Re:Lawyer? All you need is 12 people dumb enough..
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You Are Not a Lawyer
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There is a simple solution for this -- try to determine if he killed Nina, not if he is lying or not.
If he is accused of murder and he says he's innocent, then trying to determine whether or not he's lying is perfectly germane. If the DA says that X is circumstantial evidence of his guilt, and Reiser offers an innocent explanation, then judging whether or not he's lying is perfectly germane.
The evidence would not be sufficient to convict him if the jury was not hostile toward him -- and that hostility had nothing to do with the crime.
This is your speculation, unless you were on the jury. I don't feel particular hostility to Reiser, and all the evidence I heard of convinced me he was guilty of the crime he was accused of.
He appeared to be frustrated and illogical. Neither is an evidence of a murder.
He appeared to be telling lies when explaining guilty-looking acts, and that is circumstantial evidence of guilt. You make it sound like the jury saw a confused, stressed out geek and felt hostile to him because of that. In reality, they simply didn't believe his explanations, and concluded from his lies that he was covering up a murder. Which he was.
Unless I misread, your general intent seems to be "don't research, don't make your own choices, listen to what I say is right (so that I'll be safe), public health decisions are always best for every individual, etc.".
No, my intent is to not elevate my own opinion and research over that of the medical community just because it's mine. Earlier you asked about what I would consider legitimate medical reasons not to get vaccinated. My answer is that I don't know, I'm not a doctor. I'm a thoughtful, smart, well-read person who recognizes that there are practical limits to my ability to fully understand some issues without becoming the experts on whom I ultimately rely anyway.
You're acting like it's simply a matter of 'make an informed choice'. You're ignoring the anti-vaccine community's propagation of misinformation, the way they swap anecdotes of autistic children and misrepresented research. You're ignoring the near unanimity of the medical community that there is no link in favor of a perversely wrong grassroots community of self-appointed experts whose ultimate legacy is widespread outbreaks of preventable diseases. You're ignoring that keeping alive questions that have already been answered creates the false appearance of a controversy. We don't buy it when we're talking about teaching the 'controversy over creationism' in schools, so why is the fake controversy over vaccines a sacred cow?
Let me ask you a direct question: Now that it's pretty much completely settled scientifically that there's no link between Thimerosal in vaccines and autism, what responsibility does Dr. Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy and other boosters of the anti-vaccine movement bear for the very real suffering they caused among children whose parents didn't vaccinate them because they thought that there were real concerns about the vaccine?
Just to check, are you actually saying that given the choice between a vaccine from manufacturer A that has mercury and aluminum in it, and B that didn't have either but was just as effective, you'd not care? Why do you rile so, when someone else wants to choose B?
It's not that someone else wants to choose B, it's that B is 'no vaccine at all' and hope that an outbreak doesn't occur because too many people chose B.
But to answer your question directly, I would look at whether or not the mercury and aluminum vaccine had been demonstrated to be harmful or not in that form. This is one of those facts that the anti-vaccine crowd glosses over, that the mercury in Thimerosal is in a chemically unreactive form that delivers a smaller dose than is in a 6oz. can of Tuna. If the mercury and aluminum vaccine had a long history of being safely used, and the only apparent problem was a spurious link to autism that had been debunked, I probably wouldn't care.
Will you feel righteous by not asking those questions?
You're committing the same sin here that you accuse me and others of committing against you, to view your argument as a one side of a black and white dichotomy of unstinting loyalty to scientific consensus versus a total refusal to vaccinate. Of course I'll inform myself, and ask questions, but at the end of the day I'll recognize that I'm ultimately dependent upon the best efforts of the medical and scientific community to help me and mine rather than hurt us. My responsibility for possibly making a mistake that hurts my child doesn't make me smarter or better educated than the doctor who might administer the mistake. Life isn't fair, but irrational, cargo-cult home medicine decisions don't improve it. In this case, they make it worse.
At bottom, you're making a very reasonable sounding case for a conspiracy theory that has been exhaustively demonstrated to be false and fraudulent at its root, and then saying "since we can't know for certain, people should be allowed to make the choice themselves." Except that leaving it to individual choice leads to public health risks with potentially severe consequences that are very real.
