Category Archives: Semantics

ACDC, Christian Anarchism, Propaganda, Semantics

Whole lotta Larken

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Larken Rose, author of The Most Dangerous Superstition, is my favourite anarchist thinker.

Larken posted this on his Facebook page yesterday. It’s highly germane to my previous post damning the MSM so I decided to copy and paste it below.

The world is really damn big, and there are a lot of people on it. No kidding, right? But the near incomprehensible number of humans on the planet allows for massive manipulation and deception. To wit, if I could merely choose which events and stories you hear about—even if everything I tell you is completely true and accurate—I would have massive control over your perceptions, control over your thoughts and fears, and therefore a lot of control even over your actions. If, for example, I made sure you were told about it—and saw the gruesome images—every single time someone was injured by a chainsaw (which happens about 80 times a day), you would think it was an intolerable, shocking epidemic… a crisis! If you weren’t very good at statistics and critical thought, you might even be joining the call to have chainsaws banned, or at least licensed and heavily regulated.

As another example, if I made sure you heard about it, in lurid detail, every time someone with red hair mistreated an animal, and you were exposed to that day after day, over time you would—whether consciously, subconsciously, or both—start to think that redheads are all sadistic animal torturers. Just due to the sheer numbers of people on the planet, there could be a news channel that reported only redheads mistreating animals, without repeating the same story twice, and without ever running out of stories (provided they had a way to find all those stories). For those who want to check the math, there are estimated to be somewhere around 100,000,000 redheads in the world. If even one out of every 100,000 of those was nasty to an animal at some point, that would give our “Redheads Being Mean to Animals Network” around three unique stories a day, for a year, never mentioning the same individual twice. (After a year you could probably start over with the list of people without the viewers noticing.)

The point is, if YOUR perception of any group—any race, religion, nationality, fans of a particular band, people who wear a certain fashion, people born in a certain month, etc.—is based on what you see on a screen, or hear on the radio, keep in mind that you are allowing someone else to mold your opinions for you. And if your view of that group doesn’t match your own direct, firsthand experiences, then you are probably being lied to, and someone is probably intentionally instilling fear or hatred in you in order to serve their own agenda.

Take it from an anarchist, living in a world of people who are being taught to fear anarchists.

A quick question for the reader. What is YOUR perception of anarchists?

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Allow me to mold your opinions for you.

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Yeah nah. You can mold your own opinions.

Meanwhile, I pick my fights, and defending the preferred labels of the political tribes with which I’m affiliated from what I and other tribe members deem to be misuse isn’t my battle.

There’s an insuperable problem with the terms ‘anarchy’, ‘anarchism’, ‘anarchist’ that isn’t going to go away. Simply put, the trouble is that the term ‘anarchist’ (e.g.) is an auto-antonym. Check out the Collins English Dictionary definition.

1. a person who advocates the abolition of government and a social system based on voluntary cooperation
2. a person who causes disorder or upheaval

I’m a person who advocates a social system based on voluntary cooperation and the abolition of government, but I’m not a person who causes disorder or upheaval. So, am I an anarchist or not?

What do you say I am?

I say I’m a voluntaryist.

ACT, Censorship, Christmas, Ephesians, Free Speech, Humour, Keeping It Real, King James Bible, Liberate your Mind!, Martin Luther, Matthew, Peter Dunne, Proverbs, Semantics, Things Jesus Never Said

Salt is a four-letter word

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[WARNING: This blog post contains lots of very strong language and is practically guaranteed to give offence to weak-minded prudes. Please proceed at your own risk.]

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The use–mention distinction is a foundational concept of (Western analytic) philosophy. To fail to recognise the distinction is, at best, to invite disaster.

The following true statements illustrate the distinction.

(1) Salt is an ionic compound, viz., sodium chloride (NaCl).
(2) ‘Salt’ is a four-letter word.

The first sentence is a statement about the substance called “salt”—it uses the word ‘salt’ to refer to that substance. The second is a statement about the word ‘salt’—it mentions the word without using it to refer to anything other than itself.

