Thought of the day

From a discussion elsewhere:

I believe that people have two rights, but they are very expansive:

1. All humans have the right to assert control (and accept the consequences of that control) over their lives, their bodies, their minds, and their properties, so long as it causes no other human damage to his body, mind, life or property without informed consent.

2. All humans have their right to defend their rights from infringement, or surrender them, should they see fit.  Consequently, all humans have the right to defend their lives, bodies, minds, and properties from damage to which they did not consent.

You can synthesize a lot from that: freedom of speech, equality on the basis of religion or heritage, etc.  The right to a free anything that requires effort from someone else, however, doesn't follow.

— Jonathan C. Patschke

Also on the philosophical front, try this post from rbos on the proposition that magic is fighting a war of minds against naturalism, and losing:

As our tools for understanding the world around us get better and better, we take more and more things away from the magicians.  Their most vociferously-announced ideas are repeatedly shown to the be the lies of con men, control freaks, and slavers of the worst kind: slavers of the mind.  Every time we take one of those ideas away from them, their positions as slavers grow more and more shaky.

One might conclude that the magicians never had anything real in the first place, that they never actually had information that the rest of us don't have, that magical beings do not talk to them and not us.

One might conclude, in fact, that the voices the magicians hear are not real, and that the magicians are just making it up for their own benefit.