The Obama cutout didn't mind either. One person seemed a little suspicious, but that was it. I was showing people I was taking photographs and blogging right from my phone, so that there posts were up about 10 seconds after the photo was taken, and no one else cared at all.
Erhmmm. Gene, please forgive the quibble, but why are you "monkeying" around with an orangutan? It is a great ape and like us a member of the hominid family, and NOT a monkey.
(The monkeys have tails; those of New World monkeys are prehensile, while those of the Old World are reprehensible.)
Yes, Tom, I learned that distinction when I was about six, but do bad puns need to be taxonomically accurate?
Monkey:
"1. any of several families of Old and New World primates usually having a flat, hairless face and a long tail "2. loosely any of other, similar primates, as a gibbon or chimpanzee"
By the way, the major cladistic division is Old-World Monkeys/Apes versus New World Monkeys -- "monkey" itself is not a taxonomic term at all!
But why you wanna quibble me so? You are like an amiable and often amusing gadfly, whom I could never bear to swat even though I can't understand why it keeps buzzing past my ear.
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...
Taxation is not theft: "Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves." -- Romans 13 The key idea implicit here, and the one that turned me on the subject of whether or not taxation is theft, is that "every soul" owes obedience to the "governing authorities." Now, if that is a debt I truly owe , then, when those authorities levy the taxes they need to do the job of governing, I owe them those taxes, and attempts to collect them certainly do not constitute acts of theft. And obviously it doesn't matter at all, from this point of view, whether or not I "signed" any sort of "social contract." (In fact, the history of political thought since the Reformation can be read as an attempt to find a secular rep...
Never one to allow a mistake to go uncompounded by a glaring error, Bob Murphy digs in deeper . He claims that "Taking money from people against their will is not akin to getting on the treadmill; it is akin to killing people against their will." Bob has introduced a largely irrelevant criterion here with his "against their will." Let us start with killing. (No, no, not killing Bob : we still love him despite his obstinacy.) The justice of a killing does not depend at all on whether the "victim" wants to be killed. If I shoot someone who is attempting to set off a nuclear weapon in Times Square, the fact that I killed him "against his will" does not make my killing immoral. And if a friend who is in despair asks me to shoot him in the head, the fact that he wants me to kill him would not make my action moral. Similarly, in taking money from people, the crucial question is whether you are taking it justly or unjustly, not whether they wan...
Did anybody mind that you were wandering around snapping photos? (Presumably the monkey didn't care, but besides him?)
ReplyDeleteThe Obama cutout didn't mind either. One person seemed a little suspicious, but that was it. I was showing people I was taking photographs and blogging right from my phone, so that there posts were up about 10 seconds after the photo was taken, and no one else cared at all.
ReplyDeleteErhmmm. Gene, please forgive the quibble, but why are you "monkeying" around with an orangutan? It is a great ape and like us a member of the hominid family, and NOT a monkey.
ReplyDelete(The monkeys have tails; those of New World monkeys are prehensile, while those of the Old World are reprehensible.)
Yes, Tom, I learned that distinction when I was about six, but do bad puns need to be taxonomically accurate?
ReplyDeleteMonkey:
"1. any of several families of Old and New World primates usually having a flat, hairless face and a long tail
"2. loosely any of other, similar primates, as a gibbon or chimpanzee"
By the way, the major cladistic division is Old-World Monkeys/Apes versus New World Monkeys -- "monkey" itself is not a taxonomic term at all!
As I said, Gene, it's merely a quibble.
ReplyDeleteShall we estrange
ourselves from our cousin apes?
Or "monkey" with care?
But why you wanna quibble me so? You are like an amiable and often amusing gadfly, whom I could never bear to swat even though I can't understand why it keeps buzzing past my ear.
ReplyDeleteWhat can I say? Even if I fail to inform, I am rewarded by agreement or by learning from disagreement, and in either case learn something about you..
ReplyDelete