There's no propaganda machine making people hate you. There's a lot of concerned citizens who recognize that you're making the wrong choice because you're receiving (and fostering) bad information, and less tolerance for your idiosyncratic beliefs because it leads to material risk for everyone else. Why should I respect your choices when they're demonstrably wrong and harmful to me?
Best to learn about vaccines, what and why they are given, decide what risks exist, make your own judgments that best reduce the overall risk to your child
This in particular is the most pernicious part of your response. It gets at the heart of the collective action problem that is vaccination: It might seem individually best to avoid the risk, but if too many individuals make that choice, it actually increases the risk for every individual. It's NIMBYism on the level of the bloodstream that endangers everyone. Worse still, people are taking it upon themselves to make judgements that they are unqualified to make--that's why the bad science and worse anecdotal evidence takes root on vaccine denier message boards, leading to people making the wrong choice.
Let's do a little thought experiment here, one that's commonly offered in classes on moral philosophy. It's called "The Baby Crushing Machine." It's a hydraulic press into which a baby has been placed. You're standing in front of the machine. Two scenarios:
1. You press the button to start the machine. The press crushes the baby.
2. The machine is started when you arrive. You can press the button to stop the press, but you don't. The press crushes the baby.
Assume there are no other relevant details.
Now, obviously the difference here is that in (1), you're the active cause of the baby's death, while in (2), your inaction allows the baby to die. In which scenario are you more morally culpable for the death of the baby, if there's a difference, and why?
Wrong. Vaccinations do not confer perfect immunity, only a (usually) high degree of immunity or resistance. Not to mention that a pool of unvaccinated carriers or sufferers can lead to mutations of the disease that my kid's vaccinations can't handle.
1) Should the courts (or any authoritative body) decide what is scientific fact for everyone and allow no dissension or discussion?
The courts did not decide scientific fact. The courts surveyed the scientific/medical establishment to see what their belief was in light of much evidence and many direct studies; the medical/scientific establishment reported that, scientifically, there was zero link between vaccines and autism, and this after studying it extensively over the last decade. The court said "Okay, you know best" and then ruled on a case where the parents of an autistic child were trying to recover monetary damages from the vaccine fund.
When you start to research what is fact/fiction about vaccines you run into the term "herd protection". The premiss being, that the vaccination might not be anything you need, but it's given to you to protect someone else.
No. "Herd immunity" is an additional benefit to widespread vaccination, where the percentage of people in a given group that are vaccinated is equated to an additional level of protection against the disease because the vaccinated individual is less likely to be exposed to the disease in the first place. Vaccines offer a very high degree of resistence to a disease, not perfect immunity; reducing the odds of exposure is a worthwhile goal too, and protects those who don't get vaccinated for legitimate medical reasons. And there's a larger issue too, which is that your decision to not vaccinate your children materially affects my child, sitting in the desk next to him at school, because you increase my child's exposure to crippling and potentially deadly diseases.
There are a lot of "non-vaccine" things in the shot. There is still mercury in some vaccines (aka, Thiomersal), aluminum, etc., that are known toxins (heavy metals) that growing babies are especially sensitive to.
Thimerisol hasn't been in vaccines for 8 years, during which time the rate of diagnoses of autism actually increased; if there was a causal link between Thimerisol and autism, you would expect the rate to decrease. As for aluminum and other metals, there have been no demonstrated links between their presence and any adverse effects of vaccines, and this is after a decade of heavy scrutiny looking for links.
If your child isn't going to be sexually active or an IV drug user in the first 1-6+ years of life, does it really make sense to give HepB shot at birth just because "there are people that might not ever see a doctor again"?
If your child is receiving a battery of vaccines that will help him, what's wrong with adding one more when it's been thoroughly demonstrated that the vaccines do not cause autism? Besides, there are other ways to catch Hep B than needles or sex.
Are you claiming that since one component *might* not be linked, then nothing else in the shot is, and thus the vaccine is 100% safe? What about the Aluminum?
I'm claiming that all the scientific evidence is against any link between autism and any of the components of the MMR vaccine--that is, all the scientific evidence that doesn't come from a doctor in the pay of a group of lawyers looking for a pretext to sue the pharmaceutical companies, which is later demonstrated to be fraudulent.
