I’ve resisted commenting on the story of the 10-year-old girl and her need of a lung transplant, mostly because when I first heard of it I believed HHS Secretary Sebellius was (happily!) correct: it isn’t, nor should it be, in her control to throw around waivers: there are established protocols for organ donation and scores issued for where people are placed on lists precisely because we wish to remove the politics from the equation.
I’m supportive of having UNOS review and revise its rules for pediatric vs. adult lung donation — its protocols are outdated, in my estimation, and in this particular case, the generic intent for separating out pediatric patients from adult donors, the size of the lungs and the size of the child’s chest cavity, doesn’t obtain, meaning that I believe the case should be viewed on an individual basis and not as part of some rigid rule set — but what I’m not comfortable with is watching so many conservatives clamoring for Sebellius to intercede and issue some waiver.
And while I can see why the parents are acting as they are (I’d be doing the same), what we’re to take away from this is that it is by petitioning our rulers and applying media pressure that we will find relief — that is, who we know and how capable we are of promoting our cause — not through the very kinds of apolitical channels and rule sets we really should be demanding.
In other words, many conservatives are missing the forest for the trees; and as we’re reliving our pasts today, I’ll point out that I stood against many on the right during the Schiavo ordeal for just the same reason. How you get there matters.
And it seems to me you can’t complain about centralized, bureaucratic decision making that will take place under ObamaCare while at the same time demanding centralized, bureaucratic relief in this specific case — even if (or even especially if) we’re dealing with an emotionally-charged situation.
The proper place to petition and to apply pressure is at the counsel responsible for writing up the rules. And Sarah’s doctors should be given audience and input. If they believe that any kind of lung will save her at this point — and that her condition moves her to the top of the list based on scoring separate from the pediatric / adult distinction, it is at that point and on that basis that she should receive the organ.
In the Schiavo case, a federal court judge was attacked by conservatives for upholding process. That is, he recognized it wasn’t his place to step in lest he be acting as a philosopher king. Here, the judge stepped in, swayed by the emotional arguments of the petitioners and swayed by the glacial movements of any bureaucracy to re-examine its own assumptions.
From a conservative and classical liberal perspective, I can see why the judge ruled as he ruled. But I don’t agree with it.
Similarly, I can see why conservatives wish to blast Sebellius, knowing as they do that she is not, in other instances, constrained by what is her proper function. But they are wrong: here she is acting correctly, for whatever her reasons or ulterior motives, and she shouldn’t be criticized for doing so. In fact, this is the kind of behavior we should, as constitutionalists appalled by the coming politicization of our medical system, applaud and demand be adhered to at the federal level.
Sorry. I know I’m the big heartless stickler for rules here today, but it is what it is.
And I suspect the same conservatives who were calling for statist intervention on the Schiavo case are leading the charge here, not realizing that they are in fact working against the very core of conservative principle within the context of governance.
Sorry, but there it is.
Making me 2 for 2 on the Contrary Meter today.
One of the larger problems I have with this whole scenario is having the government in charge of a transplant list in the first place. Bureaucratic functionaries are hardly the best people to be entrusted with powers that impact individual decisions of great import. The government is famously slow to make changes based on updates in technology, and having a team of medical people in charge of something like this would allow changes more quickly to any rules or guidelines governing who is eligible for what, and when.
The benefits of a centralized organ registry are evident: a larger pool of organs can be provided to a larger group of people over more space. If a heart appears in Idaho and the best match is in Louisiana, it’s good to identify that quickly and transport right away. The downside is the same as with any large operation: there is greater opportunity for fraud, corruption, and waste to impact and degrade any benefits.
In any event, with matters like this, it comes down to the question, “who do you trust”? And increasingly the answer is, “not government”.
In the end, in this situation, it really is coming down to, “Someone will get the lung and a chance at continued life, and someone will not, and will likely die.” And that’s sad.
The Contrary Meter rings 3:
There is evidence that the IRS was actually doing its job profiling conservative groups but legitimately botched the effort for whatever reason. In the Obama era there is plenty of cause to form a conservative / TEA group and with an underfunded IRS operating on the bone-headed Citizen’s United rationale, the inevitable occurred.
Goes the rationale. All of which makes a whack of sense to the left, of course, notwithstanding in this view a lot of important details are omitted, among them the profoundly questionable nature of unnamed PAC funding (including the Establican money and influence engine), political lobbying as a corrupting influence, an increasing IRS budget, a flagrantly wasteful IRS, the inherent unconstitutionality of personal income taxation, and the perfect storm all the above was allowed or even directing into political oppression.
My point is that the macro must precede the micro and conservatives are wise to strip long-prior bad ideas from the law books before using them as handy cudgels themselves. Stop playing by the left’s rules by failing to see that they’re synonymous with statism, which is a bad idea from either side.
Yes. the National Marrow Donor Program manages quite nicely without HHS in charge of it. Sebelius should not be in a position to make a call like this.
I’m with Jeff and Darth on this one. This is an issue of medical ethics and protocol not of knee-jerk sentimentality. While it is a tragic situation for Sarah and her parents, it is equally tragic that another, an adult who is equally in need, may be denied a lung due to slap-dash legislating from the Bench. The questions not being answered are whether or not the girl is a good candidate for transplant? Is there a match available? Will she follow the course of anti-rejection drugs that she must take for the rest of her life faithfully or will she be remiss? What is the likely outcome of a lung transplant in a patient with CF? Is the pain and suffering of the transplant itself worth it? The family is pushing to save Sarah from dying. I know it’s hyperbole, but odds are she may die anyway. We’re all going to die one day, some sooner than others.
Thankfully, I am not these parents. I have been on the fence about heroic measures using organ transplant for many years and this case isn’t changing my mind that it is too much like playing God. My understanding from my doctor buds, is that the host body will eventually reject the transplanted organ. In the meantime, the patient will be immune-compromised for the remainder of his/her life. And finally, if the organ fails is the patient then eligible for another transplant and why?
Within the current framework, the problem with that evidence is that it fails to understand what “political activity” is. Campaigning for social issues or even specific legislation is perfectly acceptable as social welfare work. Campaigning for or against specific candidates or parties is the restricted sort of political activity. For instance, you can have an org that exists solely for the purpose of opposing Obamacare and be within the 501(c)(4) rules. So, the “evidence” is bunk.
Amended. Lightly.
I agree pretty much entirely, Jeff. The job of the government should not be to divert aid resources to whoever or whatever cause that will give them the best PR. That’s practically the definition of self-serving.
I just hope that the lungs would have gone to a vegetarian black socialist lesbian unwed mother with Masters degrees in Angry Studies and Community Organizing. For the irony. Or the poetic justice. I have trouble telling the two apart these days.
we’re supposed to be growing organs to specification in vats by now I thought
Strong point.
We could also argue a damn strong case that anything that opposes anything more than a skeletal State is for the social good and that all joint, public action could be considered inherently political, but we both know neither are ever flying.
I want to hit the point that conservatives using statism to further anti-statist conservatism isn’t a wise strategy the majority of the time. All this political contribution rule-making rubbish should be replaced by a prohibition against the Corporate State usurping government and the end of the IRS.
Crap like this comes from conflicting original principles.
Caesar looks to the crowd, that ever hungry beast of a billion heads, for its verdict. Thumbs up or down. Life or death. The beast roars out its unthinking “decision”
Ever unmindful that come the morrow the Fates will pluck more from its ranks to be the next days festive spectacle, a bug to be crushed by the Caesarean thumb.
Umm, Jeff G? Those aren’t *conservatives*. They’re anti-abortion nanny-statists.
They want to use the “big stick” of government to do good, they just want to change the definition of “good” to match what’s in their holy book, not the current liberal marching orders.
They may sometimes agree with us, but .. they are the enemies we must keep closer than friends.
Mew
That doesn’t make a lick of sense, either in the present context or the context of the Schiavo controversy.
Ernst, I think the cat is tag-teaming with the electric hamster to try and turn this into an abortion/embryonic stem cell thread.
I say “Nay”.
To leigh’s points, this situation calls for the consideration of multiple factors, many of which require significant medical knowledge to understand or even acknowledge. Having to supplicate in the Court of Holy Healthcare to allow tailoring their one-size-fits-all hospital gown is an unfortunate reality in our broken system.
I’d really love to get Mrs. Darth on here. She has TONS of information about the medical business from the inside, and she’s not shy about her opinion. I haven’t spoken with her about this topic yet, as she’s on Day 9 of a 10-day ER rotation and thus is rather cranky when she gets home. But I’m sure her insight would be interesting. Plus she’s got great stories about things people shove up their butts and How Drug-seekers React When Told No.
