MisterSwig

Yeah, I see another problem with the Everest objection. I doubt they will place the Mars colony on a mountain of rock and ice that gets pummeled by high winds and snowstorms most of the year. They will have to contend with extreme cold though, and of course the oxygen problem. I kind of get how they plan to solve the cold and oxygen problems by transporting needed materials and machines to Mars, but the water problem puzzles me. If they rely on ice in the soil, won't they eventually be forced to travel further and further away from the city to mine for ice? At some point each citizen might have to spend all day producing his own water ration. And that won't be much of a life. In order to zone the entire planet for residences and light industry, there would need to be some government or group of governments with the power to do so. How would it gain this power? By the people voting for or going along with unprecedented violations of property rights. There was a bit of that when he described the crew quarters on the space ship. He said something about playing games in zero-g. I also seem to recall him saying something about bounding around in Mars' gravity. Which, by the way, is another problem. Man didn't evolve for a low gravity environment, so it's a question what that will do to him longterm. Zero-g on the space station causes atrophy.

Yep, that might be an issue, depending on how much taxpayer money goes into the mission. I believe SpaceX is a private company that's partnered with NASA and holds contracts to deliver astronauts and equipment to the space station. That's partly how Musk plans to finance and develop his Mars colony idea. He's also got profits from his other companies, and probably some big investors. I think it's an interesting question. If you had a few hundred grand for a ticket to Mars, would you go? Musk means a city on Mars. And I'm not aware of any interest from Russia or China. They haven't even landed anyone on the moon yet.

Critical Thinking was okay, but then I like John Leguizamo and chess movies.

Is colonizing Mars a good or bad idea? For whom is it good or bad? Why is it good or bad? Elon Musk thinks it's a good idea for humanity. He says we have a choice: stay on Earth and inevitably perish in a doomsday event or become a spacefaring, multi-planet species. (See about a minute of his speech starting here at 1:44.) On the other hand, Jeff Bezos seems to think that colonizing Mars is not a good idea. Compared to Mars, he says, living on top of Mt. Everest would be a garden paradise. Perhaps Musk should try living on Everest for a year before trying to start a colony on Mars. Earth, Bezos notes, is by far the best planet for us. Bezos asks us to consider a different problem. He says that in a couple hundred years humanity's energy needs will become so enormous that we'd have to cover the planet in solar panels. So people in the future will face the choice of stasis on Earth or using the rest of the solar system to produce our energy needs. He suggests that Earth could be zoned for residences and light industry, while the heavy production would be done in space. (See about five minutes of his pitch starting at 1:40 in this video.) Clearly Musk and Bezos see virtue in making space travel more cost efficient, but they're doing it for different reasons. Musk wants to turn Mars into a second home for humanity, and Bezos wants to turn Earth into a residential utopia. I disagree with both of them. I shudder to think of the totalitarian government that would ban heavy industry from the planet's surface. And if we haven't perfected and accepted nuclear energy (or something better) within 200 years, we probably deserve stasis. And as for Musk, I believe there is value in colonizing Mars, but for the sake of expanding human knowledge and testing human potential. We shouldn't look upon a Mars colony as a way to save humanity from extinction, but as a way to experiment on ourselves as a species with physical and mental limits. Of what exactly are we capable?

I'm talking about use rights, but people do sign away body parts that can be extracted or detached, such as hair, blood, eggs, sperm, bone marrow, kidneys. Even kids trade baby teeth for money from the tooth fairy. Yes, but a woman doesn't have a penis to insert into her own vagina and inseminate herself. She must grant that right to a man. And if she doesn't grant it, he's not permitted in there. If he uses force it's rape.

I think there's something to be said for the division of labor and how it affects the spread of ideas, but I'll have to think about it more. Good question. Our second episode is up on YT. This time we discuss cancel culture and review some clips from Ben Bayer, Onkar Ghate, Stephen Hicks, David Kelley, and Yaron Brook.

Hi Dan, I subscribed to your YT channel some time ago when I searched for Objectivists. I'll be checking out more of your content. Maybe you could post some links to individual videos in this thread.

Outside of some contractual agreement like marriage, I agree. But within a marriage, one grants marital rights to one's spouse, and those rights can include reasonable use of the spouse's body for romantic and reproductive purposes. Denying such rights can be grounds for divorce, if the couple married for romance or in order to create and raise children. So I can see where DNA might be a factor in a marriage, where the husband has a legal claim to the product of the marriage. But it doesn't seem to apply outside such an arrangement.

