Eugine_Nier comments on Rationality Quotes November 2012 - Less Wrong
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This works until the king sends armed men to confiscate your vegetables.
What king ever sent armed men to confiscate the vegetables of one poor dude?
Damn near every one of them through the systemical implementation of taxation?
You can't get blood from a stone. So sometimes it pays to be a stone.
EDIT: Anyway, this is missing the point. Diogenes is preaching self-sufficiency and a variant of keeping your identity small. Sycophancy isn't a reliable way to hold onto one's vegetables and one's dignity.
You can dynamite stones as an example to other would be stones.
They still won't give you any blood. They're stones. No blood up in 'em.
"Would be". As in, "don't become a stone; if I can't get blood from you I'm liable to blow you up instead".
Leaving you with more stones.
Which would be a problem if the dynamiter was trying to minimize the number of stones rather than maximizing the amount of blood, I suppose.
But you can destroy the stone, and put something you can get blood from in its place.
Depends on the size of the stone. You might not even notice it if it's small enough.
Well, you might be bulldozing the whole area.
The stone in question will hitch on ride on the bottom of a workman's boot, eventually ending up on his well-tended lawn where it will reside comfortably for decades.