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Ninth Doctor

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Everything posted by Ninth Doctor

  1. I don’t think so. Does anyone question that infanticide is a well-attested ancient practice from numerous cultures? I brought it up to show that there is precedent for waiting until after the umbilical cord is cut to kill a baby, and obviously I’m not in favor of this. Why would that ever happen? This does bring up a point, however, the fact that newborns aren’t yet moral agents, and won’t be for years. Somewhere or other, I think it’s in one of the interviews you can watch on YouTube, Rand talks about how you can only “claim rights for your mind”; newborns, toddlers, maybe even up to age of ten, does the developing mind qualify? You can’t vote, or even sign an enforceable contract until 18… P.S. the part about baby baby back ribs was a kind of inside-baseball joke, it might seem overly bizarre to someone not familiar with the kerfuffle I was poking fun at.
  2. Yeah well we don’t have Spartan writings, we mainly know about them from what Athenians wrote, and we must bear in mind that they were rivals/enemies. I forget who it was, Aristo-Xeno-something I bet, who wrote about how Spartans would ritualistically cook up and eat baby baby back ribs, in lieu of the more generally accepted haruspicy methods. So, barring ancient intercity-state libel, thousands of years too late to properly adjudicate, this ought to explain the lack of infant bones in this particular midden. You’re not trying to change the subject, right?
  3. Meaning what? The mother can order the newborn dismembered and brains sucked out with a needle to make the skull collapse after it has been delivered, but not once the umbilical cord is cut? Rights are totally on/off, like a light switch? If that’s what you mean, wow… OTOH, in Sparta among other places, this was pretty much the deal; actually back then you had much longer to decide.
  4. Wow, look at those prices. Giveaways, compared to how it used to be.
  5. This is a weird story. Do you have to pay to get on the waiting list? If so it makes better sense, and whether reselling is ok depends on the contract, I suppose. This calls to mind the Bayreuth Festival in Germany. You have to mail away to get on a waiting list, every year for an average of 10 years, before you get your chance to buy tickets. But the Festival is heavily subsidized, they could probably run all year and do better, but they choose to keep it the way it was in the early days. Just a few weeks in the summer, always 100% sold out. The tickets aren't expensive at all, if you go through the process. Then, on the "secondary market" they're outrageously expensive, and supposedly you can get kicked out if you're not the person who properly bought the ticket. Meanwhile you have no way of knowing if the production you'll finally get to see is going to be any good. Their latest Lohengrin has the chorus dressed up as mice! With big ears and tails trailing behind. It's on YouTube. People are known to walk out, in spite of all the trouble they went through to get tickets.
  6. At this point I can’t resist a little snark: “Not bad, not bad at all,” Diotallevi said. “To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.” Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, Chapter 83
  7. Yes it’s extremely rare, and keep in mind that the woman has waited several months, you don’t just wake up one morning nine months pregnant. Can or should the State force a woman to continue carrying the fetus that extra week, or month, now that she’s changed her mind? Sounds like that’s the way it works in Britain. Or just leave it to the medical profession? Let’s imagine a scenario where the doctor ought to say no. Picture a woman, let’s call her Rosemary Woodhouse, she’s pregnant full term, physically healthy, due date tomorrow, and she shows up at another Ob-Gyn’s office saying that she’s just discovered that she’s carrying the child of Satan. She wants it out of her, now! I mean imagine how that brat must kick! Not to mention the horns and claws. She tells this Ob-Gyn that she wants it aborted, killed now rather than after birth, because otherwise she’d have to go hunting for the Daggers of Meggido, and old Bugenhagen has gone missing with them (ah hell, now I’m mixing up my classic 1970’s satanic movies). So, does he make like Charles Grodin and give her a sedative, call her real doctor and write it off as hormones talking, or perform the procedure? And if he’s a real sleazebag, maybe takes an unusually big fee to do it, never mind the woman’s obvious insanity, could he later be charged with a crime? Malpractice, murder? Let’s say it turns out she’s off her lithium, and she and her husband go to the police afterwards. Tough questions. First I need a big pay grade increase, then I’ll start giving answers.
