Re: Civilization and Enemies, was Re: CONFESSIONS OF A CHEERFUL LIBERTARIAN By David Brin

From: Michael M. Butler (butler@comp-lib.org)
Date: Fri Dec 01 2000 - 19:56:50 MST


I will not rise to any of Michael's tempting bait (yum), but there's a
nugget of gold here:

> There is a significant difference between individualism and
> socio/psychological killers, liberty is not about nihilism.

Absolutely true, and I never said it was.

I will repeat what I said, broken down, with annotation:
1) Pure individualism <do what thou wilt, plain and simple>
2) in its rawest form <hmm... what the *hell* is going on? looks
weird to me>
3) is hard to distinguish <not impossible, _hard_ for J. Random
person on the street>
4) from psychopathology <bad craziness>
5) unless the observer <the person trying to gauge how to respond>
6) has confidence <justified or not>
7) in the shared values <I figure most people will eat the pie, not
throw it in my face>
8) of the observed. <the person doing what he wilt>

Pick any part of this apart, Michael. Please go by the numbers, there
are a lot of assumptions and nominalizations here; I hope you won't
waste time quibbling over semantics.

I mean, really, haven't you ever freaked a mundane? You know what I'm
talking about, don't you?



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