The Gaming Den

clikml wrote:That is an interesting comparison between Palin and Limbaugh. It would not surprise me if she is gunning for his job instead of Obama's.

I've heard that too, even from my presepctive it's kind of bizzare. She has got the speaking presnece of Obama, only without the teleprompter at her side, and the gaffe level on par with Biden.

(Note: I mean she speaks like Obama does when his teleprompter breaks down ... or when he is caught without one.)

I think medium term she might go for the party itself, although what part might be open for debate. I think in doing she is going down the path of tears JC Watts went down.

Crissa wrote:Well, it's heritable from people who already have it.

WTF? No it isn't. It's a TRISOMY. There are three chromosomes. That is a selection defect that happens very rarely. It requires that you got two copies of a single chromosome from one parent. Gametes with 24 chromosomes are almost always aborted by the body.

A Down Syndrome person does not create more Down Syndrome children than normal. Their fertility is reduced by about 50% because half their eggs have an extra chromosome and normally get spontaneously aborted.

If you want there to be less abortions, you should abort Down Syndrome fetuses. Their mere existence creates a lot of natural abortions.

-Username17

tzor wrote:I've heard that too, even from my perspective it's kind of bizarre. She has got the speaking presence of Obama, only without the teleprompter at her side, and the gaffe level on par with Biden.

(Note: I mean she speaks like Obama does when his teleprompter breaks down ... or when he is caught without one.)

I REALLY want to get a hold of whatever drugs you and your fellow Birthers and Teabaggers have been smoking in your off time inbetween protests against universal health care and affordable internet service, because there is no way in hell that any reasonable person could favorably compare the rhetorical abilities of Sarah Palin to Barack Obama. Sarah Palin is an idiotic, incoherent religious lunatic, and everything that comes out of her mouth is nothing more then verbal diarrhea. The fact that you or anyone else in your party take this woman seriously is absolutely insane, but it's all the more frightening that you actually believe and openly reiterate the Fox News talking points about "Obama not being able to speak without his teleprompter" and "Biden making worse gaffes then Palin" when it's clear to anyone that is not part of "the base" that these are both obvious lies. Hell, Palin can't even speak coherently whenever she is reading a pre-written "farewell" speech, and GWB2 routinely and painfully mangled the English language any time he opened his stupid mouth. The only people with teleprompters that I have a problem with are the folks at Fox News, who apparently have no issues with the cognitive dissonance associated with criticizing someone for using a teleprompter for public speaking when they are in fact completely dependent on teleprompters and can't go without them for more then 30 seconds without throwing a fucking tantrum.

Anyways, I'll end this post with a slideshow of Saint Reagan reading from teleprompters. Enjoy!

Wow, I just watched some more O'Reilly clips on youtube and it's obscene how he treats his guests. How do my octogenarian relatives watch that shit and not become ashamed of or offended by the right wing prick?

I go to family gatherings sometimes and the discussion invariably is a bunch of world war 2 vets talking about how Obama is going to kill us all, starting with the old people of course. Here's to the most effective terrorist in the country. Thanks Fox News.

On a more cheerful note:

One of those people who deny the lunar landings tried to call out Buzz Aldin.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOo6aHSY8hU

I know it's assault and illegal...But I'd honestly say it's justified.

FrankTrollman wrote:A Down Syndrome person does not create more Down Syndrome children than normal. Their fertility is reduced by about 50% because half their eggs have an extra chromosome and normally get spontaneously aborted

...And of the surviving ones, a significant number more have Downs. Just because they have less surviving offspring does not change that.

Lastly, Koumei, that site just says they kill animals. It doesn't say where the animals come from, refer to any sources... It just lets the reader make the assumption they are taking in animals like a local shelter and then slaughtering them. Which is wrong. They take in animals from rescue operations that are already slated to be killed, in attempts to save them. Perhaps misguided, but it's a seriously stupid argument. It's like saying 'THE INTENSIVE CARE UNIT KILLS PEOPLE!' because more people die there than anywhere else in the hospital.

