This can be done quite easily. (Well, "easily" meaning there are no theoretical challenges.) It's just that you end up investing more energy in the process than you produce though annihilation. See your average particle accelerator for example.
Oh, I hear that. I wish Michael would just go get his own blog and quit pissing in the Slashdot pool. If we could get him out of here, I'm confident that most of the problems that plague this site would vanish.
You mean apart from the fact that "redistribution of wealth" is usually a euphemism for institutionalized larceny, an offense which is rejected out of hand by every legal, ethical and moral tradition we have?
I've been reading estimates in the news of the Iraqi civilian death-toll being over 100,000.
That figure came from a widely discredited Lancet study. A few seconds of googling will yield up all the detail you could ever want, but basically the people who conducted that study used bogus methodology to produce a number with a margin of error of anywhere between about 9,000 and about 200,000, then they split the difference and reported a figure of about 100,000.
The study was complete crap. The instant it hit newsstands, critical reviews began to appear. It was discredited in about a day, but that wasn't until after people like yourself got duped by misleading headlines based on shoddy research.
ICRC says 9,400 to 11,800, Coalition and Iraqi, military and civilian. That does not count foreign fighters, who have no legal standing and of whom thousands have been killed by Coalition forces in recent weeks. I should have mentioned that; sorry.
You deny the rich are getting richer based on percentage of yearly income?
Yup. The Current Population Survey says that real earning for male members of the population has remained unchanged since 2002, and for female members of society the median has actually gone down very slightly as demographics shift. The rich are not getting richer. The earnings figures are pretty stable.
Based on total accumulation?
I don't understand. Are you trying to say that there are some rich people with a big pile of money somewhere in, like, a cave or something? I'd love to hear how you measure that.
Based on percentage of the wealth in this country?
According to the latest figures, the middle class expanded slightly last year because the stock market underperformed. So by percentage of investment assets, no, the rich are not getting any richer. The total wealth held by the rich declined in the 2003-2004 fiscal year.
You deny thousands of people are dead because of the war in Iraq?
That's many thousands fewer than would have been dead if not for the war in Iraq. Saddam was murdering 30,000 people a year on average, and the terrorists about 7,000 more on average. According to ICRC estimates, the total dead in the war in Iraq since March 2003, military and civilian, is between 9,400 and 11,800. So we've saved the lives of over 62,000 people.
Get pissed already.
No, thank you. I prefer to save my uppity indignation for stuff that's actually related in some way to reality. But if you want to keep chanting the same old tired lines without bothering to look at the actual data, that's fine. It's a free country. Knock yourself out.
You mean like a plummeting dollar, a failing economy, a losing war, an unprecedented transfer of money to the wealthiest few, thousands of war deaths, and a dismantling of civil rights and our constitution?
Wow. That would suck. Good thing none of that is happening in my country. If it ever does, I'll be pissed.
Yah, that's all well and good, but the problem is that Windows Web browsers do not know from color management. Because it's not built in to the operating system, see. (No, ColorSync is not just a buzzword for a cross-platform anything. But whatever.)
If you go out and shoot a photo with your digital camera, and you bring it in as a raw file and convert it to an sRGB JPEG (or just let the camera do the conversion, whatever), and then post it to the Web, it's going to look just right on a Mac and like poop on a Windows or Linux computer. Because the browser doesn't know from color management.
Now, if you want to restrict yourself to an incredibly specific set of Windows applications -- no Linux applications, just Windows applications --and all you want to do is scan and print, then yes, technically you can make color management work if you're willing to hold your mouth just right and put up with a few nasty workarounds.
But that's not what I call "identical results, more performance."
Your photo of the police officers has no embedded ICC profile. Of course it looks bad. Once I brought it into Photoshop, set the white and black points and put it into sRGB, it looked fine.
It's kinda funny that you would comment on color management by posting a link to a photo that suffers greatly from the lack of an embedded color profile.
Yeah, I saw how well that works just recently when doing some research for an article (an article which, now, will probably never be published; music piracy is basically dead according to recent stats). If you want to download something, Bittorrent works well. But if you're looking for something particular, you're shit-outta-luck. For example, if you want to get Dire Straits' first album, you're going to come up dry on Bittorrent. But you can get it in three minutes on the iTunes store, and that counts download time.
