he supplied the answer.) this quickly evolved into a discussion of "I agree except for the (insert franchise here) movies". From practically everyone!
    Fantasy is perfectly fine, Homer has monsters and gods, but I do find it amusing that with Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Pol Pot in living memory so many seem to need fantasy to imagine evil.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"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

In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights

By -
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...
Read more