I think your point relates to my last post above. The mother does 100% of the carrying, which means 100% of the producing--after the initial insemination.

"You could be wrong" is a proposition, and without evidence it's an arbitrary proposition. Typically people will point to man's fallible nature as evidence that "you could be wrong" about anything. But the capacity to be wrong is not the same as the possibility of being wrong. To say something is possible requires evidence pointing directly to that possibility. Let's say you're certain that you're reading my post right now. Is it possible that you're not due to your fallible nature? No, because being fallible doesn't exclude certainty, it simply excludes infallibility.

Another aspect of this position is the issue of the cell cycle. A zygote grows and its cells divide numerous times within days of the egg being fertilized. So after only a few days the man's initial material contribution is reduced to basically nothing. The mother's body grows and produces the fetus, including all the new cells in the baby. The DNA argument thus relies upon an assumed right to one's DNA sequence, not merely one's DNA material. So even if the father's original cells die inside the mother's fetus, he can still make a claim based on the DNA sequence in the new cells of the fetus.

There's an implied initial premise. If it's not your DNA, then it's not your choice. It's not your DNA. Thus, it's not your choice. I addressed the implied premise with: Eiuol is right, it's a stupid argument. But these new conservatives are flush with stupid arguments that should probably be shot to pieces for the sake of target practice or helping those who can't see the errors.

I hadn't even considered that. The slippery slope leads to DNA-based collectivism. The fetus is collectively owned by the surviving genetic lineage.

This is a loaded question. It assumes you need a right to be certain of something's value. Certainty comes before valuation and rights. You must first be certain that something exists before you can evaluate its worth and your claim to it.

A person who always wants absolutely nothing, is permanently unconscious. I'm not sure if that is being alive. I don't think such a person could choose to want nothing, due to being permanently unconscious. This subset of humans is therefore post-morality. They are essentially dead, almost certainly on life support due to brain death, and so post-humanity, arguably not really a subset of human beings. Humans are not permanently unconscious. Even a normal (non-irreversible) coma patient has the potential of regaining consciousness. The permanently unconscious are either dead or in the final stage of dying, perhaps being kept alive by machines.

You'd have identify your context and define "amoral" first. An amoral Christian is not an amoral Objectivist etc. They're your context and your word, so you can identify and define them however you like. Previously you described someone who wants absolutely nothing as being in the state of amorality. Then in a recent reply you told me that people who want nothing are dead. So I'm trying to confirm whether the amoral people you described are alive or dead, according to your philosophy.

Is your set of amoral humans dead or alive? Are we talking about living people or corpses?

But there is. If you want nothing, then you must continually reject all thoughts of doing something. If your nose itches, you must resist the urge to scratch it. Resistance is an action too. I haven't read this whole thread, so maybe I'm repeating someone else's point, but I think the deeper issue here is your method of thinking and arguing. When your opponent replied that there is no such thing as killing without a reason, you abandoned that line of questioning and moved on to another. Perhaps you should have stopped cold and figured out why you started down that line in the first place. This thread is a good start to fixing your thinking, but even here you began with a title question about why other people can't understand something. I note that some here have been trying to re-orient you to thinking about yourself, which is where objective values begin. SL, for example, is helping you clarify your thinking and writing. I think that's the best place to start. And if it's an utter fog, try looking around at real examples and describing them. Don't get lost in advanced abstractions. Find a level at which you're comfortable and start over.

That's true. When you rely on expert testimony, you need to pay attention to details that are relevant to their objectivity and honesty and trustworthiness, as well as those relevant to the charges in the case.

If you don't know what the essential details are, then you need to pay attention to as many details as possible and logically relate them to your question. In this case it was: what caused Floyd's death? If your bias is that the police caused Floyd's death, then you're probably going to note everything that points to that conclusion, and you're missing the most important details that point to his actual cause of death. You're not thinking in essentials. You're thinking in biased essentials.

How do you know whether a missed detail was the more important one?

Knowledge of what?

This trial was televised. I watched every second of it. I have a better claim than the jury. One, the jury had to remember testimony, they weren't given transcripts, whereas I could watch the testimony repeatedly on YouTube and also pause it to facilitate copious note taking. And two, statistically I'm probably more intelligent than most of those jurors, though I don't put much weight in statistics, so mostly my objective advantage comes from point one.

First degree is premeditated. Second degree, in Minnesota, can be intentional or unintentional. Chauvin was charged with unintentional murder but with intent to cause bodily harm.

Here is an interview with one of the alternate jurors.