On 12/28/2015 5:48 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 6:39 PM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 12/28/2015 2:53 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sun, Dec 27, 2015 at 7:01 PM, Brent Meeker
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 12/27/2015 3:56 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sun, Dec 27, 2015 at 7:04 AM, Brent Meeker
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 12/23/2015 1:12 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 6:31 PM, John Clark
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 Telmo Menezes
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>wrote:
>
>>
and their land is not your land.
>>
I do not have the same faith in the divine
right of inherited wealth as you do.
>
Nice dodge. Yes, let's put all in the same bag,
Wall Street trust fund kids and remote tribes
wanting to keep living their way in *the place
they were born in*.
I'm not a big fan of
Wall Street trust fund kids
either, and if one of them owned one of the 3
places on the planet where a thirty meter telescope
could be built and refused to let it be used for
that purpose I would be in favor of using the law
of eminent domain to force the brat to sell it. And
by the way, no native Hawaiian or anybody else was
ever born atop Mauna Kea, there is nothing living
up there except for a few astronomers, and if
native Hawaiians
get there way soon there won't even be that, they
want to remove all telescopes from the mountain
including the world class ones that have been there
for decades. Why do you defend these people?
I don't defend them. I think they should not interfere
with the construction of the telescope. All I am saying
is that ramming things down people's throats isn't
working out so well. I am suggesting that something
like the "prime directive" is probably a good idea. It
would be nice to put a telescope in a certain mountain,
but it's not our mountain, so tough shit.
?? Why isn't it our mountain? The Hawaiians didn't
create it. The ownership of land is a concept invented
and enforced by the U.S. and Hawaiian state government.
There's no ownership of land apart from the society that
enforces it. In this case the state of Hawaii owns the
land and they approved the use of the land for astronomy.
This is the usual confusion between lawful and ethical.
The desire and need to have some control over one's
environment already existed in biological species much more
ancient than the Homo Sapeins.
But among social animals it was joint ownership...which is
exactly the kind of ownership the government exercises
over. The Hawaiians are like a small fraction of the tribe
who wants to have exclusive control of a part of the joint
territory because they have supernatural myths they tell
about it.
Suppose that centuries from now we are capable of traveling to
inhabited planets in other star systems. We come across a planet
populated by humanoids who are roughly in the middle ages. They
are terribly afraid of us and regard us as the demons of some
ancient prophecy of their religion. Do we see them as part of our
tribe, take over the planet and impose our values and technology
for the greater good? Or do we try to remain benevolently distant
until they are ready? And if we chose the first, isn't it true
that they were right to consider us demons to being with?
The ethical choice is number one. And the answer is no.
In fact, I have another ethical dilemma for you. The EU considers the
death penalty to be a barbaric and uncivilized practice. A country can
only join the EU if it rejects capital punishment, and the world wide
abolition of the death penalty is a stated goal of the EU.
Should the EU attempt to use its military power to subjugate the USA,
as to abolish the death penalty and move civilization forward?
No, because (a) they'd fail, (b) thousands of times as many people would
be killed as are executed, and (c) the death penalty is mostly a state
decision - so if the EU can conquer Texas, I say go for it.
Brent
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