Okay, finally. The baby was unhealthy. Can we move on, please?
Are people who are unconscious or asleep sentient? No. HOWEVER. It is possible to wake someone from sleep back to sentience.
If you wait a bit, a baby will become "sentient," by your bullshit useless definition of the term. How, please, is a baby qualitatively different from somebody who's sleeping?
A foetus has no sentience - it cannot regain what it does not have.
So now you're saying that babies don't become "sentient," whatever that means? If so, I'm confused about how this whole thing works. I thought the argument was that you don't remember being a baby, therefore a baby isn't "sentient." But since you obviously were a baby once, and aren't one now, that would sorta imply that you became "sentient" at some point, wouldn't it?
Unless, of course, this whole discussion is fucking absurd because the term "sentience" has no useful meaning. That's always a possibility, huh?
from an a priori position it is unlikely that foetuses have sentience
I think you're confused about what the phrase "a priori" means. It's not a synonym for "I made it up."
Example: There exists a property that I will call glizzorism. I will not define glizzorism because I'm confident that it's widely understood. I have glizzorism now --I'm glizzorish, if you will --but I wasn't when I was 20 years old. This is logical because there are only two possibilities: That 20-year-olds are glizzorish or that they're not. The simpler assumption is that they're not, therefore they're not. But I am. Ta-da.
See? It's bullshit, every word. If you start with a statement that makes no sense and try to construct some kind of "I'm-oh-so-smart-love-me" walk through the primroses off of it, you end up wasting a whole lot of time on nonsense.
despite many many years of medical science and psychological studies of extremely young foetuses NO evidence has been found to prove its existence.
But you're missing the striking fact that there's absolutely no evidence of your own "sentience" --or glizzorism --either. Not a bit. But to you this is somehow (a) proof of its existence in you as well as (b) proof of its absence in babies, old people, sleeping people...whatever.
This makes it extremely unlikely that foetuses have sentience.
It is extremely unlikely that babies are glizzorish. That's a completely nonsense statement, harmless enough if completely wrong in every way. It only becomes harmful when you start basing policy off of it. Like, for instance, asserting that it's okay to kill babies because they're not glizzorish.
People asleep can be woken up.
And babies can be "woken up" too, through the application of time. But this somehow makes them fundamentally different to you, for reasons that even now you have refused to explain.
Old people may, indeed, be loosing sentience. I dont believe thats a necessary or sufficient reason to kill them, but I have no problem with assisted suicide in such cases.
Aha! Now we're getting to the heart of the matter. So far you think it's okay to kill anyone under the age of two and anybody over an as-yet-unspecified age. Anybody else you think can be killed with impunity? People with brain damage, maybe? People in irreversible comas? Just exactly where are the limits of life, in your opinion?
Who else is it okay to murder?
One's a baby in a womb. Ones an old guy with Parkinsons. Difference found.
Okay, setting aside the fact that you apparently don't know what the phrase "qualitative difference" means, which one of those is it okay to kill, and why? You've already said that it's okay to kill babies, because they're not "sentient," a term that you still haven't defined. And you just said that it's okay to kill people who are "loosing
"Trapped by poverty?" Are you out of your goddamn mind? The way we define poverty, 74% of "poor" households own a VCR! And 64% pay for cable or satellite TV every month. One in four poor households includes a cell phone, and that stat is from 2001; I promise you the figures have climbed dramatically since then.
You talk about "poverty" like it's the brink of death. Poor people in America are growing fat. LITERALLY! They're overweight! They've got access to more calories per day than a person needs to consume in a week to stay healthy. And they've got color TVs and DVD players and Xboxes.
Want to get out of poverty? Stop throwing your money away on entertainment and excess! Save. Go to night school at one of America's one thousand community colleges. Get a degree. All it takes is a little money and an investment of time. Then comes a better job, more money, the opportunity to move to a better neighborhood, and then you can start spending on luxuries like cable TV and video games.