I'm sympathetic to frustrated parents who want to know why their child is autistic, and who hang on to a possible explanation long past its disproven-by date. That doesn't change the science.
Easier for the baby? Perhaps you intended to say "Easier for the adults to give them all in one go"?
Yes, it is in fact easier for the baby. Vaccinations are generally trivial things, and there's no reason to vaccinate children for the adult's convenience. It's medically better to give children vaccinations than it is adults whether they're substantially at risk or not.
The medical tests showed a variant of TB that required quarantine. The fact that more conclusive tests changed that diagnosis to a non-quarantine version of TB doesn't make the quarantine tyrannical, it makes it a reasonable precaution based on the evidence.
Then the cops show up to seize your children. If you resist, they'll use force. If that use of force results in your death, then you will not have been killed for refusing to vaccinate your children, you will have been killed for resisting lawful authority. It will be regrettable, but it will be your own responsibility, same as if refusing to pay your taxes led to you holing up in your bunker, which led to a shootout with police, which resulted in your death.
I won't kill you. But I'll happily vote for legislation saying that your children will be administered vaccinations over your wishes, just as the gov't should seize the children of Christian Scientists who refuse blood transfusions for their children.
If my kid ends up blind because you didn't vaccinate your kid on horseshit pseudo-scientific grounds, do you think I'll give a shit about the active/passive distinction in moral philosophy?
FYI, if you want to look at the ethics of the situation, you also need to read up on 'collective action problems'.
The court appointed special masters looked at the medical and scientific evidence to make their ruling. It was the absence of scientific evidence of a link that caused them to rule. RTFA.
Whether it is caused by the vaccine is solely to be determined trough researching the subject.
And that's exactly what happened here. The court, recognizing it had no ability to pronounce on a scientific matter, appointed special masters to review the scientific evidence and pronounce on what the best scientific conclusion was, which they did. The court then said, "okay, according to the special masters, there's no link. Case dismissed."
But don't let me get in the way of your high dudgeon over the idea that something might happen in a court that's good and right.
Thimerisol was phased out of vaccines in 1999 and 2000. The rate of autism diagnoses has continued to rise long past the time when Thimerisol could have been causative if it were.
I'm sorry to hear about your son, but the link between thimerosal and autism has been rigorously, repeatedly demonstrated not to exist, most obviously by the fact that autism diagnosis rates continued to rise long after thimerosal/mercury were no longer used to make vaccines.
You vaccinate babies for diseases like Hep B because for the most part, it's easier for the baby to get a battery of vaccinations out of the way early on. The vaccine takes more easily and effectively in a developing immune system.
Re:Lawyer? All you need is 12 people dumb enough..
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You Are Not a Lawyer
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· Score: 1
You've created a double bind for the jury: They can't decide that he's lying until they decide that he killed Nina; if they can't decide his statements are lies, then they must accept his claims at face value; if they accept his claims at face value, they can't decide that he killed Nina. Therefore, all he has to do is claim he didn't kill Nina by claiming he couldn't, and no jury could convict him without a videotape of him strangling her.
In reality, the circumstantial case against him was strong, and he appeared to be lying in disputing the facts of that circumstantial case. I would have voted to convict, and I'm far, far from a law-and-order, hang-em-all type.
You didn't answer my question: given that the evidence that the MMR vaccine causes autism has been shown to be fraudulent, why shouldn't I require that you vaccinate your children to avoid exposing mine to disease?
To put it another way, does your right to choose include the right to make bad choices that put my children at greater risk than your children are risking by getting the vaccine?
Almost all vaccines do work as advertised. The autism scare to do with the MMR vaccine has been shown repeatedly over the last decade to be completely without evidence. In that case, why shouldn't I force the vaccine down your throat, knowing that your refusal to immunize your kids puts mine at risk?
Andrew Speaker is a lawyer who chose to fly from Europe to the U.S. with a diagnosed case of tuberculosis of which he was fully aware, without informing anyone and without taking any precautions to prevent transmitting the disease. He was forcibly quarantined on his return to the U.S., having demonstrated that he wouldn't abide by the health restrictions placed on him. Was that tyranny?