  8. Getting back to the story from Britain, will anyone step up and defend this woman’s actions? Posit an innocent scenario? Maybe she decided she wanted to give birth at home, by herself, with no help, kind of like Ayla does in the Clan of the Cave Bear movie (as I recall, it’s very different in the book). So, she buys a drug to induce labor, since I don’t know, it needs to happen on her schedule, so she doesn’t miss her afternoon soaps. And then, darn it, it’s a stillbirth. So sad. Ignorant that there might be later inquiries, she dumps the body…wherever she dumped it. She says she buried it, but no body has been produced, so maybe by “buried it” she means: in a dumpster. She wasn’t thinking straight, give it a pass. As opposed to: she used a drug to induce labor so she could have the baby without anyone around, with the intent of killing it should it come out alive, as it probably did. In which case we’re talking about a Susan Smith grade psychopath. Even Casey Anthony probably killed her kid by accident. Which of these do the facts point more or less towards?
  9. I’d like to make it clear that I was responding above to the suggestion that an “elective” abortion at 8 months 3 weeks is ok. But whatever the legality, you’d have a hard time finding a reputable doctor to perform such a procedure. It actually endangers the mother, not to mention “the entity”. You basically have to scramble the child inside the womb, then vacuum the pieces out. The brain has to be sucked out with an oversized needle, to make the skull collapse. Not that birth is some kind of picnic, but this is something else. The question of where to draw the line is quite beyond me. Even at such a late date there are situations, like an injury from an accident that requires a quick judgement call, tragic emergency situations, where abortion is the right way to go, and if so it’s going to be the same nasty procedure I objected to above. Abortion is a tough topic. I remember I was really disappointed by Bernstein’s talk, though I believe it was only the second time he’d delivered it, so maybe (hopefully) he’s better now. I still have the VHS of it somewhere in the middens, though I haven’t watched it in ages. There are some tough questions to wrestle with, and he acted like people were asking questions no rational person would ever ask. And oh man, he had this pathetic reply about how do you know if/when it’s a human being: you point at it!!!!! GAAAAA!!!!!!!
  10. The way I'm reading it she's trying to avoid being charged with murder. And without a body...well I don't know, it happened in Britain, things might be different there. The fact that she didn't go to a hospital sure looks bad. Casey Anthony got away with it for lack of proof, but what really happened was about as obvious as the O.J. case.
  11. As Beaker would say, and only he can channel the emotional flavor of my reply: MEEEP MEEEP MEEEP MEEEP MEEEEEEEEPPPP!!!!! Ugh. Alright. But no, I'm not going to try and write an essay right now. When I ran a campus club I brought Andy Bernstein to do his Abortion talk, and he was simply maddening on the subject of viability and exactly when rights begin. Obama gave a really respectable reply about it in one of the 2008 debates, he said it's above my pay grade. Do you believe the fact that the umbilical cord is still attached means it's ok (morally, legally, feel free to parse it out) to chop up the...what shall we agree to call it, how about "the entity". It’s no longer in the womb, there’s just the cord. Ultimately Bernstein didn't, though he repeatedly dodged by saying it was an "invalid question". Ok, I'm going to assume you're on board so far. Now, the entity, full term, due date was last week, is still in the womb, and the woman wants, for whatever reason, to evict her tenant. If a doctor induces labor, out will pop a healthy, screaming entity, er, newborn. But if another doctor does something else, which I’m not going to describe, out will come…something I don’t want to describe. But suffice to say that if he did the same thing to the newborn that he did to the entity, he would be convicted of murder. So, so long as the entity is still inside the woman, it’s all no rights, no consequences? All the way up to, when? The hour before delivery? The minute? Until the cervix is dilated to so many centimeters? Come on, let's see what’s your pay grade.