‘Salt’ is a four-letter word. Salt is not a four-letter word. And neither salt nor ‘salt’ is a four-letter word in the usual idiomatic (and only incidentally numeric) sense of the term. It’s perfectly polite and indeed good table manners to ask someone please to the pass the salt!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMkNsMMvrqk

In this post I want to say a few words about four-letter words (e.g., ‘fuck‘ and ‘shit‘) and their cognates (e.g. ‘fucking shit‘) and briefly discuss whether (and in what contexts) Christians ought or ought not to be using such vulgarities and profanities.

And it struck me that the perfect way to make the main point I want to make is to recycle the metaphor that Jesus uses in Matthew 5:13 right after the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus says to his followers

You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. (NIV)

George Carlin aptly refers to the words I’m talking about as “just words which we’ve decided not to use all the time.” And “that’s about the only thing you can say about them for sure.” Carlin’s bang on the money! Because, if we used the words all the time, they’d lose their “saltiness”! They’d no longer be effective cuss words and they’d no longer be good for anything more than just plain old communication. Which would be a dingleberry of a disappointment.

(Or would it? If we no longer had an inventory of “reserved” words with which to insult others effectively, we’d have to relearn the art of the insult. And our prose would begin to be colourful like Bill Shakespeare‘s or Martin Luther‘s prose is colourful. And actually that would be fucking awesome!)

Say what you mean and mean what you say. Is probably the one blog post of mine I regularly link to. It explains how (according to me, but I’m not wrong) words acquire their meanings. The meaning of a word (any word) is determined by the conventions that govern its use. And those conventions can and do vary between different communities of language users. Amongst the kind of people I usually hang out with, the words ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ are used fairly indiscriminately. They’ve pretty much lost their saltiness in those contexts. (But I use those words extremely judiciously, if at all, if I’m having dinner with, say, my mum or any of her older friends.) Whereas both I and my peers still tend to hold back on using the terms ‘cunt’ and ‘motherfucker’. Those two words remain mostly reserved for when we need convenient terms to refer to truly despicable people, such as Peter Dunne.

But here’s the interesting thing. In the circles in which I usually move, the words ‘cunt’ and ‘motherfucker’ can cease to be insults at all simply by prefixing them with the words ‘good’ and ‘formidable’ respectively. To call someone a good cunt is to pay them a genuine compliment. And it is a mark of utmost respect to call someone a formidable motherfucker. Mohammed Ali was a formidable motherfucker. Vladimir Putin is a formidable motherfucker. Good or evil, you don’t want to cross such people! Not unless it’s from a safe distance, anyway. (I.e., well outside of Russia in the latter case.)

Let another praise you, and not your own mouth; a stranger, and not your own lips. (ESV)

Here’s a picture taken Wednesday evening of me (on the right) and a couple of good cunts. 🙂 🙂

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Now to the question, ought Christians to be using the sort of language I’ve been using here? The answer is simple common sense, really. It depends on the context and the occasion and the company. None of the cuss words above is at all appropriate during a church service, for example. (But you may say “piss” if you’re reading from the KJV.) Such terms should be used sparingly, if at all, in polite company. Because they’re impolite. But in impolite company (such as on my Facebook page) they’re not impolite. Here’s what the Apostle Paul says

Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen. (NIV)

Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving. (NIV)

It’s contextual, you see. Don’t go calling someone a good cunt if it’s “out of place” to do so. But do go calling them that if it’s “helpful for building them up according to their needs.”

I’ll finish by noting that there’s a big tension between being a good cunt and being a formidable motherfucker. If you succeed at being both simultaneously then you’re practically a saint.

Epistemology, Islam, Jihad, John, Semantics

diSsIMuLAtion

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Where are the moderate Muslim voices condemning the violence?

That’s what the likes of Fox News ask whenever masked terrorists shouting “Allahu Akbar” fire shots with automatic weapons killing swathes of innocent Westerners before departing the scene shouting, “We have avenged the Prophet Mohammed,” as happened in the recent Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris.

