I'm an old country boy. I most certainly have. Hell, one of my relatives is a long time pig farmer that has moved to large scale industrial pig farming. The newer ones are far better than the old ones. And certainly have far less stink and just plain disgusting conditions. Of course, there have been all sorts of stupid protests from morons over some of the newer facilities, one new facility going in around here drew out all sorts of kooks, from anti-genetic engineering nuts who bitched that genetically engineered skin from pigs would come off into dust and make people sick with the nasty franken-DNA to the people who complained that it would smell too much...even though there are 3 other facilities by the same farmer not too far away that don't, and other facilities by other farmers that also have no such oder problems.
How 'bout a slaughterhouse? It's pretty fucked!
I have been to a small slaughterhouse yes. What's more I have killed, butchered, and eaten what I've killed myself. What can I say, I'm a country boy. If you can't handle what it takes to eat meat, you shouldn't be a meat eater.
I have never in my life gotten any disease from eating pork. And I eat plenty of pork. Maybe because, you know, it's not pork that roams filthy streets eating garbage that I eat, but pork grown in what's basically a giant, clean pork factory that I eat.
Interaction is not necessary to learn. Information is. But it doesn't need to be interactive.
Information without context is just noise, not useful data.
Muffled sounds, sure. But not a complete absence of sound. Not a complete absence of feeling. A baby can feel it's own hands, arms, body etc. while it's in the womb. It can be learning about itself in that time. Or you think that babies are deaf and have no sense of touch while in the womb?
Depends on when. If the fetus is just at the point of "clump of cells" then yes. If it's at the point where theres's nothing in there but purely autonomic functions and the sensory organs haven't even fully developed yet...let alone the basic neural connections for them...then again yes. At these points the fetus is not going to be learning squat. And at later points, where the systems for higher thought are at least there if not actually working....you have to have context to get anything meaningful out of the information. And at that point it's about to pop out anyway. Your argument has been that it's wrong from the moment sperm meets egg...but that little clump of cells has nothing that can be argued to be a person.
The natural purpose for sex is reproduction. If you're not having sex for reproduction, you'd better take precautions before jumping into the sack. Don't drink and drive if you don't want an accident and don't fuck around carelessly if you don't want an "accident". You should be responsible with your pecker (or substitute with your proper genitals). What the fuck do they teach you in sexual education classes? Don't you know that BABIES come from there?
Ah but thanks to people like you "Sex Education" these days in quite a lot of places in the US consists of a lesson of "don't have sex", and that's it. Nothing about prevention of pregency, nothing about respon sability, nothing about options, just adults screaming "don't do that" at kids. At the same time there's been a push to make contraceptives more difficult to get, again, by the people with the same politics as the anti-abortion people. There seems to be a strong political block of people that seem obsessed with denying people their reproductive and sexual rights.
I'm simply against you making it the CHILD's pain because YOU fucked up. Take responsibility for your mistakes instead of murdering an innocent child over it. Because it's not justifiable to cause the child pain for your fucking mistake.
Show me where a clump of non-thinking cells have more rights than the person carrying them around. Show me why that person must be forced, at gunpoint (government power), to carry those clumps of cells around until a little human pops out. Every human being has a right to live....they do not have the right to live at the expense of others rights. If a dying man needs my kidney to live, and I refuse to give it up....that makes me an asshole, but not guilty of murder. Nor would that give the government the right to break into my home, drug me, and cut out my kidney to save that man...even though I don't need it to live, and he does.
Same deal...if that fetus does have a right to live....it doesn't have that right at the expense of the rights of the woman. She can rufuse to use her body to support it's life, even if that results in the death of the fetus. Ownership of oneself is ultimately the basis for rights. I own me and my body, just as a woman owns hers. Nobody else does. Any rights a fetus may have end where it's body ends and the body of the woman begins. That's a tough break.
Oh, and by the way, when a child is aborted, often it's not killed prior to being removed from the womb.
