Comrade Tovya said:
Okay, I know you didn't think before you stated that, but what the hell, I'll entertain your statement... When I was 6 years old, I came down with Reye's Syndrome... to say the least, it's a really nasty disease that to this day, doctors still don't know what causes it or how to heal someone who comes down with it. It's pretty much the roll of a dice as to whether you live or die. Anyway, here I am in 1984, dying in Cooks Children's Hospital. No cure for the disease, and they honestly don't know what the hell to do with me. Unfortunately for me, Reye's quickly progresses and before I know it, I am diagnosed with stage 5 Reye's Syndrome. I slip into a comma, and my head gets the size of a watermelon (because my brain has swelled severly) and my liver has stopped funcitioning. Long story short, the docs tell my parents that I'm as good as dead... they have me hooked up to all these breathing machines, etc etc, to keep me alive. By medical definition, I'm only barely hanging onto life because of the machines I am hooked up to, and it's only a matter of time before my brain collapses. Yeah, ugly picture. 1) Therefore, by your definition, since I was only "being kept alive by machines", I wasn't actually a living being? I mean, that is what you said after all. I can tell you right now, the entire time these machines were keeping me alive, I felt the pain of the pressure on my brain as it tried to expand beyond the limits of my skull... the pains in my midsection because my liver was not functioning properly were quite real. The pain from every organ in my body trying to die didn't go away simply because I was connected to machines to live... To this very day, my kidneys and liver don't work as well as I would like, but I am quite, uh, "VIABLE" as you would say. Alive and kicking, and certainly a living being. 2) And let's not even dive into "do black people have rights?" If you've even read half of what I've written thus far, I've made it quite clear that I am an equal right activist, even if it requires my fist to ensure those rights. Besides, I'm 1/4 Native American, so you can be damn sure I'm all about civil rights. 3) The constitution does guarantee my rights as a native American, the rights of my African immigrant neighbors, my Mexican neighbors, and just as importantly, the 20 week unborn child that sits in my wife's womb as we speak. That's what the consitution guarantees.. not the right for a woman to have sex, get pregnant and then abandon her responsibility to her child because it's inconvenient for her. |
1) This is an easy one. You were viable before you had the disease. What I was talking about has nothing to do with the example you gave, since you were already able to fully survive outside the womb. My argument was simply about where we draw the line. What if in 100 years we can keep a baby alive and have it grow into a healthy human being after it has been out of a mother's womb for one day (which is theoretically possible since all the genetic information required for development is already there)? Is it viable at one day old? That's a bad standard, since it is based on medical technology (which can change over time).
2) I never claimed you were racist, and I never suggested you were anything but the most socially responsible and conscious human being in the world. I was simply pointing out that your argument about precedents becomes ludicrious when taken to an extreme.
3) No, actually the Constitution by itself doesn't guarantee a lot of your rights, or at least not in a way that benefits you in any tangible way. If someone discriminates against you and you want to sue them about it, the Constitution isn't going to do you a damn bit of good without some kind of statute on the books that gives you a cause of action (like the Fair Housing Act). The Constitution may protect those rights, but without a statute to back it up in most cases that right is meaningless. Someone can kill my entire family, but if there isn't a criminal statute on the books that says it is illegal, the Constitution isn't going to do me a damn bit of good. Well, maybe unless I gave them some wicked papercuts with a copy of the Constitution!
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