My main belief on this is that the government ought not be the one controlling who is on the transplant list. Changing that would end the problem completely. That aside, let me play devil’s advocate:
Similarly, I can see why conservatives wish to blast school principals for reacting to student violence they way they do, knowing as they do that they are not, in other instances, constrained by what is their proper function. But they are wrong: here the principals are acting correctly, for whatever their reasons or ulterior motives, and they shouldn’t be criticized for doing so. In fact, this is the kind of behavior we should, as constitutionalists appalled by the coming politicization of our educational system, applaud and demand be adhered to at the federal level.
Basically, you can make the same argument for the rules regarding the Zero Tolerance policies that exist. I’m not sure how you can reconcile the two, and I’d be interested in hearing how.
Or modified ones, the notion that the Fed is entitled to a piece of any and every transaction unless proven otherwise being chief among them.
The transplant rules balance competing interests based on general medical truths and a sense of equality among recipients. Zero Tolerance rules outlaw the application common sense with no regard for any objective truths or concern for those affected.
I hadn’t really spent much time considering this case, It was the type of emotionally fraught story I usually avoid investing in. I did come across this by Ace last night, it’s pretty much the same reasoning as Jeff’s, and I agree with both.
This seems to be an excellent example of the claim that obamacare will change the relationship between the citizen and the government.
Concurrent to policy forcing virtually all primary phenomenon in the centralized progressivised economy those transactions occur in.
Which, freer markets.
Pablo – couldn’t you make the same argument about the loss of common sense to the 12-year old vs. 11-year old rule currentloy in place?
The crux of my argument is this: Bureaucrats make rules. Bureaucrats follow rules, even if the rules are stupid. People get pissed off because there is no flexibility. In regards to transplant policies and zero tolerance rules, they’re both in the same bucket.
I Callahan, the school principals are not reacting to “student violence”. They’re reacting to half-eaten pastries, fingers, inch-long Lego toys and the g-word. So right off I think your analogy doesn’t work well.
Wisdom has been called the ability to see reality as it truly is and act accordingly. I wouldn’t say what school principals in Maryland are doing approaches wisdom by any definition.
Callahan, I don’t think they’re both rules are in the same bucket, in this case it isn’t a matter of just enforcing the rules on the young girl, it also affects the person who is next in line according to the rules. What do you tell that person, “sorry, you aren’t as popular, stay behind the rope”?
There is evidence that the IRS was actually doing its job profiling conservative groups but legitimately botched the effort for whatever reason.
If they didn’t do anything wrong, why did they lead with an apology? And can we be sure those figures on that chart are accurately represented?
The House Dems who played the “c’mon, it’s OBVIOUS” card regarding the little anti-abortion prayer group and other “political” causes show that the politicization of EVERYTHING means that if you’re campaigning against LAWs you’re breaking the 501(4)c rules.
the notion that the Fed is entitled to a piece of any and every transaction unless proven otherwise being chief among them.
As exemplified by the House Dems very deliberately and smugly referring to tax exemption as a “subsidy.”
Boy, I wished I were in the place of some of those people. John Eastman didn’t mince words, and that one woman was REALLY good in defending her status as a citizen, not a subject, and I think she (or another woman) called out the use of “subsidy.”
However, she objected that they were implying that they were taking food from the mouths of the hungry. I would like to have called out the “what’s yours is ours unless proven otherwise” assumption that the term “subsidy” encompasses.
Plenty of other chances to stick it to our overlords in that hearing.
here the principals are acting correctly, for whatever their reasons or ulterior motives, and they shouldn’t be criticized for doing so. In fact, this is the kind of behavior we should, as constitutionalists appalled by the coming politicization of our educational system, applaud and demand be adhered to at the federal level.
What the hell does this even mean?
Why are they acting correctly? What exactly are we supposed to applaud and why?
Please clarify your position.
If the point is to get the federal government out of making decisions about organ recipients and setting up school Zero Tolerance rules, I’m all for that.
The only reason I can think of to have the government involved in the organ list in the first place is to avoid the lawsuits from people low on the list.
According to the narrative that profiling was a mistake. If that narrative holds, then the IRS really is or was a neutral entity underfunded to the point that it targeted conservative groups just as a function of the sheer number of conservative groups forming via rules allowing concealed contributions.
On the one hand how can we trust any source, but on the other , are you challenging the veracity of a group evidently partaking in some of the gazillions of dollars wasted on tax accounting? dicentra, I’m shocked.
You could. But you’d also have to fashion a rule that doesn’t have a cutoff point, which, good luck with that. When you insist on human judgement in that situation, you’re forcing a human decision on who gets to live, which is best avoided for a long list of reasons. Lack of zero tolerance doesn’t have such pitfalls. No one loses when an administrator chooses to apply reasonable judgment.
There is no defense for the IRS’s behavior. This source ignores a lot more information that has since come out such as leaked donor lists, targeted individual audits of conservatives, and so forth that further buttresses the evidence of what this was.
Sorry, there is ambiguity here.
MThe only reason I can think of to have the government involved in the organ list in the first place is to avoid the lawsuits from people low on the list.
It’s a matter of funding for the crews (doctors, nurses, pilots) who do the harvesting and transport of the organs to and from various parts of the country and to keep a nationwide inventory database of those in need of transplant. It could be privatized, but I’m not convinced it would be less expensive or more efficient. Many, if not most who are on transplant lists are gravely ill and have maxed out their private insurance and are on Medicaid. So, circle gets the square.
Pablo says June 6, 2013 at 12:07 pm
No one loses when an administrator chooses to apply reasonable judgment.
That was my initial thought, but some would say that if one kid gets a favorable judgement ruling, while another does not, that the second kid has “lost”
To me the only really glaring difference is the purpose of the rules, and the way they are carried out. The school rules have a highly political purpose (causing gun-aversion in kids); the list doesn’t seem to at this time (although it could be used that way).
mondamay says June 6, 2013 at 12:12 pm
Sorry, there is no ambiguity here.
Sorry.
Sorry, there is not one scintilla of ambiguity here.
FTFY
If they were trying to streamline the process for identifying potentially unqualified 5o1(3)c and 501(4)c groups, why did they not also flag for “organizing” or “progress” or snare any pro-choice, pro-Obamacare, anti-gun groups?
Is what I’m saying.
I’m certain streamlining isn’t the problem. That’s just the narrative.
Because of their Obama era rarity.
If the “transgressions” are the same, then yes. But if one kid gets suspended for a switchblade and another kid doesn’t for the butter knife she brought to cut her fruit, then no. Punishing the latter kid does nothing for anyone in any sense of the term.
Because of their Obama era rarity.
I’m beginning to detect a trace of sarcasm.
“And while I can see why the parents are acting as they are (I’d be doing the same), ”
That’s why I was first shocked by it. Well, that and the Sebellius/Obamacare connection. Took a whole day for me to read into the situation, then found not disagreement, but confusion. I think it was the Drudge headline that had people up in arms over it.
While I’m glad that the little one will get her lung and live, the process is just…wrong.
DarthLevin says June 6, 2013 at 11:08 am
Ernst, I think the cat is tag-teaming with the electric hamster to try and turn this into an abortion/embryonic stem cell thread.
—-
So .. you seriously think that someone like Santorum, who was right in the thick of things on Schaivo, *doesn’t* want to use government according to his good book?
You’re non-serious and/or delusional.
Mew
“*doesn’t* want to use government according to his good book?”
And what “good book” are/will you use?
“You’re non-serious and/or delusional.”
Self-awareness; look into it.
While I’m glad that the little one will get her lung and live, the process is just…wrong.
Perhaps not. She is spiking a fever and the hospital is getting ready to intubate her if necessary. Her heart rate is also way up. To top it off, the parents of another critically ill child in the same hospital have also filed a lawsuit to get their son put on the adult donor list. This whole thing is rapidly spiraling out of control. The girl is on both the adult and the child donor lists.
It sounds hard-hearted to laymen to stick to protocol, but the rules weren’t arrived at arbitrarily by Big Medicine. Anyone who has ever worked in a hospital knows that the health and safety of the patients is paramount and those concerns will often conflict with those of the patients families. Not in the terms of giving care, but in practical matters such as diet, length of visits, nature of gifts (plants and flowers are verboten in ICU), number of visitors, strict adherence to scheduled drug dosage, et al. Who hasn’t bitched that the nurse woke then to take a temperature or give a pill?