That's how life is, folks. The fact that that's how it is isn't something we need to struggle against. If we, as a society, are failing in any way at all, it's that the elites continue to sit around and make excuses rather than telling poor people that it's time to get off their asses, start managing their money --money which would be a king's ransom in any one of a hundred and fifty countries on this planet --and improving their own lives instead of just waiting for the next government handout.
Rather than looking for pro-active solutions to lowering crime in lower-income neighborhoods, like good education systems, quality health-care, living wages, etc. we continue to see crazy-ass reactive schemes
I guess the fact that we're doing both never occurred?
So you catch a few people shooting guns, so what?
It's not the fact that they're shooting guns that's the problem. It's the fact that they're shooting them at other people that's so troubling.
Only on Slashdot could a misguided piece of crap like this get votes.
The neuter English pronoun is "he." This confuses some people, the same people who tend to be confused by the fact that the second-person-singular and second-person-plural pronouns are the same word: "you."
Yes, he was in intensive care for over a month. However, you are still linking incorrectly linking this as being unhealthy.
So the doctors put him in intensive care because he was fit as a fiddle? The President is right. We need to seriously overhaul health care in this country.
Concider, if I am pushed into a vat of acid, the reason I die is not due to lack of health
Well, apart from the fact that you've been watching too many Snidely Whiplash cartoons -- acid doesn't work that way, my young friend --being drowned would result in a sudden and dramatic change in your health, yes. Damage to your lungs would result, followed quickly by damage to your brain and organs caused by hypoxia. You would, in short, be extremely unhealthy. If you received immediate medical attention --IV fluids, pressurized oxygen, possibly the administration of drugs or electric shot for resuscitation--you might survive, but only after a long and painful recovery. Without treatment, though, your unhealthful state would soon result in your death, I'm sorry to say.
Not unlike a baby that's born too early.
The fact is right now I know I am sentient.
It is your assertion that you are "sentient." There's no way to evaluate whether that assertion is factual or not.
I remember what it was like to be 9, and know I was sentient. I know that I can't remember being a baby, and therefore can't assert that I was sentient.
And we're back to memory again. I can't remember what happened during my car wreck. Is it true or untrue -- is it or is it not "the fact," as you're so fond of saying --that I was sentient during that time? For that matter, I was asleep from about midnight last night to about six this morning; I have no memory of that time at all. Was I sentient during that time?
If the answer is "no," then "sentience" is a pretty useless test for whether it's okay to kill somebody or not, huh? A change to the murder laws making it lawful to kill somebody who's sleeping would be...um...unpopular at best, I think.
And if the answer is "yes," then you can hardly argue that babies are not "sentient" simply because you can't remember being one.
I can't prove that foetuses don't have sentience
But you're using that very assertion as a justification for your position that it's okay to kill them. Isn't that a little ethically dicey, basing a life-or-death decision on a criterion that you yourself admit is untestable? At that point, aren't you just making shit up as you go along?
Same with the existence of God - it takes too much of a stretch of the imagination to believe that he exists but I cannot prove that he does not. So, come one someone, prove it! Ball's in your court.
Um. I don't understand. I haven't the slightest interest in debating the existence of God with you. Is this your twist on the "Chewbacca defense?"
I can program a robot to move towards a food supply (electricity). Is it sentient?
No idea. What does "sentient" mean? And, more importantly, if you wanted to find out, how would you test it?
Look, this is amateur-hour stuff. Let's cut to the end, shall we?
There are two ways to evaluate another thing to find out if it's got the spark of personhood: talk to it or relate to it. You can test for this nonsense term you keep throwing around --"sentience" --by talking to someone, or you can test it by observing someone and deciding "He is like me, and I am 'sentient,' therefore he is too." There are no other ways to test the question.
By that method, we can determine rigorously and with great confidence that people younger than about two, people with brain damage that prevents them from using language, people with organic brain diseases that obliterate the faculties, people suffering from the afflictions of advanced age, and anybody asleep is not sentient.
Um. No. See, you're confused. The people responsible for choosing which sources get scraped by Google News have chosen to include radical leftist agitprop sites, and they have chosen to exclude conservative propaganda sites. So this isn't an instance in which Google shines. This is an instance in which Google should be ashamed of itself for its selectivity.