Your right to throw your fist ends at the tip of my nose. When your decisions have a demonstrable on me, then your decision becomes a public matter that may, under the right circumstances, justifiably lead to you being compelled to do something.
It's also worth noting that those opting out of the MMR vaccine are usually doing so from fraudulent science exacerbated by poor media coverage. Should your right to choose override my right to have my child avoid the measles, when your choice is ill-informed?
Syncing the EC to the popular vote means that candidates can concentrate their campaigning in higher density population areas, most of all large urban centers, where every campaign dollar goes further. Since urban centers trend Democratic due to the concentration of the poor, university students and the communities that surround them, ethnic minorities, and a large number of limousine liberals, this is effectively a gift of a couple percentage points to the Democrats.
Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not--it does seem irritating that a couple ranchers in Wyoming have equivalent voting heft to a thousand well-meaning twentysomethings in New York. But overall, remember that the Obama campaign won because it played the electoral system like a fiddle. They figured out exactly what they had to win, and where, to put them over the top at every point. The net result of this effort succeeding will be to shift campaign focus towards the cities, away from the rural areas.
Although that would mean that Palin-esque "you're the real Americans" speeches in small towns would become far less effective, so maybe it's a good thing:)
Re:Lawyer? All you need is 12 people dumb enough..
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You Are Not a Lawyer
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Howso illogical? When someone is charged with murder, and they tell gross lies in trying to explain away the evidence, isn't the most logical conclusion that they're covering something up, that the real explanation is being hidden? And in the case of a murder trial, what's more worth hiding than the fact that one committed murder?
Put another way, it's difficult to imagine what's worth covering up when the cost of covering it up is being found guilty of a murder you didn't commit.
Re:Lawyer? All you need is 12 people dumb enough..
on
You Are Not a Lawyer
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· Score: 1
Hans Reiser was convicted because he got up on the stand and told obvious lies to the jury, who (correctly) reasoned that one doesn't lie in a murder case unless one's covering up a murder. If he hadn't taken the stand, he might've gotten off. Regardless, there was plenty of evidence to convict him, as many people realized who weren't invested in the idea that there's no difference between logical and reasonable doubt.
No criticism of a process is valid if the process itself is misunderstood, as many geeks do when the subject is the law. Thus, the OP.
Your right to freedom of speech gives you the right to defame/libel me without government interference. It does not give you the right to defame/libel me without consequences in civil trial. The government can't censor you, but I can still sue you, without the constitution ever being involved.
Reiser is an excellent example of someone who should have had this explained to them. He thought he could get up on the stand and wave away a mountain of circumstantial evidence with implausible arguments that created (un)reasonable doubts.
"I removed the passenger seat so I could sleep in my car, not because it was covered in my wife's blood."
"But Mr. Reiser, after removing the seat, there's still a metal bar three inches off the floor that crosses the space. Are you telling us that you slept on that?"
"... Yes. Yes, I am."
"In a pool of water an inch deep?"
"I didn't say it was comfortable."
"Why was there water in the car?"
"I hosed out the interior."
"Why?"
"It was dirty after removing the passenger seat so I could sleep there."
Slashdot Mirror
If he is accused of murder and he says he's innocent, then trying to determine whether or not he's lying is perfectly germane. If the DA says that X is circumstantial evidence of his guilt, and Reiser offers an innocent explanation, then judging whether or not he's lying is perfectly germane.
This is your speculation, unless you were on the jury. I don't feel particular hostility to Reiser, and all the evidence I heard of convinced me he was guilty of the crime he was accused of.
He appeared to be telling lies when explaining guilty-looking acts, and that is circumstantial evidence of guilt. You make it sound like the jury saw a confused, stressed out geek and felt hostile to him because of that. In reality, they simply didn't believe his explanations, and concluded from his lies that he was covering up a murder. Which he was.
Poison your own well, not mine.
No, my intent is to not elevate my own opinion and research over that of the medical community just because it's mine. Earlier you asked about what I would consider legitimate medical reasons not to get vaccinated. My answer is that I don't know, I'm not a doctor. I'm a thoughtful, smart, well-read person who recognizes that there are practical limits to my ability to fully understand some issues without becoming the experts on whom I ultimately rely anyway.