Doctors have the added burden of explaining diagnoses that the family may not understand or are in denial over. Plus the misplaced anger that someone somewhere isn’t doing something ANYTHING! to make their loved one whole. Stir in an hysterical and medically illiterate press and watch the shit hit the fan.
you seriously think that someone like Santorum, who was right in the thick of things on Schaivo, *doesn’t* want to use government according to his good book?
Please give another example of Santorum using the levers of government to enforce Biblical compliance.
Also, please cite chapter and verse in the Bible that commands that nature should never be allowed to take its course.
He must have the Hysterical Lib New Modern Version Good Book, di.
Thanks Leigh. I guess I still don’t get it, but trying. I mean I’ve gone from heartbroken surrogate parent to greedy miser baron on this one. I know there’s a point in between.
In the homeschooling area, Ysa aced her eval in K and 1. 2? not so much, I’d give her a 40-50. But still, she’s only 4. They want 5 large to enroll her in K, and 1500 hust for the materials without a teacher. On top of that? I’d actually have to claim that she’s being homeschooled. EFF that noise. Now what?
Montessori is waving over there, Blitz. You won’t be sorry. She’ll be reading chapter books by the end of the school year and doing real math (they use counting sticks), plus they make them write their names in cursive (cursing, my kids used to call it). The public schools no longer teach cursive writing, but the parochial schools do. Talk to someone at the parish and see, well if daughter will go for that is.
Leigh, I really do think I get your point, and it’s kind of the same thing I was thinking but (there’s always a but) the doctors said she could accept an adult lung. I do see the point in the waiting list, but the facts are that chilldren do not die at the pace of adults AND when they do? they are rarely on donor lists.
Again, I’m all over the place on this one. Please correct me as you see fit.
Daughter LOVES the online school. it takes…patience to deal with her,. You’d know why but she reads here so I can’t divulge it. Also, she doesn’t know what you do. (wink) I’ll try Montessori before Parochial, she’d never go for that. Thank you!!
Think of me as an agent for learnin’.
Blitz, both of my girls went through Montessori pre-K and I thought it was very good for them (younger one is still going). Montessori techniques seem to foster the “a-ha” experience that is the gateway to reading, and that was certainly the experience with my older one. In K, we move them to the local parochial school, but we’re members of the parish so it’s a natural fit for us.
Thanks darth!! I’ll have to go through my daughter with this, but it looks good to me. Only problem is that my half brother tried it in middle school, failed miserably. But then again, I gave him a home and 2 plus years in my shop. same result.
Hey blitz, I must have edited that bit out when I posted. Meant to add that, IMHO, past early elementary Montessori loses its value. The unstructured discovery-type learning works much better in younger plastic minds when connections are forming exponentially, but when you get to age 7-8 those older minds need a structure to latch onto and grow.
Darth, I get your meaning. Hate to admit it, but I once was a teacher. Early education,Head Start…If you can’t catch them and captivate them young, you’ll never get them.
That’s exactly why I don’t want Ysabelle in public school, nor does her mom ( The one that lived ) . Ysa really belongs in 1st grade, but cost is a factor for this online school. 5 large for K? No. I’ll look into Montessori in greater depth in the morning, but I have to be up at 4am, so Goodnight all!!
Just for the sake of argument, whose good book is likely to produce, from the perspective of a classical liberal* a better political regime? Rick Santorum’s Douay-Rhiems Bible? Karl Marx’s? Al Gore’s? Rachel Carson’s? Mao’s? Lenin’s? Margaret Sanger’s?
*which, in all fairness, I’m probably not.
I’ve been trying to come up with the Catholic version of Calvin’s Geneva, and I’m not having much luck. Maybe I should have an adult beverage and try to think harder.
whose good book is likely to produce, from the perspective of a classical liberal* a better political regime?
The Book of Mormon.
No, seriously. It contains all kinds of object lessons about how a society can lose its freedom. A king tells his people that even though they’ve had pretty good luck with kings thus far, it’s too easy for it to go wrong, so he appoints judges to adjudicate the law.
A few generations later, the well-educated and wealthy decide that they don’t like this rule-of-law thing and propose a switch to monarchy, so they put it to a vote and lose. They’re so mad at losing that they go off by themselves and form their own kingdom, then make an alliance with the sworn enemies of their former fellows, and they become even more savage than the savages they ally with.
In another instance, a prophet-warrior relays a message from God that if He tells them to arm themselves and fight to defend their liberties, then they’d damn well better.
And in another instance, they fortify their cities to starve out the bands of robbers that live in the mountains and raid the cities.
Throughout the book is a warning against organized crime and its infiltration into the seats of power.
Stuff like that.
John Locke (than whom it is not possible to get more classically liberal, IMO) was a Deist.
So, there’s that.
is thinking that there isn’t a god unscientific? really we’ll let the proggtards handle it!
I heard Prager say atheism is irrational. Believing life and all this we call the universe springing from nothing and all.
The way he put it, it did sound pretty irrational.
Gulermo says June 6, 2013 at 2:17 pm
“*doesn’t* want to use government according to his good book?”
And what “good book” are/will you use?
“You’re non-serious and/or delusional.”
Self-awareness; look into it.
—–
I do not intend to force any book but the declaration and the constitution, the idea that people have the right to pursue their own lives, free of chains, and that government had damn well better be chained down or it will enslave us all.
Santorum, Huckabee, and others clearly demonstrate that they want their good book .. and that they’ll trample the declaration and the constitution to get their way. Anyone who throws in with their lot is not my ally .. they are at best sometime-enemies. Are you in their camp?
I find that your self-awareness comment is in line with a playground “I know you are but what am I?”
Can you do better?
Mew
Neither Santorum or Huckabee hold office. They are not in a position to force anything upon the people.
But wasn’t it written, like, 100 years ago, when people talked funny? How can that be relevant in 2013?
cat, can you give an example where Santorum wanted to trample the constitution? I can give you an opinion on that if you do, but even if I don’t agree with it, Thjere is no person I agree withn 100% of the time.
I do find, generally speaking, I have more agreement with the political agenda of Christians than the political agenda of Marxists, so yes, between Santorum and a Marxist I would have to say I’d throw my lot in with Santorum.
If that makes me your enemy, you must care more for Marxists than Christians, so I won’t count it as a loss.
Stupid fat fingers!
BT says June 6, 2013 at 8:41 pm
Neither Santorum or Huckabee hold office. They are not in a position to force anything upon the people.
—–
Don’t be stupid. I cited Santorum and Huckabee as easily recognizable examples of the species Anti-Abortion Nanny-Statist.
They want to do the same thing Nanny Bloomberg wants to do with his soda ban – use power of government to enforce a definition of “good” upon people.
There are many more wannabe-Nannys out there.. Jeff G pointed out a few in this piece, eh?
Seriously. Don’t be stupid.
Mew
Pro abortionists are the anti-constitutionalists. That whole right to life thing being key.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” has been around a hell of a lot longer than the right to free birth control. They predate Santorum and Huckabee by centuries.
“Santorum, Huckabee, and others clearly demonstrate that they want their good book ”
yea well the proggtard metropolitan faggots like the nyt , nation, mother jones cite their marxists “good” book
Another affectation to deal with. Great.
“They want to do the same thing Nanny Bloomberg wants to do with his soda ban – use power of government to enforce a definition of “good” upon people.”
hey doc gosnell killing viable “big as a bus” babies is effin murder dirt bag.
who’s a smart kiki fuff?
you are, kitty! yes you are
There are creative writing programs out there. Google it. There is one near you. We don’t need to workshop everything here at pw.
Enough with the affectations and purple prose and creative capitalizations.
Write like a sane adult who isn’t tripping balls, please. This isn’t too much to ask, surely.
you tell em Mr. bh
“who’s a smart kiki fuff?”
does straddling the fence make your ass big?
Aw, come on bh, can’t you enjoy the moment when it calls BT stupid?
Simple slapstick like that is rare these days.
or you like it there from any direction?
I liked when it said “don’t be stupid
Mew”
Priceless.
Anti-Abortion Nanny-Statist has the same meter as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
what does it mean?
“Seriously. Don’t be stupid.
Mew”
fu
“Anti-Abortion Nanny-Statist has the same meter as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”
overturn roevrape give back to the states
Yeah, I’ll admit it, I did find that enjoyable to read and then laugh at.
Please, don’t be a killjoy. I haven’t seen an opportunity like this since monkyboy brought up balloon fences
You make a compelling argument, Lee.
Please do carry on, acat.