It's not necessary to know the cause of a baby's sickness to know that the baby's sick. Pardon me, but: Duh.
When he was born he was simply early.
There's nothing simple about it. Healthy babies are born around the 266nd day of pregnancy, plus or minus two weeks. Babies born outside that range are, by definition, not healthy. If a baby is born outside that window, it's not healthy. It's really very simple.
And while I'm at it I'll throw in a straw man for you
Huh? I'm asking you a question to demonstrate that the baby wasn't healthy, as you (bafflingly) continue to assert that he was. Did he require medical treatment, or did the doctors send him home?
Are you saying that this child shouldn't have been treated?
Of course the child should have been treated. All sick babies deserve treatment.
I dont have to prove it.
Well, if you want to use this mythical criterion of "sentience" as your deciding factor, then somebody has to prove it, don't they? You can't do it. Nobody else can do it. So how can you continue to argue that it's a meaningful notion?
I remember being a nine-year-old and I was sentient by any "useful working definition".
Oh, so the test is memory? I was in a car accident when I was about 17. I don't remember anything about it. Was I not sentient during that interval? If somebody had killed me during that time, would it not have been unlawful?
If you can demonstrate conclusively that a foetus is sentient, I'll rethink my position.
Ah, now I get it. Now I understand your position. You establish this imaginary, undefined, untestable criterion, assert that the babies you like meet it and that the babies you don't do not, and then demand that somebody else play by those rules.
Tricky, very tricky. But stupid.
lets define sentience as being...
You made that definition up? What are your qualifications? Why are you qualified to define the term, as opposed to (say) me? Why can't we define it as being "able to qualify for a boat loan?" Why is your definition better than mine?
I'm going to make this as clear as I possibly can: Stop talking about "sentience." There's no such thing, not really; the term has no practically useful definition. And even if it did have a useful definition, it would be empirically untestable, making it useless for drawing the kinds of lines you're trying to draw. Why do you not see that?
If you know that the baby was unhealthy... what was unhealthy about the baby?
Surely the flaw here is obvious even to the most unobservant among us?
It was not unhealthy in any way (he is fitter than I am now), it was just premature.
To be born premature is, by definition, to be unhealthy. Tell me, did this newborn require treatment of any kind? Or did he just go home that same day? Was the hospital's reaction to his birth consistent with the birth of a healthy child?
a 9 year old has achieved sentience
Prove it.
Seriously. I'm not kidding. Prove it. Demonstrate conclusively (1) that "sentience" is a meaningful term with a useful working definition, (2) that a nine-year-old child is imbued with it and (3) that an unborn child is not.
Even by that standard, abortion is not always unethical.
The "but what if the mother is dying" approach is the very first tool in the abortion apologist's toolbox. Here's why it fails. I'm gonna go slow here, because it's tricky. Ready? Here we go:
The fact that an unethical act may be the less objectionable of two unethical alternatives does not magically make that act ethical.
Got it? When the mandate is to do no harm, killing a patient is unethical. Period, end of discussion.
The fact that doctors sometimes have to choose between two unethical options doesn't mean that one or the other option is somehow ethical.
(Incidentally, in all but the very most rare of cases, hyperemesis resolves by week 16. It's virtually never life-threatening to either mother or baby, and in even the worst cases, treatment with fluids is 100% effective. In other words, the only way for your contrived hypothetical to emerge is for the mother to be among an exceedingly rare group -- the incidence is less than five per hundred thousand --and for the mother to deliberately neglect her own health by refusing the standard treatment protocol. Dumb example.)
Slashdot Mirror
This can be done quite easily. (Well, "easily" meaning there are no theoretical challenges.) It's just that you end up investing more energy in the process than you produce though annihilation. See your average particle accelerator for example.
I can't help but notice that you didn't say anything about why, or even whether, he might be wrong.
Speaking of tricks of small minds, crying "logical fallacy" when you just don't feel like writing a rebuttal is about the lamest one I know.
Oh, I hear that. I wish Michael would just go get his own blog and quit pissing in the Slashdot pool. If we could get him out of here, I'm confident that most of the problems that plague this site would vanish.