Fox’s own Monica Crowley, for example, said that Muslims “should be condemning” the attack and that she hadn’t “heard any condemnation… from any groups.” Fox News’ America’s Newsroom guest Steve Emerson complained, “you don’t see denunciations of radical Islam, by name, by mainstream Islamic groups.” Bob Beckel, a host of Fox News’ The Five host said Muslims were “being quiet” about the shooting and accused the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) of keeping “their mouth shut when things happen.”

Raw Story gives 46 examples of Muslim outrage about Paris shooting that Fox News can’t seem to find in an attempt to discredit Fox News.

Wait, what? Only 46 examples? A good many of the cited condemnations of the violence are tweets from individuals on Twitter. There are a handful from the foreign ministers of Muslim countries. Only a dozen or so statements are from representatives of large Islamic organisations. But there are between 1.5 and 2 billion Muslims in the world, depending on who’s counting. 46 out of billions isn’t very many. It’s near silence from the so-called moderate Muslim majority over this outrage!

Or so it might seem to someone predisposed to blame Islam, rather than Islamic extremism, for the all-too-frequent acts of Islam-related terrorism in today’s world. But the sad truth of the matter is that we simply don’t know how many moderate Muslims condemn durka durka Mohammed jihad. And we don’t know whether they’d be reported doing so by the MSM if they did.

I posted a couple of pictures of moderate Muslims demonstrating for peace before. Clearly one of them is photoshopped, but which one? (Perhaps they both are. I forget.)

Will the real Islam please stand up? Are the masked homicidal gunmen who stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo the true representatives of Islam? Or is the hard-working and law-abiding Muslim family who own and run your corner store the true faces of the religion of peace?

Seriously, folks. Can’t you see that there’s an epistemic problem here? Is Islam the root cause of the problem? Or something else? I don’t really know and, may I respectively suggest, neither do you.

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Credit where it’s due says blogger Brendan McNeill, upon whom I rely to keep tabs on what Mohammed’s followers are up to.

I have previously reflected that nothing short of a reformation of Islam will ever allow its followers to co-exist peacefully with other faith communities. It seems the Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who is himself a Muslim, agrees and is apparently unafraid to say so.

Speaking before Al-Azhar and the Awqaf Ministry on New Year’s Day, 2015, and in connection to Prophet Muhammad’s upcoming birthday, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a vocal supporter for a renewed vision of Islam, made what must be his most forceful and impassioned plea to date on the subject.

McNeill then quotes from al-Sisi’s speech in which the Egyptian President declares that Islam “is in need of a religious revolution,” before concluding

President Sisi is a brave man. Normally, to utter these words would be an automatic death sentence. It may still prove to be.

Is al-Sisi’s speech a reason for optimism? Perhaps, but there’s a bigger problem than that which already makes al-Sisi’s future assassination a very real possibility. A further epistemic problem to exacerbate the one we already have.

I’ve previously blogged on tawriya which is the Muslim doctrine of double entendre.

Now here’s Wikipedia to say a few words about taqiyya, the Muslim doctrine that allows lying in certain circumstances—primarily when Muslim minorities live under infidel authority.

In Shi’a Islam, taqiyya (تقیة taqiyyah/taqīyah) is a form of religious dissimulation, or a legal dispensation whereby a believing individual can deny his faith or commit otherwise illegal or blasphemous acts while they are in fear or at risk of significant persecution. The corresponding concept in Sunni Islam is known as idtirar (إضطرار) “coercion”. A related concept is known as kitman “concealment; dissimulation by omission”. Also related is the concept of ḥiyal, legalistic deception practiced not necessarily in a religious context but to gain political or legalistic advantage.

Can we trust any of the moderate Muslims condemning violent jihad? Can we even trust al-Sisi? A friend on Facebook thinks we can’t. He says

be in no doubt it was a very brave thing for Sisi to say unless of course he is practicing Taquiyya which is the islamic doctrine of being able to lie or decieve to protect or further islam.

I don’t know if we can trust al-Sisi or not. How could I know? (He’s a politician, after all.)

Christianity does not permit lying. Not even white lies. We are called to worship God in spirit and in truth. The fact that Islam does permit lying in certain circumstances and even has a name for the practice is of the utmost concern.

