08.27.10
Posted in General at 1:36 pm by Clay
…or so I’d have to assume.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan is reputed to have said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
I like this quote, as I try as hard as possible to be fair and accurate with my opinions. I also try to respect the opinions of others when the difference is because of some basic belief, rather than a factual difference. So, for instance, I tend to respect both sides of the abortion debate because it’s a clash of different belief systems.
Stem cell research, on the other hand, has arguments like the one put forward today by Steve Chapman, which included:
What’s wrong with destroying a 5-day-old embryo that would be discarded anyway? Nothing, unless you think there is something wrong with killing a human embryo ostensibly for some greater good.
This is directly equivalent to saying, “What’s wrong with killing a 25-year-old car crash victim who’s now brain dead and will be completely dead in a few hours? Nothing, unless you think there is something wrong with killing a 25-year-old for some greater good.” Well, yes, some(if not most) people are squeamish about organ donation, but almost everyone believes that organs are better used than rotting in the ground.
In other words, you’re not choosing between killing or not killing a human embryo, you’re choosing whether you think its life should consist of being thrown in the trash or possibly saving someone else’s life.
He continues:
If there is nothing wrong with that, though, it’s hard to see what’s wrong with destroying an embryo that is 5 weeks old or 5 months old, if its tissue could be used to help people who are seriously ill. In that case, why limit research to leftover embryos? It would make more sense to let scientists create embryos and let them gestate for months, for the sole purpose of destroying them for their stem cells.
This quote, on the other hand, is factually wrong(or unfair) for a couple of reasons. An embryo has pluripotent stem cells, meaning that the cells can become any type of body tissue. At 5 weeks old, the embryo has stem cells that have already differentiated, and are much less likely to be helpful. So far as I understand, there isn’t much of a difference between those and adult stem cells.
The second reason is that the research he describes would intentionally create fetuses for the express purpose of scientific research, which is a wildly different moral question. Hypothetically, it might still be justifiable research, but it’s not the much easier moral question that stem-cell research is.
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04.13.10
Posted in General at 9:24 am by Clay
Recently, Mike Huckabee said a few things that reasonably offended gay people(that gay marriage is comparable to incest) and atheists(that they have no moral grounding).
I’m not going to argue either of those things, since a reasoned individual should already understand where Huckabee is coming from, and why gay people and atheists would have reason to take offense.
What I’d like to point out is Huckabee’s reasoning with this quote:
“You don’t go ahead and accommodate every behavioral pattern that is against the ideal,” he said of same-sex marriage. “That would be like saying, well, there are a lot of people who like to use drugs, so let’s go ahead and accommodate those who want to use drugs. There are some people who believe in incest, so we should accommodate them. There are people who believe in polygamy, so we should accommodate them.”
Okay, so pretty much everyone would agree that some “behavioral patterns that (are) against the ideal” should never be accommodated. He points out same-sex marriage, drugs, incest, and polygamy. I’d add murder, violence of most types, most theft, and most things that put others in danger.
Okay, great; we all agree on at least most of those. Now, why? Why should the force of the government be put behind stopping such things? Well, for the ones I brought up, we have the fact that one person’s whims are likely to cause someone else’s injury.
The harm principle applies to incest, and even to polygamy, as as surplus of males often leads to violence.
Drugs? Well, drug addicts have done their share of damage to society. I’m not certain it’s any worse than the damage alcoholics have done, but I see the point.
Gay marriage? No one is directly harmed.
So, opposition to gay marriage must come from something else. Therefore it is not a directly comparable issue.
So, Huckabee’s “partial logic” is that his statement is perfectly reasonable, but only if there were some common, underlying reason. As far as I can tell, the underlying reason is Huckabee’s moral code.
I doubt that an argument coming from a moral code would ever be convincing to someone who doesn’t share that particular moral code.
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01.09.09
Posted in General at 12:38 am by Clay
From Politico:
Sen. Kit Bond, the senior Republican from Missouri who sits on powerful Senate committees, announced Thursday that he will not run for reelection in 2010, giving Democrats a shot to pick up a seat in a state that has emerged as a major battleground.
While Missouri had the closest vote of any state in the 2008 US Presidential election, it managed to send its electoral votes to McCain. Missouri last voted for the losing candidate in 1956, and before that, in 1900. Since the United States hasn’t had terribly long strings of single-party presidential rule, I’m inclined to think that Missouri emerged as a major battleground in 1904.
Disclaimer: an officeholder deciding not to run again almost always makes an election more of a battleground. I have to assume that Missouri’s senate election in 2010 will be significantly more competitive than the election of 2004.
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01.08.09
Posted in General at 11:51 pm by site admin
I’m not sure if this’ll bring more spammers in, but it is now possible to post a comment without logging in.