You mean apart from the fact that "redistribution of wealth" is usually a euphemism for institutionalized larceny, an offense which is rejected out of hand by every legal, ethical and moral tradition we have?
Nothin'. Nothin' at all.
I've been reading estimates in the news of the Iraqi civilian death-toll being over 100,000.
That figure came from a widely discredited Lancet study. A few seconds of googling will yield up all the detail you could ever want, but basically the people who conducted that study used bogus methodology to produce a number with a margin of error of anywhere between about 9,000 and about 200,000, then they split the difference and reported a figure of about 100,000.
The study was complete crap. The instant it hit newsstands, critical reviews began to appear. It was discredited in about a day, but that wasn't until after people like yourself got duped by misleading headlines based on shoddy research.
ICRC says 9,400 to 11,800, Coalition and Iraqi, military and civilian. That does not count foreign fighters, who have no legal standing and of whom thousands have been killed by Coalition forces in recent weeks. I should have mentioned that; sorry.
You deny the rich are getting richer based on percentage of yearly income?
Yup. The Current Population Survey says that real earning for male members of the population has remained unchanged since 2002, and for female members of society the median has actually gone down very slightly as demographics shift. The rich are not getting richer. The earnings figures are pretty stable.
Based on total accumulation?
I don't understand. Are you trying to say that there are some rich people with a big pile of money somewhere in, like, a cave or something? I'd love to hear how you measure that.
Based on percentage of the wealth in this country?
According to the latest figures, the middle class expanded slightly last year because the stock market underperformed. So by percentage of investment assets, no, the rich are not getting any richer. The total wealth held by the rich declined in the 2003-2004 fiscal year.
You deny thousands of people are dead because of the war in Iraq?
That's many thousands fewer than would have been dead if not for the war in Iraq. Saddam was murdering 30,000 people a year on average, and the terrorists about 7,000 more on average. According to ICRC estimates, the total dead in the war in Iraq since March 2003, military and civilian, is between 9,400 and 11,800. So we've saved the lives of over 62,000 people.
Get pissed already.
No, thank you. I prefer to save my uppity indignation for stuff that's actually related in some way to reality. But if you want to keep chanting the same old tired lines without bothering to look at the actual data, that's fine. It's a free country. Knock yourself out.
You mean like a plummeting dollar, a failing economy, a losing war, an unprecedented transfer of money to the wealthiest few, thousands of war deaths, and a dismantling of civil rights and our constitution?
Wow. That would suck. Good thing none of that is happening in my country. If it ever does, I'll be pissed.
Yah, that's all well and good, but the problem is that Windows Web browsers do not know from color management. Because it's not built in to the operating system, see. (No, ColorSync is not just a buzzword for a cross-platform anything. But whatever.)
If you go out and shoot a photo with your digital camera, and you bring it in as a raw file and convert it to an sRGB JPEG (or just let the camera do the conversion, whatever), and then post it to the Web, it's going to look just right on a Mac and like poop on a Windows or Linux computer. Because the browser doesn't know from color management.
Now, if you want to restrict yourself to an incredibly specific set of Windows applications -- no Linux applications, just Windows applications --and all you want to do is scan and print, then yes, technically you can make color management work if you're willing to hold your mouth just right and put up with a few nasty workarounds.
But that's not what I call "identical results, more performance."
Your photo of the police officers has no embedded ICC profile. Of course it looks bad. Once I brought it into Photoshop, set the white and black points and put it into sRGB, it looked fine.
It's kinda funny that you would comment on color management by posting a link to a photo that suffers greatly from the lack of an embedded color profile.
You kinda forgot the point, huh? Macs have ColorSync. Windows doesn't.
The people who fended off the Americans were living here
And I'm fairly certain that they're all long dead. What's your point?
Yeah, I saw how well that works just recently when doing some research for an article (an article which, now, will probably never be published; music piracy is basically dead according to recent stats). If you want to download something, Bittorrent works well. But if you're looking for something particular, you're shit-outta-luck. For example, if you want to get Dire Straits' first album, you're going to come up dry on Bittorrent. But you can get it in three minutes on the iTunes store, and that counts download time.