Not least because it gives anti-Islamic factions in Western society a free pass to practise a modern-day form of medieval witch dunking, also known as ordeal by water.

Ordeal by water was associated with the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries: an accused who sank was considered innocent, while floating indicated witchcraft.

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Innocent accused who sank drowned. Guilty accused who floated were executed for witchcraft. So the accused was damned if she did, damned if she didn’t. (See also the Biblical test for an unfaithful wife.)

Muslims who don’t protest the violence of their extremist co-religionists are accused of condoning terrorism by not speaking out. Muslims who do protest are accused of committing taqiyya. Thus, in the eyes of many, there are no moderate Muslims, just as there were none left living among those women of medieval times accused, rightly or wrongly, of witchcraft.

(Point illustrated. In fact, with respect to dunking, “the notion that the ordeal was flatly devised as a situation without any possibility of live acquittal, even if the outcome was ‘innocent’, is a modern elaboration.”)

Lying is wrong. And the fate of all habitual liars is that eventually no one believes them. That Muslims are so widely regarded with suspicion is a fate that Islam has wrought upon itself.

Epistemology, Evolutionism, Proverbs, Semantics, Twisted Sister

I’m an agnostic. (Don’t ask me why.)

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Last month I posted the following Facebook status.

I’m an agnostic. (Don’t ask me why.)

I meant it mainly as a joke.

Let me explain. An agnostic is someone who doesn’t know. So if you ask me why I’m an agnostic, I’m going to answer, “I don’t know!”

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I meant it mainly as a joke, but I also meant it partly as a statement of fact about me.

The term ‘agnostic’ was coined by 19th century English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (who, incidentally, is best remembered as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his advocacy of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution). He derived the term from the (Ancient) Greek ἀ- (a-), meaning “without”, and γνῶσις (gnōsis), meaning “knowledge”. Hence, the literal meaning of ‘agnostic’ is someone without knowledge. Huxley said

Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle … Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable.

Agnosticism is not a creed. Agnosticism says nothing about anything. That’s how it’s entirely possible (and, in my opinion, entirely desirable) to be both an agnostic and a Christian.

Agnosticism is not a creed. It’s a method(ology) only. And it’s about what conclusions are certain. (I’m not sure, but I think I’m not entirely certain about anything.)

I’ve studied more than enough philosophy to know not to put too much trust in the evidence of the senses or the deliverances of human reason. That’s one reason why the following is one of my favourite scriptures.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart
And do not lean on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge Him,
And He will make your paths straight. (NASB)

Do not lean on your own understanding. Seems pretty agnostic to me.

Abortion, Electric Wizard, Green Party, Semantics, State Rape

Legalise Drugs and Murder

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Green Party to decriminalise abortion

The Green Party will decriminalise abortion and assert the right of women to make decisions regarding their own health and the wellbeing of their family or whanau.

But will the Green Party assert the right of unborn women to make decisions regarding their own health? Check your born privilege!

Abortion is currently a crime under the Crimes Act. It is only legal if two consultants agree that the pregnancy would seriously harm the woman’s mental or physical health or that the fetus would have a serious disability.

So let’s get this straight. Abortion is already legal if “the fetus would have a serious disability.” That’s disability based discrimination, isn’t it?

“The Green Party trusts women to make decisions that are best for them and their whānau/family,” Green Party women’s spokesperson Jan Logie said.

“The Green Party believes the time has come for New Zealand to take an honest approach to abortion, to treat it as the health issue it is, and remove it from the crime statutes.

I think the time has come for the Green Party to take an honest approach to abortion, and acknowledge that abortion is killing an unborn child. Abortion is a form of infanticide.

“The fact that 99 percent of abortions are approved on ‘mental health’ grounds and that rape is not grounds for an abortion reveals the dishonesty of the current legal situation.

“By keeping abortion a crime, New Zealand has created an unnecessary stigma around abortion that has led to delays, erratic access to terminations depending on where you are in the country, and unnecessarily late terminations.

Perhaps there should be a stigma around killing babies. Nice to have?

“Decriminalisation will reduce the stigma and judgement that surrounds abortion, and enable abortions to be performed earlier in pregnancy, which is safer for women.