You're acting like it's simply a matter of 'make an informed choice'. You're ignoring the anti-vaccine community's propagation of misinformation, the way they swap anecdotes of autistic children and misrepresented research. You're ignoring the near unanimity of the medical community that there is no link in favor of a perversely wrong grassroots community of self-appointed experts whose ultimate legacy is widespread outbreaks of preventable diseases. You're ignoring that keeping alive questions that have already been answered creates the false appearance of a controversy. We don't buy it when we're talking about teaching the 'controversy over creationism' in schools, so why is the fake controversy over vaccines a sacred cow?
Let me ask you a direct question: Now that it's pretty much completely settled scientifically that there's no link between Thimerosal in vaccines and autism, what responsibility does Dr. Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy and other boosters of the anti-vaccine movement bear for the very real suffering they caused among children whose parents didn't vaccinate them because they thought that there were real concerns about the vaccine?
It's not that someone else wants to choose B, it's that B is 'no vaccine at all' and hope that an outbreak doesn't occur because too many people chose B.
But to answer your question directly, I would look at whether or not the mercury and aluminum vaccine had been demonstrated to be harmful or not in that form. This is one of those facts that the anti-vaccine crowd glosses over, that the mercury in Thimerosal is in a chemically unreactive form that delivers a smaller dose than is in a 6oz. can of Tuna. If the mercury and aluminum vaccine had a long history of being safely used, and the only apparent problem was a spurious link to autism that had been debunked, I probably wouldn't care.
You're committing the same sin here that you accuse me and others of committing against you, to view your argument as a one side of a black and white dichotomy of unstinting loyalty to scientific consensus versus a total refusal to vaccinate. Of course I'll inform myself, and ask questions, but at the end of the day I'll recognize that I'm ultimately dependent upon the best efforts of the medical and scientific community to help me and mine rather than hurt us. My responsibility for possibly making a mistake that hurts my child doesn't make me smarter or better educated than the doctor who might administer the mistake. Life isn't fair, but irrational, cargo-cult home medicine decisions don't improve it. In this case, they make it worse.
At bottom, you're making a very reasonable sounding case for a conspiracy theory that has been exhaustively demonstrated to be false and fraudulent at its root, and then saying "since we can't know for certain, people should be allowed to make the choice themselves." Except that leaving it to individual choice leads to public health risks with potentially severe consequences that are very real.
There's no propaganda machine making people hate you. There's a lot of concerned citizens who recognize that you're making the wrong choice because you're receiving (and fostering) bad information, and less tolerance for your idiosyncratic beliefs because it leads to material risk for everyone else. Why should I respect your choices when they're demonstrably wrong and harmful to me?
This in particular is the most pernicious part of your response. It gets at the heart of the collective action problem that is vaccination: It might seem individually best to avoid the risk, but if too many individuals make that choice, it actually increases the risk for every individual. It's NIMBYism on the level of the bloodstream that endangers everyone. Worse still, people are taking it upon themselves to make judgements that they are unqualified to make--that's why the bad science and worse anecdotal evidence takes root on vaccine denier message boards, leading to people making the wrong choice.
Let's do a little thought experiment here, one that's commonly offered in classes on moral philosophy. It's called "The Baby Crushing Machine." It's a hydraulic press into which a baby has been placed. You're standing in front of the machine. Two scenarios:
1. You press the button to start the machine. The press crushes the baby.
2. The machine is started when you arrive. You can press the button to stop the press, but you don't. The press crushes the baby.
Assume there are no other relevant details.
Now, obviously the difference here is that in (1), you're the active cause of the baby's death, while in (2), your inaction allows the baby to die. In which scenario are you more morally culpable for the death of the baby, if there's a difference, and why?
Wrong. Vaccinations do not confer perfect immunity, only a (usually) high degree of immunity or resistance. Not to mention that a pool of unvaccinated carriers or sufferers can lead to mutations of the disease that my kid's vaccinations can't handle.
There's a lot of fail in the parent.
