Doug Morris

Not as much as most people, and most people don't think enough. And he is very erratic. I would say sense of life is entirely emotional. It is also important. Emotions more generally are important as fuel and can be clues. But we must still make our decisions rationally. In addition, Trump is more dishonest than most politicians and is motivated more by a craving for personal reassurance than by any conception of what is moral or practical.

Trump is emotion-guided, which puts him fundamentally at odds with Rand's philosophy, and in a way that makes him very dangerous.

There's already been plenty of time to look for evidence.

Can you clarify which people this refers to? We also need to get it clear where to draw the line between rightful and wrongful actions.

Whether the fetus/infant is still inside the mother and attached to her by a placenta may be relevant to how to draw the line between the fetus/infant's rights and the mother's.

A functioning human white blood cell is alive and human, but is not even a potential human being. A fertilized human ovum is alive and is a potential human being, but it is not an actual human being, and it is not carrying on human life in the sense that is relevant to Ayn Rand's philosophy. It has not yet acquired rights.

I don't want to go down a rabbit hole debating an ever-expanding mass of details about something that happened more than a year ago. I'll bow out of discussion about the January 6, 2021 insurrection. To the best of my knowledge, there is no evidence of a stolen election, but there may be evidence of incompetence and cover-up of incompetence.

Perhaps Ayn Rand should have said something more like "Life as an actual human being begins at birth." or "The acquisition of rights occurs at birth.".

My understanding, based on news reports from around that time, is that one police officer died as a result of injuries from the violence and that some others died as a result of stress from the violence. This does not necessarily mean that they died before they could be taken for treatment. In the chaos, there may have been a mistake about Ashli Babbit. If so, the insurrectionists are responsible because they created the chaos. We need to distinguish between Trump's false, baseless claims of a stolen election and any cases of incompetence that there is strong enough evidence for, especially if there is evidence the incompetence was covered up.

A fertilized human ovum is in a certain sense a human entity that is lacking most of its parts. Even before fertilization, the ovum and the spermatozoon are in a certain sense human entities. We need a better way of drawing the line than that. A house (being progressively developed) that is lacking a roof is not very usable as a house. If a person or organization undertakes a legal obligation to provide a house, and they provide one that is lacking a roof, they can not legitimately claim to have fulfilled the obligation. Cats and dogs experience something material, but that does not make them human. A fertilized human ovum is alive, but does not yet have human life. Even before fertilization, the ovum and the spermatozoon are in a certain sense alive, but certainly do not yet have human life. In a certain sense, the life of the entity that eventually develops into a human being starts at conception. (This is what the "pro-lifers" emphasize.) In an even more generous sense, it starts even before conception. But human life starts later.

They were insurrectionists. They used violence to attack the orderly, constitutional transfer of power. They invaded a legislative chamber of the Capitol, not just the lawn. They murdered some police officers. Serious incompetence and attempts to cover it up should not be ignored. If that whistle blower report is true, there needs to be a tightening up of the way things are done there, there are probably people who need to be fired, and there may well be people who need to go to jail.

Maybe the point is that human life begins at birth. I would argue that it begins even later, although it might be necessary to grant rights legally before they exist morally.

The cover up and the ease with which the ‘officials’ opted for falsifying records. If we define "fraud" broadly enough to include things that don't necessarily affect the outcome and don't necessarily involve an attempt to affect the outcome.

Yes. But it sounds more like incompetence and an attempt to cover it up than election rigging.

Certainly not an outcome that my friends and I don't like. (It's hard to say what that would even be, given Trump's serious flaws.) Not biased people, who don't understand what they're seeing, spying on election workers and jumping to conclusions. The burden is on those who claim fraud to present evidence and let the rest of us evaluate it. Solid evidence of ballot stuffing or of waylaying legitimate ballots, in sufficient quantity to affect the outcome, would be evidence. A discrepancy between a recount and an original count, in sufficient quantity to affect the outcome, would be tentative evidence.

How are they evidence of election fraud?

Can you give some examples of evidence?

The policy decisions were made by people with flawed premises at best. At least some of their decisions were wrong. This does not necessarily mean that all of their decisions were completely wrong.

This is getting into technical questions, and away from the philosophical issue which was my main point. I will pass on these for now.

No. No. You are conflating recognizing and dealing with risk with some sort of nonsensical omniscience which would make everything certainty and nothing a matter of risk. We may have great difficulty controlling whether we cough. But we can control whether we wear a mask. If it is risk, then your "will" should be "may". Again,

We've been over most of this before. This is getting repetitive. I'm saying that you are conflating them, because you don't understand how the concept of rights applies to increasing the risk of spreading disease. This is not what I advocate. I advocate refraining from wrongly endangering others. The altruists are very wrong about this. But when someone spreads germs, others are helpless to put them back. And this must be considered in dealing with people who increase the risk of spreading germs, even if it can't be determined whether they actually did. Guilt can reside simply in increasing risk. We must neither sacrifice ourselves to others nor sacrifice others to ourselves. In today's world, most people don't understand this well enough and don't know how to do it. This makes it all the more urgent to sort out what sacrifices whom to whom. No, I think wrongfully increasing the risk of spread can rise to the level of violating individual rights. I have never claimed or implied that such a "right" exists. I'm saying there is a right not to be subjected to excessive risk. *** I am well aware that a lot of details must be worked out before implementing any of this as policy, and that most people today do not sufficiently understand the basic principle of individual rights, and therefore are fumbling in the darkness when they try to work out details.

This does not give us license to increase the risk. We may be tired of COVID-19 but COVID-19 is not tired of us. You are being too simplistic. Preventing someone from stealing may cause his children to starve, but that is not a reason to let him steal. Preventing someone from endangering others by the way they use a gun or a car may negatively impact his life, and in some cases this negative impact might escalate into something serious, but that is not a reason to let him endanger others.

All the more reason not to put additional risk on them. No. At the core of my argument is that increasing the risk of spreading germs increases the physical danger to others and that increasing the physical danger to others can rise to the level of physical force.

All the more reason to refrain from unnecessarily increasing it. No, that's bad, but I think we should refrain from endangering one another. Respecting the rights of others is not altruism Part of your problem is that you conflate my concern about individual rights with the altruism, statism, collectivism, power lust, and sloppiness that dominates our society.

We can still unnecessarily increase their risk. We can also unnecessarily increase the risk of people who are relatively isolated, but in most cases have some contact with people who in turn have wider contacts. Some transmission is inevitable, but we still have some control over how much transmission there is. Any transmission, however avoidable or unavoidable it may be, is "bad" in the sense that it puts people in physical danger. No. Anyone, regardless of age, health, or strength, is at some risk of serous effects such as death, hospitalization, long COVID, and the inflammatory syndrome that has affected some children.