Doug Morris

Does this mean we need to "defund" the package deal known as "public health", including sanitation?

I brought it up not just to talk about COVID-19, but also to talk about my example of poisoning the water. Whether we are talking about COVID-19 or my example of poisoning the water, slipping peanuts into an allergic person's food is a much better analogy or comparison than your silliness about banning peanut butter.

Obviously it is possible to overdo concern with safety. It would be ridiculous to equip buses with lifeboats in case they get caught in a flood. The question is where and how to draw the line.

There are three kinds of "mathematical probability". Classical probability has to do with things like honest coin tosses, honest die rolls, and honest deals from an honestly shuffled deck of cards. It is well connected to reality. Relative frequency probability is based on empirical observations of how often things occur. It too is connected to reality. Intuitive probability involves attempts to assign numerical probabilities to such outcomes as Trump being nominated in 2024 or Ukraine driving Russia out of Crimea within the next 5 years. It is an overreach and is not really connected to reality. However, a form of it is implicit in a betting person's willingness to make some bets and not others.

Ayn Rand dealt with the issue of two inventors working independently on the same invention, and one beating the other to the patent office. The first one to the patent office is entitled to the patent. This would be even more true if the second inventor's work depended on knowledge of the first's. But if one inventor patents the very expensive route and another makes a less expensive route work, the second inventor should be able to patent the route they made work.

A while back I heard someone on NPR say that when the land grant colleges were established, they were established with more spaces than they could fill with an appeal based on academics, so they had to find another appeal to fill the spaces. They chose an appeal based on athletics. This started the close association of U.S. higher education with athletics, which looks strange in other countries. I just did a quick search on Wikipedia to see if I could find anything to back this up, and didn't find anything. Can anyone shed light on this?

Why is Russia going out of its way to trash Ukrainian culture? Or do you deny this is happening?

This is a separate question from the question of whether you are physically endangering others.

People know that peanut butter contains peanuts and can avoid it. People are entitled to presume that no one has poisoned their water. To have an appropriate analogy or comparison, consider a case where someone slips peanuts in some form into an allergic person's food without warning them. That would be an egregious violation of rights.

Not the same as Russia ceasing to exist.

All historical examples of colonialism involve some moral wrongs, such as seizing property that American Indians had developed and were therefore entitled to under Objectivist principles. A fully moral colonialism would scrupulously avoid such wrongs. This leads us to the question, to what extent were historical examples of colonialism fundamentally moral enterprises tainted with some wrongness?

If someone puts a sometimes toxic substance into the water supply which, for 99.9% of the people, creates a 0.00000001% chance of death, but for 0.05% of the people, creates a 1% chance of death, that person has committed an egregious violation of people's rights.

The amount of space between the earlobe and the cheek is very small. Photographing it from a different angle makes it harder to see.

The photos that supposedly show earlobes connected to cheek actually have the relevant area in shadow, so you can't tell whether the earlobes are connected or not.

So we need to compare number of non-alcohol-related traffic deaths divided by number of sober miles traveled with number of alcohol-related traffic deaths divided by number of drunk miles traveled. Nobody's offered anything like that yet. More people die while not serving as military or police than while serving as military or police. It would be ridiculous to draw a conclusion from this while blowing off the question of denominators.

When? Where? The key point is how much risk is being created, not a count of total deaths.

It would be more to the point to say that one should not lie to total strangers that one expects not to ever interact with again because there is no telling how far the lie and its effects will go. (This is in addition to not lying simply because one should not do wrongful harm.)

Part of the problem with Facebook is that people are understandably upset about the spread of harmful misinformation, and are demanding that Facebook do something about it. This raises the question of how harmful misinformation should be handled.

An action motivated by a perverse desire for destruction is neither altruistic nor morally justifiable.

I don't recall seeing anything in the Western media that dehumanized the Russian people. If you see so much of it, can you give a few examples?

If Putin is a good guy, why is he trashing civilians so much?

Are these beatitudes entirely an AI work, or did you have to do some of the work?

The entire western media. Can you give a few examples?

Where do you see this?

Wouldn't it be better to get some evidence about the particular study or authors, rather than just making an assumption?