Gene Wolfe Fans Talk Politics (Again)

Adam Thornton · 20 May 2009, 18:10 · from 2009-May.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: adam at io.com (Adam Thornton)
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 13:10:31 -0500
Subject: (urth) Gene Wolfe Fans Talk Politics (Again)
In-Reply-To: <200905200739.00603.ddjones at riddlemaster.org>
References: <mailman.68838.1242757770.12296.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
	<10324.67.142.130.18.1242781944.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<1270DCFD-CC10-4E34-A534-EB4EEF1945D2 at io.com>
	<200905200739.00603.ddjones at riddlemaster.org>
Message-ID: <9880C4BF-78E9-4F5E-A123-8CFAAAACAB0A at io.com>

On May 20, 2009, at 6:39 AM, Daniel D Jones wrote:

>
> No, we don't need an exhaustive list.  We need simple principles to  
> define the
> terms.  In short, you're free to do anything you like so long as you  
> do no
> harm to me and mine.

If we don't create an exhaustive list, we're going to get an ever- 
cascading list of entitlements that become fundamental rights.  I  
thought that was part of the problem we were trying to solve.

"Do no harm," is also tricky.  I mean, every time I breathe, I'm using  
up oxygen that you *could* use.  If I drive to the grocery store, I'm  
removing some gasoline from the global oil supply and thus making it  
just a little bit more expensive for a humanitarian aid convoy in  
Africa in five years.

Let's say I have a silver mine.  You live below it on the mountain.  I  
do all my mining and waste disposal on land I own, as is my right.   
However, my waste disposal makes YOUR well water undrinkable since  
water doesn't respect property boundaries.  Am I within my rights to  
say, "hey, I'm doing lawful things on my own damn property--your well  
is not my problem!" ?

"No" harm is clearly not possible.  What is the epsilon that is close- 
enough-to-zero-for-rights-determination-process, and who gets to  
decide it?

Adam
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 4988 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20090520/2e3782e9/attachment.bin>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net