"Often" eh? How often? At what developmental stage does this most often occur? Does this usually occur with legal abortions or with crappy "back alley/home abortions" like in that story you linked?
You have a capacity for learning without being in contact with the world.
I would truely love for you to explain how, there's no interaction, no context, nothing for the little brain to attempt to comprehend. They're basically floating around in a warm, moving, sensory deprivation tank with life support.
Would it be permissible to kill a child who has gone from the womb to in an incubator? They still haven't "been out in the world" in a way that's significantly different than being in the womb still.
Sure it is, there are sounds, lights, people moving around, new and different sensations for the first time in it's life. Lots of things for a young, new mind to experience. When everything is something new, even the slightest thing is a stimulating learning experience.
And how much of this stimulation is required? Visual stimulation? Audial stimulation? Contact stimulation?
Nothing particular, but as much as possible.
Contact stimulation is the only one you have a chance at standing on without including those who are born blind or those who are born deaf in your definition of children you can murder.
As long as there is sufficient stimulation, and most importantly, lots of new stimulations, then this isn't the problem you are claiming it is. And therefore...no murdering babies who are both deaf and blind. And certainly not just one such disability.
And at 1 year of age, they've probably been stimulated less than a child with good hearing would be stimulated in the third trimester. Therefore, an unborn child has the capacity to be stimulated more by the world than a deaf and blind child.
If you understood exactly how full of shit you are, maybe you'd understand why people like myself can't agree with you or permit you to justify infanticide.
I'm not the one justifying infanticide. Nobody who supports abortion supports the murder of children, babies, which are people. It is people like you on the radical lunatic right that want to make that connection. And next....denying women the right to contraception as well (don't deny that, there's already been pushing in that direction). People like you won't be happy until women are just subservient, obedient, baby factories.
For everything to sufficiently be in place...said brain has to be out in the world experiencing it. You cannot be learning and thinking about stimulating experiences in an environment which has not provided you anything to experience, learn, or think about. So, it happens at birth.
When does this awareness begin? Can it be measured?
You see, we have these things called "brains." And when they reach a certain point in development, and reach a certain amount of activity thanks to existing in an environment which provides it with stimuli (all of which can easily be measured by modern scientific instruments), they show signs of these things called "learning" and "awareness." It's not some mystical, magical force provided by pixie dust, it's a simple physical process within these lumps of grey matter between our ears.
Indeed, technically, it is the Queen that rules Britain...the government that has been granted it's position continues to exist only because it promotes order within her realm and she is thus satisfied with it's function of keeping the country from falling into utter chaos. Technically. If that government were to grossly step out of line it is entirely within her authority to remove it, or at least bring it back in line.
Ultimately though, it comes down to the People. If they won't support the Queen in her actions then very quickly you'd either find her removed (given past examples in Britain, this would likely involve plenty of bloodshed and one dead monarch) or a slap on the wrist given and an illusion of a limitation of the Monarchy's powers (which would merely be the creation of a new government with expanded authority, that again merely exists because it keeps the Monarchy satisfied the nation is running properly...technically).
It's a being when it gains at least a degree of awareness and the ability to learn and think about it's surroundings. In short, it becomes a being when it becomes a person.
Then you rewrite history by claiming that Republicans held the moral high ground on the slavery issue. The fact is, Lincoln's objection to slavery says less about his being a Republican, and more about his being a Northerner.
Point of fact, Lincoln was a native of Kentucky, a Southern State.
A TV show about a whiny little bitch on a dusty little failing farm, on a dirtball planet, who hangs out with his boring friends and races speeders and shoots the occasional desert animal. Such exciting show potential, I'm sure it will make...
As long as it keeps fiscally responsible, small government republicans in office, I don't care how many votes we have to step on.
What fiscally responsable Republican are you refering to? I haven't seen one in any major US office, ever. For that matter, same with small government Republicans, I'm convinced those just don't exist amongst the politicians. Bush certainly isn't either. He's a big spender, and not just on the war...spending on everything has been huge in his administration. And his government has been anything but small.