I have allready stated that I will not answer your further comments.
And yet, you did. This is one of those "irony" things, isn't it?
No, the neuter gender is "it" and always has been.
Fair enough. If you prefer I word it this way, the "gender neutral" third-person pronoun is "he," and always has been.
some folks think it's sexist
Some folks think lots of things. Doesn't make 'em right.
My lack of health is caused by the environment.
...whatever.
Okay, finally. The baby was unhealthy. Can we move on, please?
Are people who are unconscious or asleep sentient? No. HOWEVER. It is possible to wake someone from sleep back to sentience.
If you wait a bit, a baby will become "sentient," by your bullshit useless definition of the term. How, please, is a baby qualitatively different from somebody who's sleeping?
A foetus has no sentience - it cannot regain what it does not have.
So now you're saying that babies don't become "sentient," whatever that means? If so, I'm confused about how this whole thing works. I thought the argument was that you don't remember being a baby, therefore a baby isn't "sentient." But since you obviously were a baby once, and aren't one now, that would sorta imply that you became "sentient" at some point, wouldn't it?
Unless, of course, this whole discussion is fucking absurd because the term "sentience" has no useful meaning. That's always a possibility, huh?
from an a priori position it is unlikely that foetuses have sentience
I think you're confused about what the phrase "a priori" means. It's not a synonym for "I made it up."
Example: There exists a property that I will call glizzorism. I will not define glizzorism because I'm confident that it's widely understood. I have glizzorism now --I'm glizzorish, if you will --but I wasn't when I was 20 years old. This is logical because there are only two possibilities: That 20-year-olds are glizzorish or that they're not. The simpler assumption is that they're not, therefore they're not. But I am. Ta-da.
See? It's bullshit, every word. If you start with a statement that makes no sense and try to construct some kind of "I'm-oh-so-smart-love-me" walk through the primroses off of it, you end up wasting a whole lot of time on nonsense.
despite many many years of medical science and psychological studies of extremely young foetuses NO evidence has been found to prove its existence.
But you're missing the striking fact that there's absolutely no evidence of your own "sentience" --or glizzorism --either. Not a bit. But to you this is somehow (a) proof of its existence in you as well as (b) proof of its absence in babies, old people, sleeping people
This makes it extremely unlikely that foetuses have sentience.
It is extremely unlikely that babies are glizzorish. That's a completely nonsense statement, harmless enough if completely wrong in every way. It only becomes harmful when you start basing policy off of it. Like, for instance, asserting that it's okay to kill babies because they're not glizzorish.
People asleep can be woken up.
And babies can be "woken up" too, through the application of time. But this somehow makes them fundamentally different to you, for reasons that even now you have refused to explain.
Old people may, indeed, be loosing sentience. I dont believe thats a necessary or sufficient reason to kill them, but I have no problem with assisted suicide in such cases.
Aha! Now we're getting to the heart of the matter. So far you think it's okay to kill anyone under the age of two and anybody over an as-yet-unspecified age. Anybody else you think can be killed with impunity? People with brain damage, maybe? People in irreversible comas? Just exactly where are the limits of life, in your opinion?
Who else is it okay to murder?
One's a baby in a womb. Ones an old guy with Parkinsons. Difference found.
Okay, setting aside the fact that you apparently don't know what the phrase "qualitative difference" means, which one of those is it okay to kill, and why? You've already said that it's okay to kill babies, because they're not "sentient," a term that you still haven't defined. And you just said that it's okay to kill people who are "loosing
Um. No. What you cite as "the preferred method" is just plain wrong. The third-person neuter pronoun in English is "he."
"Trapped by poverty?" Are you out of your goddamn mind? The way we define poverty, 74% of "poor" households own a VCR! And 64% pay for cable or satellite TV every month. One in four poor households includes a cell phone, and that stat is from 2001; I promise you the figures have climbed dramatically since then.
You talk about "poverty" like it's the brink of death. Poor people in America are growing fat. LITERALLY! They're overweight! They've got access to more calories per day than a person needs to consume in a week to stay healthy. And they've got color TVs and DVD players and Xboxes.
