‘Uncontacted’ Amazon Tribe Members Are Reported Killed in Brazil

I have just spent a year in 16 countries in West Africa.

On the whole, people here are extremely happy / content / friendly.

In all honesty, they make Canadians look unfriendly and unhappy.

I know you strongly believe everything we have invented in the modern world makes us happier (almost everyone does) You really, really, REALLY need to see with you own eyes, not just listen to what you have been told.

I would, in no way whatsoever, be interested in such a procedure and I think it's safe to say that applies to the vast majority. Thus, it must be presumed that the happiness of an individual or a group is not really a measurement of their 'fulfillment' even if it sounds like a reasonable premise in a vacuum.

Now to give you another example as to how things could reverse and take forever to recover. Take a look at USSR and its space program. They were once in race to putting man on the moon and sending probes to Venus. Today? Not really that ahead of the pack.

NASA on the other hand, has had relatively a lot more success. But a lot could change if there is some unanticipated political or economic crisis that could set back US as a country. Of course a new country will likely replace it, but the end and start points won't be exactly the same.

The point being you need continuity and need to keep the inertia going to achieve stellar growth.

Barbaric and shameful though it is.

Do you have a source to back that up?

That's clearly not a relevant analogy.

Why does the concept of "ancestral property" somehow suddenly make violence acceptable to you.

Look, it was the person above me who was saying, basically, that it was the miners' violence against the tribespeople that was "acceptable" (paraphrasing, but that's what they basically said). So perhaps you should take up this line of discussion with them, instead.

All I'm saying is - if you knowingly invade territory known to be inhabited by an "uncontacted" community -- that is to say: by definition, a fully sovereign community, and not bound by any treaties with your own government -- and you don't expect the same kind of response (i.e. violent) any self-respecting community would make when not just their land, but their very survival comes under direct attack -- then at the very least, you're pretty damn naive.

And on top of that, it becomes really, really hard to see why you might deserve any sympathy.

I don't find that convincing at all though.

There's literally a very small amount of people responsible for this atrocity and I hope they serve adequate sentences in prison for their crimes.

This is just an appeal to the mob to punish those that have a different value system then you. It works because there are enough people in the mob that agree with you that they know the absolute sense of what right and wrong is, that they all will punish those that don't share the same belief system, and praise you for sharing theirs.

So you get that tiny instinctual reward because you have shown yourself to be a valued member of the crowd through upvotes. And you'll also get an instinctual reward due to the sense of power, because those that oppose you are punished get downvoted to oblivion. This completes the circle, and keeps the mob mentality self sustaining. However, no intellectual progress comes out of it, and in fact it makes everyone dumber by rewarding only those who praise the mob.

The second part is quite interesting, because it would be suboptimal for rational agents. If humans were rational decision makers, the reaction to a crime should be chosen to balance out the damage, so that nobody can derive a benefit from criminal behavior. Then failure to punish would be equally severe as unjust punishment, and everyone should be treated according to their probability of guilt.

However, humans react much more strongly to losing something they already have than to not gaining it in the first place. So if you have a fine of $10,000 to distribute among 100 people with 1% probability of guilt, they will complain much more about the $100 they have to pay than when nobody pays anything, which means that one of them gets away with whatever crime deserved the $10,000 in the first place.

If the situation is different, e.g. when you are just deciding whether to write an article about some as yet unproven allegation, the same considerations don't necessarily apply. That doesn't make the general principle completely irrelevant, but it does mean that your standard of proof doesn't have to be quite as strict.

Sort of. It's a technical detail of US criminal justice. If it was some moral basis of all justice, you'd have to explain why civil justice is 'immoral'.

I hate seeing the US policy discarded because it's "irrelevant"

I don't think anyone did that - if anything, you're seem to be elevating something you're very familiar with to some sort of universal principle mainly on the basis of that familiarity. And anyone who disagrees is a tyrant, somehow?

We make all sorts of nuanced judgements, even about other people's criminality, all the time. Sure, it's best not to judge without basis or too hastily or uncharitably or you name it. But few things outside actual criminal trials require 'proof beyond reasonable doubt'. That would be silly and impractical. Many people, for instance, believe OJ Simpson is guilty of murder and they're neither immoral nor tyrants for thinking it. Trotting out 'innocent until proven guilty' is even weirder and less applicable as some sort of substitute for 'there's a thing in this newspaper article I don't like or agree with'. One can just say that instead of reciting some strident and inapplicable phrase.

However there is prima fascia evidence a crime may have been committed and that is being reported and investigated.

What exactly, specifically about any of that is being objected to? I really can't tell. All I can see in criticism of the article is demagogic posturing.

Morals are about value systems. Moral intuition is a paradox, as there is a multitude of moral value systems. Innocent until proven guilty is an American ethical precept.