It's called a typo. It isn't the end of the world. It's not a sign of the end times. It's just one of those everyday things that happens. And using one to take a cheap shot at someone is...well...just cheap.
Actually, in the past we've shipped vast amounts of grain overseas only to have it sit and rot with the governments refusing to distribute it to their starving citizens because it was genetically engineered food. We've had Europeans going around screaming "Frankenfood!" to every corner of the world making it rather difficult to get people to accept food that is from an engineered source. And now we're evil because we won't provide genetically modified food to other countries?
Wow! Provide everyone with broadband, call it free, take it out of everyone's taxes, make it actually far cost more than if done privately, make it mismanaged out the ass, and make it such horrible service that you might as well be on dialup....well, that's what will happen if the Dems try and run with this ball.
The Ethical Implications of this plan are just sickeing. We all know it will only be a few years (decades?) before this technology is advanced enough to control every movement that an infected animal makes. Why spend billions of dollars to develope an ASIMO type stand-alone robot for physical labor when you can just jamb $200 neurocontroller into the brain of a fetal monkey and have a basicaly free slave creature?
So? They are non-sentient creatures. Furthermore, we are talking about non-sentient cyborged creatures specificially created in a lab. How is this unethical? Furthermore, how can it be considered slavery? Slaves are sentient beings, these are not...these are simply tools.
I hate all this "bio-ethics" bullshit. "Oh oh, cloning is unethical because...um...you might do something with them!" "Oh, Oh! genetic engineering using human DNA is unethical, because...um.....we can't tell you it just is!" The kinds of arguments I hear against progress due to "bio-ethics" seem like the same kinds of bullshit arguments that religious nutcases use to justify their actions. "It's wrong because God, who whispers in my brain every night and tells me to kill abortion doctors, told me so!" No fucking different. Find me one bioethicist who can actually back up his arguments with actual, solid, rational reasons why anything they say is wrong shouldn't be done. Bunch of pseudo-intellectional, quasi-religious bullshit.
Let's get this straight, I hate the way the U.S. thinks it can solve all it's problems with guns, pills and suing the crap out of each other.
Well, if we fed enough pills to the people who sue people all the time and shot all the doctors who overprescribe drugs we wouldn't have a problem now would we?
Well, we don't need hyperdrive for that. The Solar System has ample reasources, enough to sustain a far larger population than what we have with energy production being a non-issue for a period of a few billion years and enough power to make high speed, but still slower than light, intersteller travel cheap and affordable.
Funniest thing is...our "Imperial" units are not even the same as English "Imperial" units, and there are a number of old English "Imperial" units that we don't really use at all. Add in the fact that technically, our units are actually defined around metric standards anyway, and we're a "dual" society with both metric and Imperial units in use....the idea that we only use Imperial being a stereotype.
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Oh, and I actually cook my meat before I eat it of course. I'm a human being, not a coyote or something.
I have never in my life gotten any disease from eating pork. And I eat plenty of pork. Maybe because, you know, it's not pork that roams filthy streets eating garbage that I eat, but pork grown in what's basically a giant, clean pork factory that I eat.
Show me where a clump of non-thinking cells have more rights than the person carrying them around. Show me why that person must be forced, at gunpoint (government power), to carry those clumps of cells around until a little human pops out. Every human being has a right to live....they do not have the right to live at the expense of others rights. If a dying man needs my kidney to live, and I refuse to give it up....that makes me an asshole, but not guilty of murder. Nor would that give the government the right to break into my home, drug me, and cut out my kidney to save that man...even though I don't need it to live, and he does.
Same deal...if that fetus does have a right to live....it doesn't have that right at the expense of the rights of the woman. She can rufuse to use her body to support it's life, even if that results in the death of the fetus. Ownership of oneself is ultimately the basis for rights. I own me and my body, just as a woman owns hers. Nobody else does. Any rights a fetus may have end where it's body ends and the body of the woman begins. That's a tough break.
