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Messages - Rush

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12181
Spin Zone / Re: Would you support overturning Roe-v-Wade?
« on: April 13, 2017, 10:37:05 AM »
I hope that when I get to a certain point, I can opt for euthanasia.  I don't want anyone else making that decision for me as long as I am able to make my own decision, but I don't want any bureaucrat or religious zealot telling me I have to suffer because of their moral opinion.

Agree, self chosen euthanasia is an option I'd like to be able to consider. Making the choice for someone else should definitely remain illegal unless they are literally a vegetable and cannot make the choice for themselves. That would be like any healthcare power of attorney that you grant. However, the problem is that it becomes a very gray area when we are talking about old sick people with declining judgment and cognition. They become easily manipulated and the financial incentive to have them gone becomes huge.   But on the other hand, we put down our dogs out of love and not wanting them to suffer. It seems morally wrong to deny our fellow humans the same mercy.  As for the religious argument, I cannot believe a loving God wants us to suffer unduly and would object if we hurried along our demise a bit.

But it also becomes a slippery slope.  Painful terminal cancer and are going to die soon anyway, it makes sense. But now you have people claiming things like mental depression, or inconvenient but not terminal disabilities, as a reason for doing away with themselves. That is just suicide, not euthanasia. Part of me says, well let them if they're that miserable. Good riddance. But another part of me says there would be too much risk of financial exploitation. We shouldn't open that Pandora's box.  It's just another way to devalue human life and that always seems to lead to some government then stepping in and making the decision FOR you. Maybe that's the ultimate danger; government often tends to mandate things that began as optional choices. Once the government is paying for your nursing home, euthanasia, if legal, could too easily get out of our control.

12182
Spin Zone / Re: Would you support overturning Roe-v-Wade?
« on: April 12, 2017, 05:23:04 PM »
Then each cell of my skin that is removed from my body should have full legal protection to "life" because each has the entire requisite DNA to be human. In fact the creation of egg cells from skin cells was demonstrated ....

Nope, I never said anything about giving full legal protection to anything.  As for your skin cell, once removed from you it's dead, or soon to be.  To my knowledge the only known exception to this is Henrietta Lacks, and that was a mutation, and the mice cells also not naturally occurring.

Quote

Do you really want to punish someone for an act of murder for causing the death of something the size of a poppy seed? Just because it has potential to become sentient?

Where did I say anything about punishing someone for getting an abortion?

12183
Spin Zone / Re: Would you support overturning Roe-v-Wade?
« on: April 12, 2017, 05:10:31 PM »
Ok. I have no problem killing another human.  But it needs to be done humanely; ie, no pain and no fear.  I don't believe an early stage fetus feels pain or has fear.
I am also for the death penalty, but only in severe cases, and only if the sentence is carried out quickly and humanely.  Waiting around for years to be legally murdered is my idea of cruel.

Face it; everyone that has ever lived, EVER, has either died or is going to die.  What's the big deal?  If God didn't want people to die he would have done a better job of creating us.

I was with you until the last paragraph. Yes we are all going to die. But WHEN we die is a big huge deal.  How much time we get to spend on this earth enjoying it, or whatever else we do, is reduced when we kill someone, from what he would have had if death had come naturally.  So taking a life is not about taking the life because as you point out, we're all going to lose it anyway.  It is about taking TIME away from that person.  Therefore it should only be done with the greatest justification.

12184
Spin Zone / Re: Would you support overturning Roe-v-Wade?
« on: April 12, 2017, 04:01:58 PM »
Once the egg and sperm join it has the requisite human DNA, and it is not dead. Therefore it is human life, period.  So an abortion at any point after fertilization is killing a human. I don't know why people waste time debating this.

Now, maybe it is justifiable to kill another human.  Let's just be honest and say that is the real question.

12185
Spin Zone / Re: Colorado cuts teen births and abortion rates in half
« on: April 12, 2017, 03:56:12 PM »
You're not going to make them more responsible by withholding birth control, and you're not going to make them less apathetic by providing it to them for free. 

If the data shows an implantable device does prevent pregnancy, because they don't have to think to use it at the moment, where is the data showing these people end up less poor or becoming better citizens in the end?  If they don't have the motivation, intelligence or impulse control to take a pill every day or use a condom, are they going to suddenly be able to get through college or run a successful business just because you prevented them from having a baby?

No, these people need a whole lot more than just free birth control. They need a whole life intervention, as explained in this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Hillbilly-Elegy-Memoir-Family-Culture/dp/0062300547

Focused personal mentoring from a caring individual, exposure and immersion in a culture other than the impoverished one that bred them. That's what brings people out of poverty, not government Band-Aides.