This cat person hangs out on Althouse’s blog. I’m almost positive. I remember the stupid “mew” signature and thought wtf? Is this an adult person?
Woof.
*drops mic*
Hard to argue with somebody who signs off with a “Mew,” isn’t it?
Assertion kitty?
What did the Founder’s and the Framer’s think about abortion? About infanticide? What laws were on the books regarding either?
What are the arguments from First Principles as they would have understood them?
as if kiki fuff said anything remotely unreasonable
When the cartoon character agrees with the talking cat, it’s time for all of us to re-examine our principles.
“as if kiki fuff said anything remotely unreasonable”
same koskid twaddle different day
Luckily it’s only abortion that involves moral issues with the law. Everything else is just robot accounting rules.
Yep, we really did luck out.
Imagine if theft or rape had these sorts of moral dimensions. We’d have a hell of a time dealing with those sorts of issues after our Bibles had already been thumped empty.
The sine qua non of personal liberty is the unrestricted right of a woman to have her uterus scraped and suctioned. Perfectly reasonable.
perhaps the cat bumped its head on the drywall
i think dr gosnell’s “baby feet in a jar” might be fun to sale at proggtard 2013
kiki fuff loves freedom
kiki fuff loves jasmine rice
kiki fuff loves individual liberty
kiki fuff loves getting a good deal on a shirt at the gap factory store
kiki fuff loves limited government
kiki fuff loves sunbeams
kiki fuff loves personal responsibility
kiki fuff loves the indigo girls’ early stuff
kiki fuff loves economic freedom
It seems to me that the nanny-state exists to protect you from the consequences of your actions —either by cushioning the blow, or by preventing you from making the wrong choice you’re too stupid to not make without on your own—, so I’m not persuaded that restricting abortion or even banning it altogether really is an example of nanny-stateism.
at every demonrat event show up selling “dr gosnell’s baby feet in a jar” the cure for american values.
We shall go on to the end, we shall mock them
fightin France, we shall mock themfighton the seas and oceans, we shall mock themfightwith growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall mock themfighton the beaches, we shall mock themfighton the landing grounds, we shall mock themfightin the fields and in the streets, we shall mock themfightin the hills; we shall never surrender“kiki fuff loves
freedommurdering babies go gosnell”Yep. Bloomberg holds office, Santorum and Huchabee don’t.
Bloomberg, depending on the actual powers of the mayors office could possibly enact his ban.
Huckabee and Santorum not having any more power than the microphone and soapbox, not so much.
Don’t worry so much about the folks who opine for or against gun control, worry about the ones who can actually change the law in one way or another.
And I’m the stupid one?
“kiki fuff loves personal responsibility”
tell the faggots to knock it off in the bath houses
you put the left foot in you take the left foot out then shake it and whatever hokey pokey!
hey you guys Mr. newrouter says knock it off
Since almost all abortions happen as the result of irresponsibility, I’d say you’re wrong.
let’s ban abortion then that will for sure make all the abortions go away cause of how everyone respects our fascist slut whore of a brokedick government times like a thousand cause of it has moral authority out the butt
“let’s ban abortion then ”
the 9th and 10th amendment thingy
“let’s ban abortion”
industrial grade stupid with basil
Let’s decriminalize murder because of how criminals won’t respect any authority, and we wouldn’t anyone thinking we were all judgey.
that sounds like a rash thing to do
the important thing is to ban stuff what we don’t like
Really? It was your idea.
I just turned it inside out.
No. The important thing is to protect the innocent.
that’s like turning a shirt what you bought at the gap factory store inside out
you can’t wear it like that people will think you’re a momo child
“the important thing is to ban stuff what we don’t like”
like abortion
Like pedophilia?
Should that be banned? It’s not like sanctions against it will stop it entirely. It’s not like it isn’t based on social mores.
There are intelligent arguments to make here. Ric and cranky have expresses a good one previously.
This isn’t one of those good ones.
“the important thing is to ban stuff what we don’t like”
like letting the states decide if baby killing is ok?
expresses=expressed
You’re mistake bh is in assuming that happyfeet is interested in making an argument, intelligent or not. This is just attention-whoring.
Instead of banning abortion, haw about we just give a human being with a beating heart the inalienable right to life under the constitution?
You know one way to discern evil? It tries to hide it’s action. Like when the school makes it an expellable offence for a 14 year old girl to bring aspirin, but the very same school will conceal an abortion from the girls parents.
If it’s good and right, why ya gotta hide it from the parents”
no fair banning stuff what’s already banned for one thing it’s redundant and for another thing it doesn’t expand government
I hear you, Ernst.
You’ve just banned the death-penalty Lee.
I might be willing to make that trade though.
Don’t try and argue pedophilia with happyfeet, he’s for it if the adult calls it love .
“no fair banning stuff what’s already banned”
thus spake the pikachu
I wouldn’t say that Ernst, unless you can equate a murderer judged guilty by a jury of peers with the rest of us.
I guess I’m absolutizing inalienable then. Maybe that’s why Jefferson used unalienable instead?
I doubt I could write it properly but I just imagined a dark comedy based on a world where you had to argue against one of those damn babies to convince a judge to issue an execution order.
It’d be a bit like Brooks’ Defending Your Life but instead of flashbacks it would be flashforwards about how that dumb kid kept you from going out on Saturday night or having enough disposable income to buy a nicer car.
I don’t want to grow up, I’m a Toys-R-Us kid
That’s what popped into my head with bh’s examples, anyways.
for the pikachu
“Before the fall when they wrote it on the wall
When there wasn’t even any Hollywood
They heard the call
And they wrote it on the wall
For you and me we understood “
Penumbras and emanations means that the bill of rights shoots off light and casts shadows. The light illuminates un-written other rights that must exist for those written to exist (or so is claimed by the black robed clan) while the shadows fall upon some written rights and dim them because were they not so limited they would destroy aspects of the written rights and the implicit rights uncovered by the light that shoots out of some of the written rights. Thus we end up with a sort of standard model of our rights where truth particles of different energy collide both elastically and inelastically with one another within the influence of meaning fields that together produce contradictions and compromises that turn the whole thing into a fluid or legal froth. And that froth is whatever the black robe clan claims to see when they look at it through their textual, ethnic, sexual, and cultural lenses.
Thus the rights as written (and unwritten) are so deftly encrypted by their very theoretical complexity and subject to modification through dramatization and stirred up controversy that they lie beyond the reach of the layman and must be interpreted and subverted or ignored by them and them alone after taking due advice from the children of the bar. There is no 95 theses that can be nailed to the courtroom door. There is no one who can translate the froth into a meaningful deterministic systematic paradigm that the layman can grasp.
Thus we have devolved our inalienable rights to the fiat of experts and whichever advocates they might deign to stoop and listen to on the way to their frothy augury.
“Do you like to take a yo-yo for a ride Zombie, I can see you’re qualified Walk around collecting Turkish union dues They will call you sir and shine your shoes “
oh speaking of musics
national soros radio has a feature on those parquet courts people I bought cause of Mr. Abe
so now it’s just hipster douche music
except I still like the one song about north dakota
I’ve heard Levin say in/un alienable are the same and interchangeable.
I think the point is that government can’t take that right, thus the need for a jury of your peers.
I could be wrong, but that’s the way I understood it.
Thank you, Justice Douglas’s Ghost.
“No I’m never gonna do it Without the fez on, oh no No I’m never gonna do it Without the fez on, oh no
That’s what I am, please understand I wanna be your holy man
No I’m never gonna do it Without the fez on, oh no Ain’t never gonna do it Without the fez on, oh no
That’s what I am, please understand I wanna be your holy man”
baracky
As long as we’ve got you dialed in on the Ouija board, would you ask Arlen Specter for me if it’s the fact that Griswold v. Connecticut generated six opinions (A Majority opinion, three concurrences and two dissents) that makes it a super-precedent?
mr godstuff the 1970’s culture do sumthing
“(A Majority opinion, three concurrences and two dissents) that makes it a super-precedent?”
and if you say no to dat?
I’m probably being overly literal Lee. If something is alienable, you can give it away; if it’s inalienable, you can’t presumably then it can’t be taken from you either.
Except of course, it can.
But is it just?
oh did i say “fuck you baracky tonight” tell mich the same. ON THE RECORD
“I heard Prager say atheism is irrational. Believing life and all this we call the universe springing from nothing and all.”
