On 1/1/2016 3:11 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 2:06 AM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 12/28/2015 5:30 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.
So you agree with our subjugation if a more advanced civilization
discovers their way to Earth?
I agree with our advancement, yes. Nobody said anything about
"subjugation"...you're trying to move the goal posts.
I would say that you assume that our current culture is so correct
that any advanced civilization would share our values, but with more
advanced tech. It is very hard to see the limitations of a culture
from the inside -- and I do not exclude myself from this observation,
of course.
What if their values were repulsive to you? Would you just trust that
they are more advanced, so they know better?
No; but then I wouldn't recognize them as "more advanced" either.
"Advanced" is ambiguous. You seem to use it sometimes in a general
sense, including ethics, and other times as purely technological and
assuming
What if they are hyper-intelligent social insects,
I don't think that's possible under Darwinian evolution.
and find our individualism barbaric? What if they don't value empathy
at all?
Then they wouldn't be social, wouldn't have a society, and wouldn't
travel here to conquer us.
Educating the American indians wasn't subjugation. The only
subjugation they suffer is being kept in traditional roles on
reservations by their "leaders".
If the education is not desired, then it's subjugation. If they didn't
want you in the land where they and their ancestors lived, then you
took that land by force. I am not saying that this can be avoided:
nature is brutal like that. But pretending that our motivations are
nobler than that of any other species our group that is just
struggling for survival is disingenuous.
See, you've switched the goal posts. This started with condemnation of
the West imposing non-slavery and no-human sacrifice on the Aztec
empire. Now you've moved it to saying we're not more noble than them
because we did it for ourselves. We're certainly more ethical by our
standards. You may say that the Aztecs standards are just as good - but
I doubt that you can believe it.
Brent
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