15 Responses to Taoists, Confucians, Stoics, Vulcans, and Obama

  1. Neil May 31, 2009 at 2:57 am #

    “If you are about to fall on top of me from a great height, for example, and my shooting you as you fall will cause you to fall on me dead instead of falling on me alive but will not save me from being fallen on, I have no grounds for shooting you.”

    Is it evil of me to get a big gut laugh out of this example? How do you come up with this??? 😀

  2. Miko May 31, 2009 at 6:24 am #

    Incidentally, we already use a base-12 (as well as the even more efficient base-60) system on our clocks.

  3. Joe May 31, 2009 at 8:02 am #

    Methinks thou makest small contributions to evil by publishing your paper in Microsoft (“Evil Empire”) Word format (which my Linux browser refuses to open automatically).

  4. JOR May 31, 2009 at 12:45 pm #

    Obama as a virtuous stoic? What the fuck?

  5. Neverfox May 31, 2009 at 3:13 pm #

    How did Maymin jump from your discussion of the libertarian aspects of early Confucians (while fully qualifying this with reference to their statism) to “I think both views are wrong. Neither the Taoists nor the Confucians were libertarians”? Did you ever claim they were?

    • Roderick May 31, 2009 at 11:33 pm #

      were you born or raised in the U.K

      No, but I grew up on British children’s books, which may be why British spellings have always seemed more natural to me. (I’m not consistent, though; I don’t write ‘tyre’ or ‘connexion’ — perhaps because I learned about those spellings only later.) But both ways count as correct English, so I can pick whichever I prefer with a clean conscience.

    • Joe June 1, 2009 at 6:59 am #

      Until my teens, I also was exposed only to British spelling (and “zed” rather than “zee”) but I don’t recall seeing the “-ise” spellings (but I did use “colour”). And although I learned French, the “-ize” endings always seemed more natural since Spanish was my first language. Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, the OED prefers the latter particularly for words of Greek origin.

  6. JOR May 31, 2009 at 3:34 pm #

    I thought both of the linked articles were pretty horrible. I barely finished either. Maybe I’m just spoiled from reading Roderick’s stuff.

  7. Black Bloke June 5, 2009 at 5:44 pm #

    How did Maymin come to believe that the TaNaKh is included in the Qur’an?

    It seems like neither author got what you were going for, but bad publicity is (almost always) better than no publicity.

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