From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org]
Sent: Monday, January
30, 2006 9:00 AM
To: 'Minarchists@yahoogroups.com'
Cc:
'marketliberal@yahoogroups.com'
Subject: Re: FW: making the LP
Platform safe for minarchism
Paul Ireland wrote:
PI> The premise of libertarianism is
that we own ourselves <PI
The pilot owns his plane, too. Can you give us a list
of all the different kinds of ownership, or do you just invent new ones when
you're losing an argument?
PI> nothing inside our body has any
claim to our body. To claim otherwise is to claim a tapeworm has more rights
to your body than you do. <PI
A tapeworm does not meet anyone's criteria
for personhood.
PI> We are born with rights and not a
second before. <PI
Wow, so you can look at the videotape of my
daughter's birth and tell me the second at which she acquired the right to
life? My camcorder shoots at 30 frames per second -- do you think you
could even narrow it down to the individual frame in which she became a
person? I'd like to send printouts of that one to the
grandparents.
PI> Even if a fully functional human
being capable of thought, speech, and written communication were to find
themselves inside the body of another human being, they would have absolutely
no rights what-so-ever; not even the right to life itself.
<PI
By the way,
is being inside another's epidermis the only place or circumstance in which a
person magically loses all his rights, or do you have a list you can share with
us persons who would like to avoid all such places? If the person is outside
the epidermis but physically and uniquely dependent for life on a connection to
or through the epidermis that the mother voluntarily arranged, can she
still kill the person? Do conjoined twins have the right to kill each
other? Given your language about "absolutely no rights whatsoever", do
they have even the right to vote?
What is it
about a mother's epidermis that gives it its magical rights-nullifying
properties? If all your skin is eventually replaced by grafts donated from
the same donor, does he have the right to kill you? If a
babysitter surgically acquires a pouch or skin flap and sews a
client's baby inside it, can she be prosecuted only for kidnapping but not for
suffocating the baby?
PI> Trying to compare an airplane to
your own body is ridiculous. I won't let myself get caught up in
such a ridiculous and worthless analogy. <PI
And yet, four
paragraphs later, you make the mistake of trying to answer the airplane
analogy:
PI>
anyone on the airplane has a right to life, and the right to enforce the
contract they made when they bought their ticket to be taken all the way to
thier destination. <PI
Bzzzt. My
question was about "a person who involuntarily finds himself in my plane".
To play again, please insert another token.
And thanks
for sparing us all the embarrassment of watching you try to save your tandem
skydiving analogy from my earlier evisceration of it.
Brian Holtz