My English Diet
I have eaten more packaged sandwiches since September than I had in the preceding 45 years.
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Libertarians, My Libertarians!
By
gcallah
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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.
"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness
By
gcallah
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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...
I'm not being sarcastic. I thought if a political body does this kind of thing, it's not mass murder, but war? I.e. you reject my classification of taxation as "theft," but are you OK with me calling war "mass murder"?
ReplyDeleteBob, no, war is not mass murder. For instance, if the Candadians were invading Brooklyn and I killed twenty of them, that would NOT be mass murder, but just killing in a war of defense. When, however, troops strike from the air, without offering any chance of surrender, at a bunch of travelers who they suspect might be the enemy, THAT's mass murder. (Probably third degree homicide, to be precise -- reckless.)
ReplyDeleteThis is, as I see it, a major problem with declaring "The State is Evil!": the government of Switzerland taking 20% of incomes for providing peaceful, very decent governance becomes no different than Mugabe slaughtering white Zimbabwean farmers and stealing their farms. Fighting a necessary war in a decent fashion becomes no different than fighting an unnecessary war in an indecent fashion.