12186
Spin Zone / Re: More sabre rattling, or cause for real concern?
« on: April 12, 2017, 02:38:27 PM »
Funny y'all are saying that. I too am swamped but spent the whole day yesterday doing yet MORE followup with our accountant for our taxes, and fielding my mother's pestering about HER taxes which I also am in charge of.  Mom (90) is freaking out because A) she thinks they're due the 15th and B) she thinks she needs to mail them a paper check that gets to the IRS by the 15th and C) if she fails that, they will send a SWAT team into her home and haul her off to prison.

12187
Spin Zone / Re: Colorado cuts teen births and abortion rates in half
« on: April 12, 2017, 11:59:44 AM »
There is just a great big giant disconnect between the biological reality of our species and our economic and social systems.  We have evolved to reach sexual maturity many many years before we are ready in today's modern world to raise and support children, at least in the first world. Age 14 for girls and 16 for males, is when mother nature insists you have sex, a drive only just behind breathing and finding food in urgency. The legal "age of consent" (18 or 21, varies by state?) is an artificial construct, as is any religious prohibitions against sex. Hence the persistent failure throughout history of attempts to restrain sex on legal or moral grounds. We are genetically programmed to begin sexual liaisons at age 14/16 because in the environment in which we evolved, this was ideal for the survival of the species.

We find ourselves now, after the rise of civilization, the success of agriculture in making possible great cities, countries and empires, with redistribution of labor and resources, then the industrial revolution and now advanced technology and cultural constraints against not only sex before 21, but WORK before 21, in a world where teens can no longer earn enough to support a family. And then we've even codified this by redefining the term "child" to mean not someone prepubescent, but someone under a quite arbitrary age many years older.  (21 has nothing to do with physical maturity; it has everything to do with getting through primary education and a few years at a trade school or college.) "Child" labor laws, alcoholic beverage laws, minimum wage laws, and this cultural myth everyone must go to college, make it impossible for teens to have a child and support it themselves, thereby making this whole thing such a big "problem". It results in the creation of a time of limbo where a person is physically mature, has the working equipment and hormonal drives for procreation, but is expected to repress all of that for five, six or seven years of what nature intended as their most prime time of performance and enjoyment.  Indeed, if one partner happens to be a few years older than the other, it becomes pedophilia (despite the fact that males - of any age - attracted to physically mature 14 year old girls are very different from a true pedophile, one who preys on unwilling physically immature small children.)

I'm not saying we are wrong to attempt to constrain with morality or law, sex in the teenager.  We are not wrong to have developed civilization, education. and all the other factors above-mentioned that place us in this predicament. It is what it is and so we attempt to deal with the problem of parents too under-prepared to raise in today's world a baby they are physically capable of making. It would be nuts to go backwards to cave man days just to calibrate ourselves so that sexual maturity now equals income earning maturity.  Perhaps in several hundred thousand years, if we don't go extinct, mother nature will adjust our sexual maturity upward to approach our intellectual and emotional maturity. In fact this is probably already underway, as our species' ancestors as well as the great apes attain sexual maturity at younger years than do we.  As mankind's brain size grows, everything else tends to eventually adjust, such as the reduction in our teeth and jaw size.

As for whether we should use tax dollars to focus on more "convenient" forms of birth control such as the IUD, my position is the same as many other topics along those lines such as treatment programs for drug addicts.  I am basically against using tax dollars for anything at all except defense of the nation and maintaining open commerce pathways.  But social programs already being in place, if our choice is pay for an IUD or pay for an unwanted kid who will be on welfare popping out many more unwanted kids for generations to come, then yes, I would be for this program.

12188
When you play World of Warcraft you further understand what happened here.  You group with others (anywhere from 5 to 40 individual live players, online at various locations around the world) for the purpose to engage and defeat a lot of AI bad guys in some evil stronghold. You meet, safe at the entrance, to organize yourselves and sometimes discuss strategy.  The AI bad guys are programmed so that when your character comes within a certain distance, they "notice" you, develop "hate" for you and then "aggro" to you. This "aggro" draws them to you like you were a magnet. These particular bad guys are usually "elite" which means that you alone cannot defeat even one of them by yourself, but must fight them together with the whole group. By running into the battle area pell-pell all by himself, he brought the attention of all those elites down upon the whole group, which was subsequently overwhelmed and had no chance.

12189
Spin Zone / Re: Would you support overturning Roe-v-Wade?
« on: April 12, 2017, 07:14:28 AM »
There would have to be a case to come back up to challenge it at the SCOTUS level again. It would still take a few years for it to make its way back up there again and even then, depending on the actual suit brought, it's not guaranteed.

