still shaking my head

How can someone make as basic a confusion as that between ontological objecthood and legal personhood? I find this so stunning that it almost seems like a deliberate attempt to cause chaos in the discussion.

Remember all those stories about some of the favored tricks of the sophists? If (pretending they were English-speakers for the moment) you’d use the word “big” in a conversation, they might say “you just contradicted yourself, because you said the word ‘big,’ but the word big is actually small.”

Complete idiocy, of course. But the very idiocy of it would piss people off enough that the true stakes of the conversation would often become obscured.