Want to get out of poverty? Stop throwing your money away on entertainment and excess! Save. Go to night school at one of America's one thousand community colleges. Get a degree. All it takes is a little money and an investment of time. Then comes a better job, more money, the opportunity to move to a better neighborhood, and then you can start spending on luxuries like cable TV and video games.
That's how life is, folks. The fact that that's how it is isn't something we need to struggle against. If we, as a society, are failing in any way at all, it's that the elites continue to sit around and make excuses rather than telling poor people that it's time to get off their asses, start managing their money --money which would be a king's ransom in any one of a hundred and fifty countries on this planet --and improving their own lives instead of just waiting for the next government handout.
Rather than looking for pro-active solutions to lowering crime in lower-income neighborhoods, like good education systems, quality health-care, living wages, etc. we continue to see crazy-ass reactive schemes
I guess the fact that we're doing both never occurred?
So you catch a few people shooting guns, so what?
It's not the fact that they're shooting guns that's the problem. It's the fact that they're shooting them at other people that's so troubling.
Only on Slashdot could a misguided piece of crap like this get votes.
The neuter English pronoun is "he." This confuses some people, the same people who tend to be confused by the fact that the second-person-singular and second-person-plural pronouns are the same word: "you."
If the shooter is still there, she deserves to be caught.
She? What planet do you live on where women commit gun crimes?
Yes, he was in intensive care for over a month. However, you are still linking incorrectly linking this as being unhealthy.
...um...unpopular at best, I think.
So the doctors put him in intensive care because he was fit as a fiddle? The President is right. We need to seriously overhaul health care in this country.
Concider, if I am pushed into a vat of acid, the reason I die is not due to lack of health
Well, apart from the fact that you've been watching too many Snidely Whiplash cartoons -- acid doesn't work that way, my young friend --being drowned would result in a sudden and dramatic change in your health, yes. Damage to your lungs would result, followed quickly by damage to your brain and organs caused by hypoxia. You would, in short, be extremely unhealthy. If you received immediate medical attention --IV fluids, pressurized oxygen, possibly the administration of drugs or electric shot for resuscitation--you might survive, but only after a long and painful recovery. Without treatment, though, your unhealthful state would soon result in your death, I'm sorry to say.
Not unlike a baby that's born too early.
The fact is right now I know I am sentient.
It is your assertion that you are "sentient." There's no way to evaluate whether that assertion is factual or not.
I remember what it was like to be 9, and know I was sentient. I know that I can't remember being a baby, and therefore can't assert that I was sentient.
And we're back to memory again. I can't remember what happened during my car wreck. Is it true or untrue -- is it or is it not "the fact," as you're so fond of saying --that I was sentient during that time? For that matter, I was asleep from about midnight last night to about six this morning; I have no memory of that time at all. Was I sentient during that time?
If the answer is "no," then "sentience" is a pretty useless test for whether it's okay to kill somebody or not, huh? A change to the murder laws making it lawful to kill somebody who's sleeping would be
And if the answer is "yes," then you can hardly argue that babies are not "sentient" simply because you can't remember being one.
I can't prove that foetuses don't have sentience
But you're using that very assertion as a justification for your position that it's okay to kill them. Isn't that a little ethically dicey, basing a life-or-death decision on a criterion that you yourself admit is untestable? At that point, aren't you just making shit up as you go along?
Same with the existence of God - it takes too much of a stretch of the imagination to believe that he exists but I cannot prove that he does not. So, come one someone, prove it! Ball's in your court.
Um. I don't understand. I haven't the slightest interest in debating the existence of God with you. Is this your twist on the "Chewbacca defense?"
I can program a robot to move towards a food supply (electricity). Is it sentient?
No idea. What does "sentient" mean? And, more importantly, if you wanted to find out, how would you test it?
Look, this is amateur-hour stuff. Let's cut to the end, shall we?
There are two ways to evaluate another thing to find out if it's got the spark of personhood: talk to it or relate to it. You can test for this nonsense term you keep throwing around --"sentience" --by talking to someone, or you can test it by observing someone and deciding "He is like me, and I am 'sentient,' therefore he is too." There are no other ways to test the question.