Just playing Devil’s advocate here: why is it “irrational” to believe that life, the universe, and everything came from nothing (or, alternatively, “always existed”, in the cyclic models), but “rational” to believe that a God capable of creating all those things came from nothing, or “always existed”? Prager is just pushing the problem one stage back and pretending that it’s been solved.
I submit that attempting to use logic on this type of question is an inherently flawed approach.
We know for a fact that formal logic is not the Final Answer (it’s possible to prove that there are statements that cannot be proved but which are are true nonetheless).
Seven Justices thought it was stupid of Connecticutt to continue to ban contraceptives, but couldn’t agree among themselves as to the rationale for why it was unconstitutional. Instead of leaving it to the good people of Connecticutt to sort out, Douglas made up some ridiculous shit about emanations and penumbras, Goldberg, Harlan and White tried to ground a right to privacy in the text of the Constitution.
So what you’ve got is a Supreme Court that’s near unanimous that there’s a right to privacy, but they can’t agree where in the constiution that right is to be found.
“They are hounded down to the bottom of a bad town Amid the ruins
Where they learn to fear an angry race of fallen kings
Their dark companions
While the memory of their southern sky was clouded by A savage winter Every patron saint hung on the wall, shared the room
With twenty sinners
See the glory Of the royal scam
By the blackened wall he does it all He thinks he’s died and gone to Heaven Now the tale is told by the old man back home He reads the letter
How they are paid in gold just to babble in the back room All night and waste their time And they wandered in from the city of St. John Without a dime
See the glory Of the royal scam
“is it just”
In an eye for an eye kinda way, if you’re into that.
“So what you’ve got is a Supreme Court that’s near unanimous that there’s a right to privacy, but they can’t agree where in the constiution that right is to be found.”
too effin stupid to say that it is a state issue and close it down. 9 losers
Nah, Red State, Hot Air, Patterico, Moe Lane.
so scotus gets to decide 9th 10th amend rights? eff that.
kagan scalia wise latina eff yourselves. HI BARACKY DID YOU RECORD IT?
Is acat this insipid over at those other sights too?
SCOTUS gets to decide everything sooner or later newrouter.
What rock have you been living under?
since we are being monitored: michelle o you be one dumb motherfucker
“SCOTUS gets to decide everything sooner or later newrouter.”
not really. in my state we don’t do stupid
“What rock have you been living under?”
i be “amnesty dude” these days oh and FUCK YOU BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA ISLAM/COMMIE TOOL
SBP, I think your question revolving around “always existed” fails to take into account that while time is an inalterable and unchanging fact for us, for God time is as malleable as clay. Just the concept of that is nearly impossible to wrap your mind around, When you think that God can view the whole of the universes history as the flashbulb of a camera, or spend the next trillion years living within the last second, concepts like “always existed” become meaningless.
“kiki fuff loves personal responsibility”
Only when that responsibility is for something described as the removal of unwanted nonviable parasitic foreign tissue that might cause health problems if left in.
Here, I’ll let someone WAY SMARTER than any math-head engineer could ever hope to be explain the dreadfully cold mechanics of this merciful abstraction, this euphemistic soothing technique to both you, and Kiki.
———————————–
“‘It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,’ the man said. ‘It’s not really an operation at all.’
The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.
‘I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in.’
The girl did not say anything.
‘I’ll go with you and I’ll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it’s all perfectly natural.’
‘Then what will we do afterwards?’
‘We’ll be fine afterwards. Just like we were before.’
‘What makes you think so?’
‘That’s the only thing that bothers us. It’s the only thing that’s made us unhappy.’
The girl looked at the bead curtain, put her hand out and took hold of two of the strings of beads.
‘And you think then we’ll be all right and be happy.’
‘I know we will. Yon don’t have to be afraid. I’ve known lots of people that have done it.’
‘So have I,’ said the girl. ‘And afterwards they were all so happy.’
‘Well,’ the man said, ‘if you don’t want to you don’t have to. I wouldn’t have you do it if you didn’t want to. But I know it’s perfectly simple.’
———————————-
LBascom: “You know one way to discern evil? It tries to hide it’s action. Like when the school makes it an expellable offence for a 14 year old girl to bring aspirin, but the very same school will conceal an abortion from the girls parents.”
Well said. Thanks to the magic of PR, optics, memes, and narrative management something can look like the Gosnell case, yet sound like freedom, reason, social justice, and the enlightenment all rolled up in one, when spoken about.
This alternate reality bubble approach is used on the offense as well as the defense.
People who don’t want babies to be killed on demand en masse for convenience are portrayed as stupid, blood thirsty, wanna be clinic bombers, who hate the educated.
Those who point out what Margaret Sanger was really about, going from her own words, are called nuts and conspiracy kooks who hate women and progress.
People who point out what has happened in China in the name of population control are told that they want to see raped women dying alone, in agony, by the thousands, daily, in highly contaminated butcher’s lairs, hidden away in back alleys.
Anyone who is revolted that the act of abortion is obscured into an appearance of safety, normality, and even nobility, via the pathological transformative context of Orwellian slogans and bland terms, is cheerily caricatured into a Taliban-like, science fearing, theocrat who want the ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ to come true.
I don’t know if God exists.
I do know that if someone believes God exists, then he does exist for them.
“I almost cut my hair ‘Twas just the other day It was gettin’ kinda long I could-a said, it was in my way But I didn’t and I wonder why I want to let my freak flag fly And I feel like I owe it to someone “
David Crosby
“There is a town in north Ontario,
With dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind
I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there.
Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us
Helpless, helpless, helpless
Baby can you hear me now?
The chains are locked
and tied across the door,
Baby, sing with me somehow.
Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us
Helpless, helpless, helpless.
“
Always liked powderfinger. like the cowboy junkies version better.
’68 0n the ’13s fu BARACKY
“If I had ever been here before
I would probably know just what to do
Don’t you?
If I had ever been here before on another time around the wheel
I would probably know just how to deal
With all of you
And I feel
Like I’ve been here before
Feel
Like I’ve been here before
And you know it makes me wonder
What’s going on under the ground, hmmm
Do you know? Don’t you wonder?
What’s going on down under you
We have all been here before, we have all been here before
We have all been here before, we have all been here before
We have all been here before, we have all been here before
“
“Too late to keep the change,
Too late to pay,
No time to stay the same
Too young to leave.
No pass out sign on the door
set me thinking
Are waitresses paying the price
of their winking?
While stars sit in bars and decide
what their drinking,
They drop by to die ’cause it’s
faster than sinking.
“
I always liked the Innocence Mission. For some reason they bring my human side back out when I’m all gritty and cold. They are like a psychological neck and back rub that has been stored away for emergencies. Sometimes Johnny Cash or the Weavers help too.
The Innocence Mission probably thinks I hate women, freedom, pleasure, and want to legalize rape and blowing up doctors though.
The world is a vampire.
mock them oh and fu BARACKY
verizon are you there? fu BARACKY or the asshole of the united states
hey can i say fu us gov’t here?
hey barack fu
“You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good bye.
Teach your children well,
Their father’s hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you’ll know by.
Don’t you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.
And you, of tender years,
Can’t know the fears that your elders grew by,
And so please help them with your youth,
They seek the truth before they can die.
Counter Melody To Above Verse:
Can you hear and do you care and
Cant you see we must be free to
Teach your children what you believe in.
Make a world that we can live in.
“
Cyndi Lauper
probably
doesn’t really see
my true colors
does she ?
If she did,
Would she roll her eyes?
Snort a laugh,
and slap her thighs.
Take a pic
And tweet it,
Let the whole world
Eat it,
And move on?
She doesn’t seem to be
the type to stop
And pet a creepy nerd
Strangled by a loneliness
That lurks in wait outside the herd.
Driven off by booster shots
Like maybe a kind word…
But no
she’s got
To catch
a plane
And fly
to Maine.
It looks
Like Rain.
Again.
@LBascom: I thought I’d addressed that with “I submit that attempting to use logic on this type of question is an inherently flawed approach.” but maybe I wasn’t sufficiently clear.
Prager is making a category error by trying to apply “logic” in the first place. He’s talking nonsense.
The day is young yet, but “Weiner testily shot back” has already made it.
There are epistemologies that deal with this and prove that consciousness is synonomous with purpose, purpose being coded into any system of spontaneous complexity and thus inseparable from them. The argument that material origins exclusively predicate an inherent existence is both flawed and primitive. It’s not borne out in materialism itself.
In fact, with logic comprising proof and there being proofs that materialism is an incomplete construct and that purposeful existence is entirely logical, then obviously it’s materialism that must give way and not logic.