When Justice Gorsuch was asked during his confirmation hearings if he'd overturn that case (among others) he said that it's precedent and that the Court must look to precedent when making decisions. It was a non-answer but he does hold precedent in some regard, as he should.

To the extent precedent is proper law, he is correct. And he is correct not to say what he would decide on an individual case beforehand. That would make him an agenda driven activist and this is something we hope he is NOT as opposed to Hillary specifically promising to put agenda driven activists on the SC.  At least I hope he is not; I am not an agenda driven conservative; I am one who merely wants the SC to do what it was tasked with when the country was born.  My personal positions on issues should not be the point, and neither should they for anyone, but we know that's usually not the case. The percent of people in this country who actually understand what the SC's job is, is pathetically few.

12190
I'm really reluctant to post this, but I couldn't stop laughing when I read it.



https://twitter.com/Lance_Bradley/status/851864862426890240

That is hilarious.  I wonder how many people who don't play WoW get the Leroy Jenkins reference?  Has it crossed into a mainstream meme?

12191
Yeah he really stepped in it there. In fact, nobody should point fingers when it comes to chemical warfare, as all sides used it (including us) during WWI and all (including Hitler) possessed them during WWII.  However, while stockpiled, they were not used on either side during WWII (in battle, not talking about death camps) because all sides also had developed effective protection against them which rendered them a waste of time or even counter-productive to a battle.

So technically he is correct, Hitler didn't use them in battle.  But the subject of the Holocaust and the use of gas to kill millions of innocent civilians is way too sensitive, and the technical correctness of his statement will be ignored by the emotional masses; something anyone should have foreseen before saying such a thing.

The truth here is that it isn't the type of method used to kill that should be the point. The focus of our outrage should be the fact that non-combatant civilians including women and children are killed. If every single person in Hitlers death camps had been shot with bullets instead of gassed, the atrocity would have been no less. But then no one would have blinked at Spicer's comment. One more case of the media and the masses just misdirecting themselves to the wrong detail.

12192
Spin Zone / Re: Republican plans to ban online porn
« on: April 12, 2017, 06:32:14 AM »

Rush was spot on when she said that this was about the state controlling more of our behavior. Just another way for the government to have a say in our lives instead of letting people live their lives how they choose.

Fixed it for you.  ;D

12193
Spin Zone / Re: Would you support overturning Roe-v-Wade?
« on: April 12, 2017, 06:27:05 AM »

My biggest problem with it would be that I don't think the Federal Government should have any say in the matter, either for or against.  It should be a State issue.

I agree with this. But I also agree with Anthony that it is a very polarizing issue.  To reverse it now would possibly create a situation where the left would regain the upper hand politically, thereby putting us back on the path to economic destruction, weaken our standing in the world, open us up to greater terrorist risk, worse health care, and all the other woes the Democrats bring upon us.  You have to calculate the downstream consequences of all of that in terms of death and human suffering when you balance it against the lives lost by abortion.

Strictly speaking RvW is unconstitutional, but right now it is not the hill we want to die on. Right now the very survival of the U.S. in a physical sense is at risk and we need to get a handle on that first.

12194
Spin Zone / Re: Republican plans to ban online porn
« on: April 11, 2017, 03:13:08 PM »
It's painting Republicans with one brush.  There are always a bunch of lunatic bills being floated by all the parties and the truth is that only the extremist control freaks are trying to get this sort of thing in place and by "this sort of thing" I am including probably as much or more insane regulation proposals from the Democrats on any number of subjects, all with the idea of state control of our behavior. Unfortunately, they have found that you can get around the legislative process by issuing agency edicts, which is a much more dangerous and insidious threat to individual freedom.  This is how the extremists, even if they are a minority, get stuff forced on us without the more reasonable majority of us agreeing to it.

They'll do it, technology is at a point where it's virtual mind reading and we are criminalizing THOUGHT.

12195
Spin Zone / Re: More sabre rattling, or cause for real concern?
« on: April 11, 2017, 12:33:20 PM »
You assume they care if their economy is wrecked. 

Also a very good point.  For example in WWI we see the heads of several nations not giving a flying fig about their country, but tumbling headlong into catastrophe driven by ego, personal issues, just being childish and stupid, etc. 

Anything could happen.  I like to think China would avoid war as long as things are relatively stable and comfortable there, but no question they want to build the military to equal and exceed ours, for defense if not offense.  It hardly matters if anyone there has a long term plan of global aggression. Whether they'll actually use it might depend on decaying conditions and a desire to expand for resources, or the kind of lunacy mentioned in my first paragraph.

Resource scarcity could be a big problem in the next century and China has a lot of mouths to feed as do we all.

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