“The Green Party’s policy would allow terminations after 20 weeks gestation only when the woman would otherwise face serious permanent injury to her health or in the case of severe fetal abnormalities

“Our policy will ensure that women have access to neutral counselling, if they want it, and that women who choose to continue with their pregnancy are given more support and are not financially penalised for doing so.

“We would also ensure parents are fully informed about the support available for families and people living with disabilities and address discrimination against disabled people that exists in the current laws around abortion,” Ms Logie said.

I don’t see how the Green Party can “address discrimination against disabled people that exists in the current laws around abortion” by amending the abortion laws to make it legal to kill disabled people in the womb. But maybe my head’s just too muddled by smoking too much of the other thing the Greens want to decriminalise?

When is a disability not a disability? When it’s a severe fetal abnormality.

Green Party women’s spokesperson Jan Logie also posted this clarification on Facebook.

Some people have raised concerns that our policy might allow abortions post 20 weeks based on disability. This is not the intent of the policy. The Greens have a commitment to human rights and the acknowledgement of international obligations runs under all of our policies. The UN Committee with responsibility for the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) has already ruled that any distinction in abortion law on the grounds of fetal abnormality breaches the CRPD so our policy will not do that. The intent is to re to allow abortion after 20 weeks for a baby who has conditions so severe that they are extremely unlikely to survive post birth.

So the intent is to allow abortion after 20 weeks for a baby who has conditions so severe that they are extremely unlikely to survive post birth. But not if those severe conditions are fetal abnormalities. What other severe conditions are such that a baby is unlikely to survive post birth? Being sucked out of the womb with a vacuum cleaner?

Provisions later in the policy make it clear that we wish to extend protections against disability based discrimination.

We just read (above) that abortion is already legal if “the fetus would have a serious disability.” Is this the disability based discrimination the Greens want to protect against?

Also, if a baby has “conditions so severe that they are extremely unlikely to survive post birth,” why not just let nature take its course? That would be the Green thing to do, after all.

I’m not sure what disgusts me the most. Killing babies in the womb or the Green Party’s blatant contradictions, Orwellian newspeak and senseless rape of the English language.

Genesis, Justice, S.O.D., Semantics

Harm minimisation vs. harm elimination

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It’s important to say what you mean and mean what you say.

If you don’t say what you mean and mean what you say, you will likely be misunderstood.

The trouble is, even if you do say what you mean and mean what you say, you will still likely be misunderstood!

Sad but true.

It all goes back to the Babel incident recorded in the Book of Genesis.

Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth. (NIV)

Later, much later … we have modern telecommunications technology. We have the Internet and language translators such as the Babelfish). Microsoft readies real-time language translator for Skype. Is anything we plan now possible for us?

No, it’s not. Our language is still confused! People can’t seem to speak clearly. Ambiguity is ubiquitous. Even if we do say what we mean and mean what we say … it takes two to tango. Communication is as much the listener’s responsibility as the speaker’s. People can’t seem to speak clearly, and they can’t seem to listen clearly either. They’ll hear you say what they thought you meant. Even before you said it.

Even if what you meant is what you said and what you said is what you meant, you will still likely be misunderstood!

Here’s a recent case study. It’s an edited snippet of a conversation I had on Facebook with a libertarian friend. (No prizes for guessing whom!)

Do you agree that a government should minimise the unjust harm the government actively inflicts on its own citizens? Yes or No?

No it must be absolutely eliminated…and it is *we the people* who do this…. not the government itself. *they dont make the rules. We do. They merely enforce the duties we delegate to them…. Government for the People… by the people.
Their Duty is to *uphold our rights*….. whether or not we Harm ourselves to a greater or lesser extent…. via ignorance or choice.
When you say Governments unjust harm should be ‘minimised’ rather than eliminated, you are saying that there is a tolerable level unjust harm that is allowable….

That’s not what I’m saying at all. Or is it?!

verb: minimise
reduce (something, especially something undesirable) to the smallest possible amount or degree.

To minimise harm is to reduce harm to the smallest possible amount or degree.

To eliminate harm is to reduce harm to zero.