Of course, logic is not at all flawed when it proofs the components and trajectory of existence to find them inherently synonymous with purpose, with purpose being the result of conscious intent. Thus materialism ceases to exist without a supporting purpose. Boom: God.
As a friend wrote me recently: “So long as the individual mind is bent in the delusion of its own non-existence, it is impossible for it to recognize its true significance in the wider order of events. In order for the atheist to verify the positive claim that there is no cosmic intelligence above mankind, the atheist must prove in all possible test cases that random chance is the operative mechanism — that no other force is intervening in the outcome. In fact this cannot be proven, and every test I researched showed the opposite conclusion, that consciousness determines certain outcomes by its mere presence, that the observer negates random chance.”
Interestingly, the delusion of non-existence is the foundation and cornerstone not of nearly all scientific thought but of nearly all progressive thought — if Progressivism is thought — which is to say in collective form the zero-state platforms of communism et al. Given that behavior is fractal, what manifests collectively also does so individually…hence the mire of progressive thought.
Their opposite entity is pure Individualism, in this world probably some manifestation of government-less order brought by the individual acceptance of complete self-responsibility. One sees this principle in the American founding; the expectation that good men shall do the right thing. With enlightenment being the individual’s highest potential and enlightenment found via the individual mind, we have another supporting argument for accepting mind as uniquely actualizable in its search for the meaning of existence, which is to say the purpose of a conscious intent.
Here again we see the nature of the actualized Mind, the entity at one with its Universe, “Nature’s God”, its fellow man, its Purpose and its trajectory. It’s all sacred and not one molecule of it defies logic. We exist, it can be said, in the Mind of God, there being no other construct.
Spoke with Mrs. Darth about the lung transplant scenario for the little girl, and she had quite a lot to say. I’ll attempt to hit the high points:
In general, lungs don’t last long. This girl is in no way going to get a chance at a normal life with this transplant, unlike a heart. So this isn’t about saving this girl’s life but forestalling death for a few years. Of course, nobody knows the future and extraordinary things happen, but the best expected result is an extension of five to seven years. So someone will live a bit longer, someone will die a bit sooner.
Having the government in this is troublesome, but the current way organ harvesting and transplantation is done is nothing short of amazing. The main factors that have to be considered are genetic typing, distance, and need of the recipient. The goal is for the sickest person who is the best match to get that organ if it’s within reach, because of the short times involved.
When Mrs. Darth was in residency (about 15 years ago), there was a brain-dead 14yo in her hospital whose parents approved taking everything possible from the child. So they did the typing and sent it off to the transplant registries. Once the best recipients were determined, phone calls were made to get the patient prepped, choppers in the air, and flights arranged. She watched as they did the harvest, and she described the whole process as amazing. First, there were seven choppers circling over the hospital. The OR had seven portable coolers standing by, and as the organs came out they went into the cooler. The cooler was taken to the flight deck, the first chopper took off, and the next one landed. And this repeated for each kidney, pancreas, lung, heart, liver. Then the machines went off, and they let the child, who just saved seven other people, die. Skin, cartilage, and eyes are taken later.
“Of course, logic is not at all flawed when it proofs the components and trajectory of existence to find them inherently synonymous with purpose, with purpose being the result of conscious intent.”
This, of course, would be known as “proof by repeated assertion.”
I’m not interested in playing that game. Sorry.
“declaration and the constitution,”
From whence came ye?
Hence the referrance to awareness.
“that people have the right to pursue their own lives, free of chains,”
With the exception of godbothers?
“Seriously. Don’t be stupid.
Mew”
Re: self awareness.
“m not interested in playing that game. Sorry.”
That’s ok. Jerry Springer is on somewhere, check your listings.
“This, of course, would be known as “proof by repeated assertion.””
Because you assert it? Really?
“That’s ok. Jerry Springer is on somewhere, check your listings.”
Let me respond on the intellectual level that this deserves: Go fuck yourself. Sideways.
I mean, I could spend several hours on an exhaustive treatment of how everyone who has tried to apply formal logic to religious issues, from the medieval scholastics down through Descartes and whichever philosophical tailchaser JHo is alluding to (in his usual uncited and excessively vague manner) has failed, then go into a detailed explication of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, demonstrating how these not only allow, but require, the existence of propositions that are unprovable, but true, nonetheless, and then maybe top it off with a discussion of the theological boneheadedness of religion sects that supposedly require faith as a component, yet nonetheless feel compelled to misapply logic in domains where it does not belong, but “Fuck you” works just as well.
It will save everyone (particularly me) a lot of time, and to be blunt, that time would be utterly wasted on y0u, Gulermo. Because between me and you, I’d wager a great deal that you’re rather more likely to find yourself being screamed at by a fat woman with five illegitimate children, while being ushered off the stage by a guy who walks on his hands and a bald-headed living example that Darwin was right.
Hope this helps. Have a nice day.
Damn this echo chamber — 175 comments and not one scintilla of disagreement on anything whatsoever. What a bunch of lockstepping wingnuts you all are.
Disproof by asserting false proof-by-assertion does have a certain consistency to, as you put it, an apparently neutral Devil’s advocacy. Granted, engaging thought to reply responsibly would be a contrast.
Of course, being me I wasn’t proving anything; I was briefly pointing to elements of a not uncommon epistemology among others that purport to. Logically, and to me, that is, which could be seen as a little more stick on the ball then fence-sitting while demurring.
Godel is infinitely smarter than me but regrettably that doesn’t stop me, at least, trying.
I think I see your problem. In this particular regard, I mean.
Oh, and what domains are approved to logic? Science comes to mind, but I’m sure I’m missing the entire roster.
“Go fuck yourself. Sideways.”
You have to ask yourself,(or not YMMV); “Crude, but effective, or just crude?” I asked myself the same question. I went with effective. You often present ideas and opinions I think are intriguing, so telling jhoward to go piss up a rope was rather disconcerting.
WRT “That’s ok. Jerry Springer is on somewhere, check your listings.” You are not required to have an answer for every question posed, (or an opinion, for that matter). You obviously have an opinion, why dis-engage?
“while being ushered off the stage by a guy who walks on his hands ”
You and me both, Buddy.
Gulermo, to be completely fair to SBP, the other day I felt moved to find his approval of a policy-led Fed playing with an inherently conflicted and terminal State economy the equivalent of monetary progressivism. It could be this choice of words has better informed his opinion of me.
Sound money and linguistic proofs of abstract spiritualism being illogical, I think could go the argument.
“find yourself being screamed at by a fat woman with five illegitimate children”
Actually, it was a middle-aged drunk Midwestern post-grad screaming at me about what EVERYONE knows, standing in a bar on the first floor of a whorehouse.
And she isn’t all that fat, a little hippy maybe, but all the more to hug.
“five illegitimate children” I only wish. Best thing to happen to me in this life. You should maybe try it? Either variety is acceptable.
In 1979’s “The Dancing Wu Li Masters” Gary Zukav got into quantum theory, particle physics, and relativity. Pursuant the title, he wove them into the ancient Chinese concept of patterns of organic energy and constructed a unified glimpse of the nature of the Universe.
As it turns out, this method and framework apply to numerous interpretations of existence, where an absence of boundaries between artificially-constructed domains – the agreement between Zukav’s modern physics and ancient Eastern mysticism, for example – clarifies the perception of reality, a perception often ruined in the West by the wall erected between what’s called science and its arch-competitor religion.
Rabbi Moshe Averick from a link above:
Apparently there is an irreducible complexity to life that cannot be explained, mitigated, or eliminated from the fuller perspective on existence. According to Averick, there is no legitimate cause to believe in the Gods of Chaos and Chronos as Spontaneous Creators of Everything by happenstance and time when we evidently will not allow each other to believe in The Unknowable God – even as the wholly undefined Entity the name itself acknowledges.
Appeals to the State that produces this State are serious science but appeals to the Creator of this Universe are not.
In short, we’re hung up on the descriptors for Something we cannot begin to know before the fact of our not knowing It. We’ve boxed both science and religion into constructed parameters and neat definitions that neither may stray outside of. This naturally limits our field of view…just as both intended but surely a shallow western science as much or more so than religion.
Whether God exists is, at best, a semantic hurdle for the secular “scientist”. “Science” is itself a semantic construct because if it is taken at its literal whole instead of as the manifestation and sum of Materialism, has zero vested interest in limiting anything at all, much as it itself was once (and must be again) a component of philosophy, which Zukav’s observations (he wrote Masters as a journalist and not a novelist) indicate he watched fulfill a certain mysticism centuries after it was first conceived. The mind came first, the scientific evidence later.