  12. Ick, this calls to mind the Casey Anthony case. But here, there’s no body, so of course there’s no cause of death, just the woman’s word that it was a stillbirth. It sure looks like murder, though. I mean, when you induce labor it doesn't mean you're killing the infant. I was born by appointment, labor was induced, and presumably the doctor was home in time for dinner and/or afternoon golf. I don’t even want to think about this case any more, what I’m visualizing is too awful.
  13. Oh well, too late to edit it out of my post. The podcast is free, so I imagine she didn't lose revenue over it.
  14. Not to worry, I have a Kindle. This just showed up on YouTube, but there are already comments saying that it's there without permission. The takeaway is that LP was on Amy Peikoff's podcast today, talking DIM, so even if this gets pulled you can still get it easily enough. I haven't listened to it yet. Here's a link: http://dontletitgo.c...-pdt-8-p-m-edt/
  15. This calls to mind news reports from the early 90’s, I have no idea how to look up an example but maybe you remember it too. There was a move afoot in Russia to go back to Communism, and the people behind it were labeled, in US media, “right-wingers”. Even “far right-wing”. Gaaa!!!!
  16. You post on an Objectivist site, equating “right-winger” with Objectivism, and now you’re upset that people are correcting you? What a n00b. Here’s an intelligent discussion of the issue:
  17. Try adding a daily affirmation courtesy of Doc Sportello: “What I lack in altitude…I make up for in attitude.” Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice, Chapter 1
  18. I have no idea how copyright works, or how it ought to work, with magic tricks. One thing that comes to mind, however, is that whoever this is who is selling the secret is advertising using Teller's name. That might give Teller standing to demand it be stopped.
  19. Well I don’t know how typical The Objective Standard is, but this comes from a recent article: As opposed to the much more useful Nolan Chart: Of course the Nolan Chart comes out of the libertarian movement, and Real Objectivists™ can’t sanction such transparent evul*, hence the one-dimensional and ahistorical (where do the terms left and right wing come from?**) TOS thingee. * note the date, immediately before the announcement of John Allison’s new Cato gig. http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/blog/index.php/2012/06/political-left-and-right-properly-defined/ ** I can't resist adding that in the French Assembly, in the time frame when left and right wing take their names, one of the undisputed heroes of Classical Liberalism, Frédéric Bastiat, SAT ON THE LEFT!!!
  20. I would expect 60:40, or 70:30. 80:20 goes beyond my experience. 88:12, way beyond. I really don't want to get sidetracked with this.
  21. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/objectivists-for-empire/ And here's another one, a bit longer, and not too much overlap, from the American Conservative. It's funny to see a non-Objectivist saying such and such "should provoke an excommunication from ARI". He's suggesting that otherwise John Allison is practicing duplicity. I, for one, am inclined to take John Allison’s latest statement, the one to Cato staffers, at face value. And I expect his "excommunication" to come about as quickly as Alan Greenspan's. Meaning, not quickly at all. He links to my video, and I just checked the analytics on it. One interesting fact, this even surprises me, is the demographics of the viewership. 88% male, 12% female.
  22. Thanks for the link. I checked yesterday, and I didn't see a Kindle sample, so either this is new or I didn't look carefully enough.
  23. Lead indeed. I’m not interested in starting a debate about foreign policy with you. This ground has been well tread, and frankly you’re not worth talking to. If you had ever acknowledged being wrong about the date rape imbroglio I might credit you with some intellectual honesty and feel it worth my time to provide links to prior discussions of the issue. As it is, I’ve long since written you off as a hopeless case, and your earlier post (#65) shows your intent here on this thread, however ineptly executed it was. Go waste someone else's time.
  24. Did you read the article? And did you notice that I used scare quotes? Weigel is equating Objectivism with ARI's foreign policy. I'm saying I find that irritating. There are plenty of Objectivists who disagree with the ARI foreign policy. Are we on the same page now?
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