To minimise harm or to eliminate harm completely? These come to the exact same thing if it turns out that the smallest possible amount of harm is zero! The question is, consistent with its ongoing role as a properly functioning proper government, what is the smallest possible amount of unjust harm the government can actively inflict on its own citizens? Is it, in fact, zero?

It’s not zero.

What is the proper function of a proper government? My friend says that government’s duty

is to *uphold our rights*

but what the hell does that even mean? Uphold? Wat.

According to my understanding of libertarianism, the government really has only two proper functions, viz., defence of the realm and administration of justice.

For defence of the realm, we have the Ministry of Defence … and (arguably) the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (but not Trade).

For administration of justice, we have the Ministry of Justice … and the subsidiary Ministry of Police and Ministry of Corrections (so-called).

The police are there to apprehend those who infringe our rights. The prison system is there to punish the perpetrators, according to principles of justice. To “uphold” our rights is merely to apprehend those who infringe our rights and bring them to justice … after the fact. Strictly speaking, according to my libertarian philosophy, the police have no business preventing crime. That’s what private security companies are for.

Now, let’s consider the government’s proper function of administering justice. Because of the very nature of earthly justice systems, it turns out that the smallest possible amount of unjust harm a government may inflict on its own citizens is greater than zero.

Sad but true.

In administering justice, earthly justice systems are prone to two basic kinds of error. Punishing the innocent and letting the guilty walk free. These two errors are not independent.

We could eliminate the first kind of error—punishing the innocent—by letting everyone walk free. But that would be a cop-out. It would not be administering justice at all.

We could eliminate the second kind of error—letting the guilty walk free—by locking everyone up. But that would be to unjustly harm the innocent en masse. It would not be administering justice at all.

In practice, our justice system is heavily weighted towards avoiding the second kind of error. As a result, very few innocent people are ever sent to prison. As a result, very many guilty people walk free.

Governments harm people. Even proper libertarian governments. Unfortunately, there is a tolerable level of unjust harm that is allowable. It’s just a harsh fact of life but one that we must accept.

Ayn Rand, Mark II, Semantics, Thomas Jefferson

Disasters waiting to happen #2

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1280px-Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_The_Tower_of_Babel_(Vienna)_-_Google_Art_Project_-_edited

Say what you mean, and mean what you say. It’s good advice!

But there’s a problem, one which I addressed in a footnote to the post linked to above. We use words to say what we mean and mean what we say. The problem is that any given word can have more than one meaning or “sense”.

Consider the following three quotations about rights.

From the founder of Utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham.

That which has no existence cannot be destroyed — that which cannot be destroyed cannot require anything to preserve it from destruction. Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts.

From blogger Mark Hubbard (channelling the inimitable Ayn Rand).

my thinking on children is they have no rights per se – don’t take that out of context – as they don’t have the experience or formed minds to exercise judgement.

From Thomas Jefferson, author of the American Declaration of Independence.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

The question is, are these three great thinkers actually (for the most part) disagreeing with each other? Or are they (for the most part) talking past each other? I think they’re talking past each other, because they’re not talking about the same thing.

There is a fix. We can talk about Benthamite rights, Randian rights and Jeffersonian rights, and avoid talking about rights sans qualification. But what a chore to have to do that!

Wouldn’t it be nice if words had univocal meanings? But they don’t. Ambiguity in language is a modern-day Tower of Babel.

I don’t know when ambiguity of meaning crept in to our language(s). But when it did, it was a disaster waiting to happen.

Ayn Rand, Beatles, Evolutionism, Humour, Metaphysics, Nihilism, Riddles, Semantics

How many holes?

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How many holes are in this bucket?

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Non-existence is not a fact, it is the absence of a fact, it is a derivative concept pertaining to a relationship, i.e., a concept which can be formed or grasped only in relation to some existent that has ceased to exist. (One can arrive at the concept “absence” starting from the concept “presence,” in regard to some particular existent(s); one cannot arrive at the concept “presence” starting from the concept “absence,” with the absence including everything.) Non-existence as such is a zero with no sequence of numbers to follow it, it is the nothing, the total blank.

— Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Topology