"Often" eh? How often? At what developmental stage does this most often occur? Does this usually occur with legal abortions or with crappy "back alley/home abortions" like in that story you linked?For everything to sufficiently be in place...said brain has to be out in the world experiencing it. You cannot be learning and thinking about stimulating experiences in an environment which has not provided you anything to experience, learn, or think about. So, it happens at birth.
Indeed, technically, it is the Queen that rules Britain...the government that has been granted it's position continues to exist only because it promotes order within her realm and she is thus satisfied with it's function of keeping the country from falling into utter chaos. Technically. If that government were to grossly step out of line it is entirely within her authority to remove it, or at least bring it back in line.
Ultimately though, it comes down to the People. If they won't support the Queen in her actions then very quickly you'd either find her removed (given past examples in Britain, this would likely involve plenty of bloodshed and one dead monarch) or a slap on the wrist given and an illusion of a limitation of the Monarchy's powers (which would merely be the creation of a new government with expanded authority, that again merely exists because it keeps the Monarchy satisfied the nation is running properly...technically).
It's a being when it gains at least a degree of awareness and the ability to learn and think about it's surroundings. In short, it becomes a being when it becomes a person.
Indeed, next we'll be hearing Bush screeaming about "rogue judges" again...because judicial conservatives don't tow the Republican party line.
A TV show about a whiny little bitch on a dusty little failing farm, on a dirtball planet, who hangs out with his boring friends and races speeders and shoots the occasional desert animal. Such exciting show potential, I'm sure it will make...
*pinky*
ONE MILLION DOLLARS
It's called a typo. It isn't the end of the world. It's not a sign of the end times. It's just one of those everyday things that happens. And using one to take a cheap shot at someone is...well...just cheap.
Actually, in the past we've shipped vast amounts of grain overseas only to have it sit and rot with the governments refusing to distribute it to their starving citizens because it was genetically engineered food. We've had Europeans going around screaming "Frankenfood!" to every corner of the world making it rather difficult to get people to accept food that is from an engineered source. And now we're evil because we won't provide genetically modified food to other countries?
Wow! Provide everyone with broadband, call it free, take it out of everyone's taxes, make it actually far cost more than if done privately, make it mismanaged out the ass, and make it such horrible service that you might as well be on dialup....well, that's what will happen if the Dems try and run with this ball.
So? They are non-sentient creatures. Furthermore, we are talking about non-sentient cyborged creatures specificially created in a lab. How is this unethical? Furthermore, how can it be considered slavery? Slaves are sentient beings, these are not...these are simply tools.
I hate all this "bio-ethics" bullshit. "Oh oh, cloning is unethical because...um...you might do something with them!" "Oh, Oh! genetic engineering using human DNA is unethical, because...um.....we can't tell you it just is!" The kinds of arguments I hear against progress due to "bio-ethics" seem like the same kinds of bullshit arguments that religious nutcases use to justify their actions. "It's wrong because God, who whispers in my brain every night and tells me to kill abortion doctors, told me so!" No fucking different. Find me one bioethicist who can actually back up his arguments with actual, solid, rational reasons why anything they say is wrong shouldn't be done. Bunch of pseudo-intellectional, quasi-religious bullshit.
We've been saying that "Google knows all" for years....but nobody really believed us until now.
Well, we don't need hyperdrive for that. The Solar System has ample reasources, enough to sustain a far larger population than what we have with energy production being a non-issue for a period of a few billion years and enough power to make high speed, but still slower than light, intersteller travel cheap and affordable.
Say it with me people, Dyson Sphere.
Funniest thing is...our "Imperial" units are not even the same as English "Imperial" units, and there are a number of old English "Imperial" units that we don't really use at all. Add in the fact that technically, our units are actually defined around metric standards anyway, and we're a "dual" society with both metric and Imperial units in use....the idea that we only use Imperial being a stereotype.