Likewise Averick confidently states that what was once evident to the Western mystical mind is now too verified by science. The mind is a “scientific” tool. The mind is a component in the grand construct of Existence whose influence is Reality.
Harvard geneticist, Richard Lewontin:
Paul Davies:
After some perceptual point clearly there is no science because science has erected its own limits and perspectives and from that, its own potential. Conversely, there is no religion in God. These are linguistic terms. There is only the mystery of an absurdly awesome Existence, a state that flatly defies it’s alternative, which is not to exist.
We don’t know so much as why states occur, why bodies and particles invariably attract or repel, why constants exist, how the simply incomprehensible complexity of a equally bewildering number of variables were set such as to allow Existence to balance on impossible odds. Yet we have the arrogance to define God by atheism and limit thought and findings — limit “science” itself — by an undeveloped faith when we should finally introduce ourselves to the concept, entity, and state of spontaneous, defiant, conscious Being.
SBP, I think the observation Prager was making was that the positive statement “there is no God” is as faith based as the statement” there is a God”, but it is logical to arrive at the later, the universe came from something, while it’s illogical to be positive it came from nothing.
“nothing.”
Would that be a nothing-nothing, or a nothing-something? Just asking, because one is not like the other, (abstract concept v oberservable reality).
I mean, I could spend several hours on an exhaustive treatment of how everyone who has tried to apply formal logic to religious issues, from the medieval scholastics down through Descartes . . .
I figure if St. Thomas Aquinas couldn’t do it, who am I to think I can?
Faith isn’t logical. Logic isn’t everything. Therein lies the dilemma of proofs.
If human beings have these two alternatives placed before them, god is [gods are], on the one hand, and god is not [gods are not], on the other, what becomes of the simple answer from some human beings asserting of themselves, after looking at these two propositions carefully, “we don’t know — in any meaningful or strict sense of the term ‘know’, as human beings know anything — regarding either of these two simple propositions, whether or if either is true”?
To those asserting the truth of either or the other of the two propositions, this would seem to be a problem, wouldn’t it?
Seems so.
In fact, it seems like the sort of problem which would engender a long chase after a solution (even a solution which was very early understood to be highly unlikely to be obtained!), wherein the chase itself is the thing. Long like, say, the entire length of so called western intellectual history.
“Would that be a nothing-nothing, or a nothing-something?”
Not being an atheist, I don’t know, but from what I gather atheists believe everything came about as a spontaneous cataclysmic explosion. What they think was before I don’t know, but as someone that believes in God, I assert “before” is a human construct of time that has no bearing on God.
Blaise Pascal resolved that conundrum as well as anybody has —or likely will— leigh.
Indeed, Ernst. I have several times referred nr to Pascal’s Wager.
Sdferr, I would say, looking around at the world, it is logical to conclude “I don’t know”. I also assert it’s logical to look at the world in all it’s glory, and think it must be a creation by a superior intellect.
I agree with Prager though, it’s illogical to say “This is definitely NOT a creation, it’s all a product of cosmic chance”.
Come to think of it, Prager may have been using “rational” rather than “logical”, if that makes a difference. It was just a couple of minutes on Fridays show I think, and I’m only going by memory.
No one else heard it?
Mr. Prager is a Jew, and it seems to me that it stands to reason he would consistently uphold a specifically Jewish position. How not, I think? So there isn’t any particular marvel about his assertion, I mean.
The problem, such as it is, or such as it seems to me to arise, lies elsewhere. One response, I suppose, is to ignore it. Another response was to put it to death.
Darth, thanks for giving us Mrs. Darth’s take on transplant. It is truly amazing an bit of choreography to get all the organs harvested and on their way.
I think it an amazing thing too, and I’ve never had a problem with the practice. The term “harvesting” in relation to it makes me queasy though.
I don’t know why…
Faith is based on deduction not unlike how scientific knowledge can be based on materialism. If faith is the product of deduction, then with deduction being entirely suitable for logical inspection, faith need not be illogical.
Just as with science, many times we learn what we first agree to explore and we agree to explore what appears logical enough to investigate.
I’d go further to claim that the entirety of Christianity of a high enough cognitive level is all logic because it deals with constructs that hold because of their interleaving absolutes: Love, Grace, Redemption, and the rest. If scientific reality is the product of perception, then perception is no less important than reality itself. We know mind influences outcome and we find arguments that reality is cognition coming to the fore with scientific principles supporting them.
Logic isn’t everything but everything is very likely logical in perceptual terms, whether materialistic or cognitive. “Science” holds this as its own principle, and Sheldrake’s admonishment against it to me shows it fails a lesser standard in that regard than the bar held for faith.
That principle strikes me as much more sensible then that contemporary science can legitimately rule out probabilities or trajectories because it perceives its principle of the unique whole, failing only what it doesn’t yet know but believes it shall.
I’ve been a believer most of my life, with a few lapses and I don’t agree that faith is in any way logical. I’ve never had a Jesuit tell me that faith is logical. Faith is a leap of logic.
We don’t know anything as corporeal human beings. We think we know and the more we learn, the more we realize how little we know and are able to comprehend. Our ability to understand our world and our universe and Creator is limited by our puny tools of understanding. Holy men have spent their lifetimes studying sacred texts and the meanings of a single word in a single sentence and how that word can turn the meaning of the sentence two or three ways.
St. Paul himself said “Now we see through the glass darkly . . .” We don’t know what God is. We can’t because we are only human.
Three point six percent of the universe consists of ‘zono and company.
Who knew?
The term “harvesting” in relation to it makes me queasy though.
It’s a creepy term, but there really isn’t a better one. Nurses and doctors who do organ harvesting almost universally speak about how powerful the experience is. It seems so wrong to remove living organs from the bodies of the, for lack of a better word, undead. The brain dead are no longer who they were and their bodies are being kept alive artificially in order to remove the organs that they may live on in the body of another. Many aren’t able to participate in the harvesting the first time other than to tag along with the team. I couldn’t do it, but I am glad that they are able to do so. Being a surgeon forces one to divorce oneself from the humanity of the circumstance and focus on the task at hand.
I am not an organ donor on my identification. My family is aware of my wishes and I have an advanced directive about donation, but I’m not throwing that information the way of the DMV.
Faith is a belief in things unseen.
See those leaves on the tree moving around over there? I have faith in it being caused by the wind, though I can’t prove it wasn’t a passing ghost. Logic tells me it was the wind.
Perhaps recycling would be the better term.
Donation.
A giving.
Taking the donation. Accepting the giving.
LBascom says June 7, 2013 at 11:53 am
I think it an amazing thing too, and I’ve never had a problem with the practice. The term “harvesting” in relation to it makes me queasy though.
I don’t know why…
Darth’s description struck me as a bit ghoulish, I’ll admit.
There are some modern wonders that lose some luster with additional knowledge.
See those leaves on the tree moving around over there? I have faith in it being caused by the wind, though I can’t prove it wasn’t a passing ghost. Logic tells me it was the wind.
Novels are born of such thoughts.
Then Thomas Aquinas is a fool who wasted his life and ought rightly be scorned as such.
Seriously leigh (well, half-seriously) if that’s how you feel, you might as well be a Lutheran or a Calvinist.
Then Thomas Aquinas is a fool who wasted his life and ought rightly be scorned as such.
Hmm, that brings to mind a story I was told by a Catholic friend who loved Aquinas (so make no particular vouch for it) that Aquinas, toward the end of his life, repudiated his own works as something somehow unworthy. How exactly? That is, as works of o’erweening egoism or what, I do not know. Still, I heard that story once.
In fairness, it occurs to me that I’m using “logic” and “reason” more interchangeably than I perhaps ought.
But how else was I going to get my Sola Fide dig in?
What happened though, to faith as the thumb of god pressing down on you — from his end, that is? I’d thought that there was at least a question, if not a simple controversy, whether anything human had to do with the acquisition of belief? So to say, that the motive force is imposed upon the faithful from without.
Such that, when so and so says “God saith such and such unto me”, there simply is no going behind the saying “such and such” to find out what’s up with that.
From the Catholic Enyclopedia, sdferr:
That’s good to read Ernst. Doesn’t look so much like a repudiation, as I wrote, though, but a mere diminishment to a proportion Aquinas would find fitting his newly acquired vision.
Yup.
It is generally accepted that St. Thomas’ proofs are not proof. Or so the good Fathers explained to us eager undergrads.