The courts did not decide scientific fact. The courts surveyed the scientific/medical establishment to see what their belief was in light of much evidence and many direct studies; the medical/scientific establishment reported that, scientifically, there was zero link between vaccines and autism, and this after studying it extensively over the last decade. The court said "Okay, you know best" and then ruled on a case where the parents of an autistic child were trying to recover monetary damages from the vaccine fund.
No. "Herd immunity" is an additional benefit to widespread vaccination, where the percentage of people in a given group that are vaccinated is equated to an additional level of protection against the disease because the vaccinated individual is less likely to be exposed to the disease in the first place. Vaccines offer a very high degree of resistence to a disease, not perfect immunity; reducing the odds of exposure is a worthwhile goal too, and protects those who don't get vaccinated for legitimate medical reasons. And there's a larger issue too, which is that your decision to not vaccinate your children materially affects my child, sitting in the desk next to him at school, because you increase my child's exposure to crippling and potentially deadly diseases.
Thimerisol hasn't been in vaccines for 8 years, during which time the rate of diagnoses of autism actually increased; if there was a causal link between Thimerisol and autism, you would expect the rate to decrease. As for aluminum and other metals, there have been no demonstrated links between their presence and any adverse effects of vaccines, and this is after a decade of heavy scrutiny looking for links.
If your child is receiving a battery of vaccines that will help him, what's wrong with adding one more when it's been thoroughly demonstrated that the vaccines do not cause autism? Besides, there are other ways to catch Hep B than needles or sex.
I'm claiming that all the scientific evidence is against any link between autism and any of the components of the MMR vaccine--that is, all the scientific evidence that doesn't come from a doctor in the pay of a group of lawyers looking for a pretext to sue the pharmaceutical companies, which is later demonstrated to be fraudulent.
I'm sympathetic to frustrated parents who want to know why their child is autistic, and who hang on to a possible explanation long past its disproven-by date. That doesn't change the science.
Yes, it is in fact easier for the baby. Vaccinations are generally trivial things, and there's no reason to vaccinate children for the adult's convenience. It's medically better to give children vaccinations than it is adults whether they're substantially at risk or not.
The medical tests showed a variant of TB that required quarantine. The fact that more conclusive tests changed that diagnosis to a non-quarantine version of TB doesn't make the quarantine tyrannical, it makes it a reasonable precaution based on the evidence.
Then the cops show up to seize your children. If you resist, they'll use force. If that use of force results in your death, then you will not have been killed for refusing to vaccinate your children, you will have been killed for resisting lawful authority. It will be regrettable, but it will be your own responsibility, same as if refusing to pay your taxes led to you holing up in your bunker, which led to a shootout with police, which resulted in your death.
I won't kill you. But I'll happily vote for legislation saying that your children will be administered vaccinations over your wishes, just as the gov't should seize the children of Christian Scientists who refuse blood transfusions for their children.
If my kid ends up blind because you didn't vaccinate your kid on horseshit pseudo-scientific grounds, do you think I'll give a shit about the active/passive distinction in moral philosophy?
FYI, if you want to look at the ethics of the situation, you also need to read up on 'collective action problems'.
The court appointed special masters looked at the medical and scientific evidence to make their ruling. It was the absence of scientific evidence of a link that caused them to rule. RTFA.
And that's exactly what happened here. The court, recognizing it had no ability to pronounce on a scientific matter, appointed special masters to review the scientific evidence and pronounce on what the best scientific conclusion was, which they did. The court then said, "okay, according to the special masters, there's no link. Case dismissed."
But don't let me get in the way of your high dudgeon over the idea that something might happen in a court that's good and right.
Thimerisol was phased out of vaccines in 1999 and 2000. The rate of autism diagnoses has continued to rise long past the time when Thimerisol could have been causative if it were.
I'm sorry to hear about your son, but the link between thimerosal and autism has been rigorously, repeatedly demonstrated not to exist, most obviously by the fact that autism diagnosis rates continued to rise long after thimerosal/mercury were no longer used to make vaccines.
You vaccinate babies for diseases like Hep B because for the most part, it's easier for the baby to get a battery of vaccinations out of the way early on. The vaccine takes more easily and effectively in a developing immune system.