By that method, we can determine rigorously and with great confidence that people younger than about two, people with brain damage that prevents them from using language, people with organic brain diseases that obliterate the faculties, people suffering from the afflictions of advanced age, and anybody asleep is not sentient.
This lead
Um. No. See, you're confused. The people responsible for choosing which sources get scraped by Google News have chosen to include radical leftist agitprop sites, and they have chosen to exclude conservative propaganda sites. So this isn't an instance in which Google shines. This is an instance in which Google should be ashamed of itself for its selectivity.
I'm unobservant - whats the flaw?
...
It's not necessary to know the cause of a baby's sickness to know that the baby's sick. Pardon me, but: Duh.
When he was born he was simply early.
There's nothing simple about it. Healthy babies are born around the 266nd day of pregnancy, plus or minus two weeks. Babies born outside that range are, by definition, not healthy. If a baby is born outside that window, it's not healthy. It's really very simple.
And while I'm at it I'll throw in a straw man for you
Huh? I'm asking you a question to demonstrate that the baby wasn't healthy, as you (bafflingly) continue to assert that he was. Did he require medical treatment, or did the doctors send him home?
Are you saying that this child shouldn't have been treated?
Of course the child should have been treated. All sick babies deserve treatment.
I dont have to prove it.
Well, if you want to use this mythical criterion of "sentience" as your deciding factor, then somebody has to prove it, don't they? You can't do it. Nobody else can do it. So how can you continue to argue that it's a meaningful notion?
I remember being a nine-year-old and I was sentient by any "useful working definition".
Oh, so the test is memory? I was in a car accident when I was about 17. I don't remember anything about it. Was I not sentient during that interval? If somebody had killed me during that time, would it not have been unlawful?
If you can demonstrate conclusively that a foetus is sentient, I'll rethink my position.
Ah, now I get it. Now I understand your position. You establish this imaginary, undefined, untestable criterion, assert that the babies you like meet it and that the babies you don't do not, and then demand that somebody else play by those rules.
Tricky, very tricky. But stupid.
lets define sentience as being
You made that definition up? What are your qualifications? Why are you qualified to define the term, as opposed to (say) me? Why can't we define it as being "able to qualify for a boat loan?" Why is your definition better than mine?
I'm going to make this as clear as I possibly can: Stop talking about "sentience." There's no such thing, not really; the term has no practically useful definition. And even if it did have a useful definition, it would be empirically untestable, making it useless for drawing the kinds of lines you're trying to draw. Why do you not see that?
If you know that the baby was unhealthy ... what was unhealthy about the baby?
Surely the flaw here is obvious even to the most unobservant among us?
It was not unhealthy in any way (he is fitter than I am now), it was just premature.
To be born premature is, by definition, to be unhealthy. Tell me, did this newborn require treatment of any kind? Or did he just go home that same day? Was the hospital's reaction to his birth consistent with the birth of a healthy child?
a 9 year old has achieved sentience
Prove it.
Seriously. I'm not kidding. Prove it. Demonstrate conclusively (1) that "sentience" is a meaningful term with a useful working definition, (2) that a nine-year-old child is imbued with it and (3) that an unborn child is not.
Even by that standard, abortion is not always unethical.
The "but what if the mother is dying" approach is the very first tool in the abortion apologist's toolbox. Here's why it fails. I'm gonna go slow here, because it's tricky. Ready? Here we go:
The fact that an unethical act may be the less objectionable of two unethical alternatives does not magically make that act ethical.
Got it? When the mandate is to do no harm, killing a patient is unethical. Period, end of discussion.
The fact that doctors sometimes have to choose between two unethical options doesn't mean that one or the other option is somehow ethical.
(Incidentally, in all but the very most rare of cases, hyperemesis resolves by week 16. It's virtually never life-threatening to either mother or baby, and in even the worst cases, treatment with fluids is 100% effective. In other words, the only way for your contrived hypothetical to emerge is for the mother to be among an exceedingly rare group -- the incidence is less than five per hundred thousand --and for the mother to deliberately neglect her own health by refusing the standard treatment protocol. Dumb example.)