Maybe that’s because they were Jesuits and he was a Dominican.
A little too much conflating the foolishness of atheism with assertions of proofs of God that haven’t been made, and conflating profound faith with the bold certainty of the uncertain in this thread.
And Einstein and CS Lewis and Peter Kreeft and various philosophers and probably a billion or so other minds. The notion that faith is illogical is entirely illogical.
Consider that the traditional Christian, wishing to appear contrite and humble, believes in the miracles of Jesus as a tenet of his eternal salvation while discounting said faith as an artifact of his own religion, faith being illogical and only leaps of it leading, therefore, to belief. Because science and because apparently it is required to accept transmutation and levitation and spontaneous healing by the touch of Ch’i on faith but to accept none of them as rooted in reality except when by divine exception they are.
And this is somehow itself logical, notwithstanding that it is both a bald testament to bad theology and as a linguistic construct only self-validating in a vacuum of logic.
“Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do he will do also; and greater works than these he will do, because I go to My Father.
-John 14:12
“Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons. Freely you have received, freely give.”
-Matthew 10:8
That’s quite possible, Ernst.
That should do the job JHo.
It’s sufficiently vague and obscure to communicate practically nothing to the causal passerby, while maintaining an odor of a superior grasp of the essential things without having to have one at all.
As you yourself find it pointless, sdferr, I’ll expect to have the courtesy to salute your stated proof of intellect.
As the consequence, I propose to take my place admiring instead the prolific arcanities presented by way of, if I may, either my friend’s overwrought, random appeals to what by your standard I assume are partly grasped ancients, or in wispy criticisms of other of their minds probably an order of magnitude beyond the mean.
If pressed I’d admit to finding some resonance there with, as I believe it goes, maintaining an odor of a superior grasp of the essential things without having to have one yourself at all. Or I could be wrong, given what’s said by the casual intellect about me and he alike.
See, the other difference between us, my learned friend, is that occasionally I try to penetrate that mental permafrost to glean some underlying new truth, salvage some principle lost to time, or mine some spontaneous insight, that being the common product of great minds as well as, in their discovery, the best hope and tendency of optimists like myself.
Conversely, I can speak as best I know how to obtuseness and receive the predictable, noisy competition of an at least tacitly professed apathy. I think the slang of intentionally rude annoyance may be “ankle-biting” but I’m certain that’s not always what it was inherently intended to be.
Regardless, let’s conclude that it’s the uncompleted, as yet slightly off-topic, or even accidentally muffed rebuttal of a casual intellect engaged just enough to hazard an admittedly superficial comment. I accept your explanation.
Sounds like someone has a new thesaurus and ain’t afeared to use it.
Sorry, when I see sdferr and JHo go at it, I can’t help but start popcorn throw some gasoline…
I didn’t find it pointless at all JHo. What would make you think that? I found it just what you returned, a long sophistical blab about how highly you think of your pursuit. As such, the comment was a kind of praise.
As to criticizing Thomas Aquinas, I wouldn’t dream of it.
LB, I prefer to think of it as having no choice but to haul out a guide to French while touring Paris and sounding like a natural idiot to the native speaker of what is to English what semaphore is to Braille.
You know how the French are.
touche with the accent
I don’t know what semaphore is, but I’m with you on the French.
OK, I googled.
Great, now Obama knows I didn’t know what semaphore is. Thanks a lot!
Well, this:
Grasp of essential things [sic] = point, no? No grasp, no point. Of course, I have both a grasp and a point, and I even have a grasp of the point, oddly.
I’m sure it was, or at least it is now.
Not anymore.
At any rate, I’d encourage you to allow some reprieve from the rigid view that things are what we say they are — that being fundamentally progressive — here, among other places. Note that it’s not what I think you think it is, and note that this is no more a proof of God than anything I’d written.
The simple but evidently as yet incomprehensible point I grasp is that not only are things not what Science and Progress say they are, they’re not even available for constant behavior and certainly do not hew to convention and tradition as much as science insist they do and to hilarious ends see to it that they shall.
I alluded to this above, pointing out that hidebound reason is fundamentally collectivized — see that talk all the way through for a surprise — and that Individualism and its political extension over on the very-small-government / very-high-individual-responsibility end of the political spectrum are both of a rather higher cognition than their opposites.
As with the conversation on money the other day, in order to reinforce obsolete notions such observations are naturally dimmed to the level where to question “scientific” convention constitutes JHo’s idiotic God-proofs, and contesting the inherent failure modes of fiat money is to automatically become a conspiratorial goldbugger and a proponent of economic medievalism.
Those would be fallacious, such as it would be to rescind one’s empty charges immediately upon being called on them.
Not anymore.
Ha! Not anymore? Where had I started? Somehow even the simplest things seem to escape you here.
to rescind one’s empty charges
Jeez-o-wheez-O, that wasn’t a recension JHo (nor an empty charge!) it was a reinforcement. Or to put it another way, a spelling out of the point.
I agree: I find you particularly, obtusely simplistic (and not a little dishonest when cornered by misstep), sdferr. Always have, and
…probably always will.
I’m still not getting what you presume to be dishonest JHo? I’m doing my level best to be as honest with you as I can. Now if I’m simple, that I would take to be a good thing. I’d rather not be obtuse when I have any sharpness available though. But if you find something particularly dull or blunted, point it out and we’ll put it to the hone to touch it up.
“Or to put it another way, a spelling out of the point.”
Snort!
Yeah, you’re a regular Alan Turing!
Ok, if you want simplistic, here it is:
I exist, therefore I was created. Ergo, there is/was a creator. Everything flows from there for me.
LBascom: “but from what I gather atheists believe everything came about as a spontaneous cataclysmic explosion.”
You might want to look up who, exactly, came up with the Big Bang theory.
Hint: I’m pretty sure he wasn’t an atheist.
RI Red: “I exist, therefore I was created. Ergo, there is/was a creator. ”
God exists, therefore God was created. Ergo, there is/was a God-creator (let’s call him God, Sr.).
God, Sr. exists, therefore God, Sr. was created. Ergo, there is/was a God, Sr.-creator….
Is that a fair generalization of your argument?
(jumping back in, against my better judgment).
*
The neo-Platonists solved that problem with “the unmoved mover”
—to no one’s satisfaction but their own.
Big Bang, Lux fiat, tomayto, tomahto.
Heh.
My friend, the Catholic lover of Aquinas, as it happens, told me that story in roughly 1991, in the gardens of the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in Washington D.C., at Quincy and 14th Sts. NE, as we strolled with his little girls there.
He told the story with what I took to be great respect, if not even a kind of reverence for Aquinas, and told it as a great honor to Aquinas’ own wisdom. After all, as I said, he loved Aquinas, who lived a very long time ago; he loved not only this act — the description of which I may have bungled a bit, but don’t think that bungling would detract from my friend’s own take on the thing — but also Aquinas’ great works of elucidation of his own religious beliefs. So this was hardly a criticism, as JHo seems to think it.
But enough of a boring story.
“Hint: I’m pretty sure he wasn’t an atheist.”
That doesn’t confront me. I was talking about the irrationality of the atheists positive assertion “there is no God”.
The believer at least as some evidence and reasoning behind his faith, the atheist has only a contrary nature to argue with.
Does the atheist believe in the possibility of life on other planets?
I know I do, based on the conviction God has much more going on than we perceive.
The idea seems to strain the probabilities for an atheist though, at least I would think. I’m probably wrong though, the atheist being famous for their faith in probability’s…
I could be entirely wrong (probably am) but my impression is the math suggests that we’re alone in the universe.
If we weren’t, SETI would have heard something by now, unless we’re the first sentient species to arise since the Big Bang.
And what are the odds of that?
i don’t think we’re alone in the universe
i don’t think alien creatures have surreptitiously visited erf though
the thing about that is
human peoples are a lot like other hive creatures most especially in the sense that they’re totally and completely unaware that they are hive creatures
but the aliens would take one look and go oh this planet is infested with fascist hive creatures let’s go find us another one
Do you really think hive creatures have the awareness to recognize they’re part of a hive?
Sorry. I’m getting belligerent, so it’s time to call it a day.
as a hive creature myself mostly I want to go into the kitchen now
You’ve misspelled ‘jive,’ bumblefoot.
“If we weren’t, SETI would have heard something by now”
Maybe they just don’t have a lot to say.
All that’s happening here is that a part of the legislative branch wants to intrude on the executive branch’s turf, and the executive branch, defending its turf, refuses to yield.
The cause is incidental.
What, you don’t think turnabout is fair play?