You've created a double bind for the jury: They can't decide that he's lying until they decide that he killed Nina; if they can't decide his statements are lies, then they must accept his claims at face value; if they accept his claims at face value, they can't decide that he killed Nina. Therefore, all he has to do is claim he didn't kill Nina by claiming he couldn't, and no jury could convict him without a videotape of him strangling her.
In reality, the circumstantial case against him was strong, and he appeared to be lying in disputing the facts of that circumstantial case. I would have voted to convict, and I'm far, far from a law-and-order, hang-em-all type.
You didn't answer my question: given that the evidence that the MMR vaccine causes autism has been shown to be fraudulent, why shouldn't I require that you vaccinate your children to avoid exposing mine to disease?
To put it another way, does your right to choose include the right to make bad choices that put my children at greater risk than your children are risking by getting the vaccine?
Almost all vaccines do work as advertised. The autism scare to do with the MMR vaccine has been shown repeatedly over the last decade to be completely without evidence. In that case, why shouldn't I force the vaccine down your throat, knowing that your refusal to immunize your kids puts mine at risk?
Andrew Speaker is a lawyer who chose to fly from Europe to the U.S. with a diagnosed case of tuberculosis of which he was fully aware, without informing anyone and without taking any precautions to prevent transmitting the disease. He was forcibly quarantined on his return to the U.S., having demonstrated that he wouldn't abide by the health restrictions placed on him. Was that tyranny?
Your right to throw your fist ends at the tip of my nose. When your decisions have a demonstrable on me, then your decision becomes a public matter that may, under the right circumstances, justifiably lead to you being compelled to do something.
It's also worth noting that those opting out of the MMR vaccine are usually doing so from fraudulent science exacerbated by poor media coverage. Should your right to choose override my right to have my child avoid the measles, when your choice is ill-informed?
Syncing the EC to the popular vote means that candidates can concentrate their campaigning in higher density population areas, most of all large urban centers, where every campaign dollar goes further. Since urban centers trend Democratic due to the concentration of the poor, university students and the communities that surround them, ethnic minorities, and a large number of limousine liberals, this is effectively a gift of a couple percentage points to the Democrats.
Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not--it does seem irritating that a couple ranchers in Wyoming have equivalent voting heft to a thousand well-meaning twentysomethings in New York. But overall, remember that the Obama campaign won because it played the electoral system like a fiddle. They figured out exactly what they had to win, and where, to put them over the top at every point. The net result of this effort succeeding will be to shift campaign focus towards the cities, away from the rural areas.
Although that would mean that Palin-esque "you're the real Americans" speeches in small towns would become far less effective, so maybe it's a good thing :)
Howso illogical? When someone is charged with murder, and they tell gross lies in trying to explain away the evidence, isn't the most logical conclusion that they're covering something up, that the real explanation is being hidden? And in the case of a murder trial, what's more worth hiding than the fact that one committed murder?
Put another way, it's difficult to imagine what's worth covering up when the cost of covering it up is being found guilty of a murder you didn't commit.
Hans Reiser was convicted because he got up on the stand and told obvious lies to the jury, who (correctly) reasoned that one doesn't lie in a murder case unless one's covering up a murder. If he hadn't taken the stand, he might've gotten off. Regardless, there was plenty of evidence to convict him, as many people realized who weren't invested in the idea that there's no difference between logical and reasonable doubt.
No criticism of a process is valid if the process itself is misunderstood, as many geeks do when the subject is the law. Thus, the OP.
Your right to freedom of speech gives you the right to defame/libel me without government interference. It does not give you the right to defame/libel me without consequences in civil trial. The government can't censor you, but I can still sue you, without the constitution ever being involved.
Reiser is an excellent example of someone who should have had this explained to them. He thought he could get up on the stand and wave away a mountain of circumstantial evidence with implausible arguments that created (un)reasonable doubts.
"I removed the passenger seat so I could sleep in my car, not because it was covered in my wife's blood."
"But Mr. Reiser, after removing the seat, there's still a metal bar three inches off the floor that crosses the space. Are you telling us that you slept on that?"
"... Yes. Yes, I am."
"In a pool of water an inch deep?"
"I didn't say it was comfortable."
"Why was there water in the car?"
"I hosed out the interior."
"Why?"
"It was dirty after removing the passenger seat so I could sleep there."