Edit: It brought more spammers in, and the feature has been turned off. I may turn it on for short periods of time after posting, though.
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01.22.08
Posted in General at 10:36 pm by Clay
On page D3 in the local section of today’s Wisconsin State Journal was an article about a Blackhawk Technical College brochure. Its cover featured a photograph of adults and two children with a caption that originally said, “A Family Affair: BTC is the perfect fit for the White family.”
This, quite reasonably, drew some complaints as being a rather poor choice of phrasing. The State Journal asked an expert:
Bob Baldwin, a diversity specialist for the Janesville School District, who is black, said most black people would have a problem with the wording.
“That’s kind of a natural thing — when you’re white, you don’t think about these things,” Baldwin said. “And people need to start thinking about these things beyond their own comfort level — you know, what about the other folks?”
There’s nothing quite like a generalization about white people to help illustrate his point.
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01.04.08
Posted in General at 4:25 pm by Clay
I’d like to mention that Ron Paul decimated the Republican Iowa caucus vote last night.
By which, of course, I mean that he took ten percent.
…
Hopefully enough people have heard the controversy about the usage of “decimate” to not think I’ve completely lost it.
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09.04.07
Posted in General at 9:41 pm by Clay
In today’s Marketplace section, Yukari Iwatani Kane wrote from Tokyo about Sony. The article was titled “Sony to Challenge Apple in TV, Movie Downloads”. It mentioned that,
Since the failure of the Walkman to beat the iPod, Sony has been struggling to come up with a new product that defines the industry standard in innovation.
This general idea of Sony failing since losing to the iPod is repeated throughout the article, along with some conjecture about what Sony is likely to do to turn its fortunes around.
However, I find it odd that the article doesn’t mention the reason why most everyone I know(and Slashdot) has developed a distaste for Sony hardware; the fact that Sony releases moderate quality products that are crippled into products that worry most about stopping you from doing stuff.
This hit home recently when I was playing with a PSP, and went to download a trailer for a PSP game, and had to agree to a EULA before I was allowed to watch it.
Again, I had to agree to abide by certain rules so that I could watch an ad.
Sony has a history of having propietary devices that lock you out about as much as American cell phones do. When you can choose an iPod, which plays MP3s and Apple’s format, or the first few generations of Sony MP3 players, which played only Sony’s format, the choice is obvious. Why would you want to force yourself to convert all of your files in order to play them? It takes a lot longer, the files are lower quality, and you can’t just copy them to another player or computer.
Sony’s methods can work, as long as all the other hardware providers provide equally restrictive hardware, but as long as Sony is competiting against hardware makers who worry more about marketability than pleasing content companies, I fail to see why anyone would want to buy Sony products.
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08.18.07
Posted in General at 2:46 pm by Clay
C-Span rebroadcast a recent Republican presidential debate that appeared on ABC, and I was struck by the fact that the moderator started off with the current Iowa polling numbers of the candidates on the stage, as well as Fred Thompson.
This bugs me. I’m not sure how reasonable it is for me to be bugged by it, but I just have this image of a debate being something where one candidate does better than another based on his performance on the stage, or because of how people view the issues, rather than forming an opinion on the candidates because of the current polling data.
On the other hand, it’s a bit pie in the sky of me to even bother pretending that most of these candidates have even a tiny shot at the nomination.
Still, aren’t the producers of this dog and pony show pretending in exactly the same way when they have all the minor candidates on the stage? And if they’re going to pretend that the “non-serious” candidates are serious, why doesn’t that extend to ignoring things like polling?
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07.14.07
Posted in General at 10:31 am by Clay
…statistics.
An AP article that appeared on the front page of today’s Wisconsin State Journal stated,
In the eyes of the public, Congress is doing even worse than the president. Public satisfaction with the job lawmakers are doing has fallen 11 points since May, to 24 percent, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll.
Poll respondents from both parties say they’re tired of fighting between Congress and the White House and want the two branches of government to work together on such issues as education, health care and the Iraq War.
So congress has an approval rating of 24 percent versus Bush’s 33 percent; therefore, congress must be less popular than the president, right?
Of course, if you were to ask people how they felt about their representative, they would almost certainly give a much higher approval rating.
As a personal aside, I’d rather like to see the two branches of government work against one another. I can only hope that congress can obstruct the president and force him to be more open than he has, and I can only hope the president can obstruct congress enough to slow down the pork fest.
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06.23.07
Posted in General at 11:25 pm by Clay
I think it’d be entertaining to begin referring to children as “post-born fetuses”.
This idea came from hearing “pre-born child” used in a news report, and the term grated on me — there’s this perfectly accurate term that’s viewpoint neutral. I find “fetus” a much better term as it’s a description of what’s growing inside of a pregnant woman; it doesn’t say whether the woman wants it or intends to kill it.
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