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:A Down Syndrome person does not create more Down Syndrome children than normal. Their fertility is reduced by about 50% because half their eggs have an extra chromosome and normally get spontaneously aborted

...And of the surviving ones, a significant number more have Downs. Just because they have less surviving offspring does not change that.

Only in the case of Robertsonian Translocations. Don't be retarded.

-Username17

Heritable can be defined as having a greater chance because of who your parents are. It can be said smoking and drinking, or religion, is inherited, even though those are not primarily genetic.

-Crissa

God dammit Crissa, shut the fuck up.

Heritable diseases have a fucking definition. Translocation Down Syndrome is considered a heritable disease. Chromosome duplication Down Syndrome is a nonheritable disease.

You continuing to talk on this subject causes me physical pain.

-Username17

Crissa wrote:It just lets the reader make the assumption they are taking in animals like a local shelter and then slaughtering them. Which is wrong. They take in animals from rescue operations that are already slated to be killed, in attempts to save them.

In 2000, when the Associated Press first noted PETA's Kervorkian-esque tendencies, PETA president Ingrid Newkirk complained that actually taking care of animals costs more than killing them. "We could become a no-kill shelter immediately," she admitted.

PETA holds absolutely no open-adoption shelter hours at its Norfolk, VA headquarters

That's without going into the supporting arsonists, stating outright that they'd still be against animal testing even if it did mean the cure to cancer/AIDS and so forth. Because a person can say "Well that stuff is bad, but hey, at least in general they're doing well." But we're focusing on the fact that they're not. They're not taking last-resort critters off the death row of other shelters and trying (but usually failing) to give them a life. They're collecting them from owners and killing them in the van before they even pull out of the drive way.

Umm.

The only animals I've ever had evidence that peta took in were animals the local shelters would not, or were to kill.

I don't see how a four year old case (which mostly showed how poor the state's laws were) of a single van makes for a pattern.

-Crissa

tzor wrote:(Note: I mean she speaks like Obama does when his teleprompter breaks down ... or when he is caught without one.)

Uh...Obama beat the snot out of his competition in about 2/3s of the 25 or so unscripted, teleprompter-free debates he did in the campaign. People who think he can't speak well without a teleprompter are fucking idiots. The difference between Obama and every other politician I've ever seen is how he deals with off-the-cuff questions: Obama actually tries to answer the question posed to him rather than rattling off some pre-planned talking points only vaguely related to the subject at hand.

Sarah Palin, on the other hand, claimed that the fact you can see a completely uninhabited part of Russia from a completely cut-off from the rest of the world part of Alaska as foreign policy experience and flat-out refused to answer the questions posed to her in the one debate she was in.

Comparing the them to each other is grossly insulting to people who aren't complete idiots.

Neeeek wrote:Uh...Obama beat the snot out of his competition in about 2/3s of the 25 or so unscripted, teleprompter-free debates he did in the campaign.

Debates don’t count in part because he was playing by different rules. Yes you can always sound great when you know that you aren’t going to be fact checked. You can sound great when you “weren’t there” (that in a nutshell was his argument about the Iraq war and why he kicked the crap out of all the others on the debate floor; not being in the senate at the time he didn’t have to vote for it; they did) and when your own voting record is either not on the table (his state senate record) or was simply a constant stream of “present” votes.

That’s why practically every fucking thing he said in the campaign he has broken in the first few months of his administration. This is the most controlled, the most secret administration of all time. He has kept all of the “horrors” of the Bush administration in place; raising the bar in some cases by calling any who don’t bobble head nod in agreement with him, mobs or terrorists. Bills are rushed through without reading; we still have Gitmo; we still have Iraq. Even the great sainted reporter Helen Thomas has called him worse than Nixon! All those things he lambasted others in the debates? Guess what? He’s doing them!

If he had a real debate with a real person who he could not play the “race” card as an excuse to get out of the tough questions, he would have been toast. JC Watts would have mopped the floor with him. Heck, Joe the Plummer managed to scratch through the veneer of that slick Chicago Snake Oil Salesman and get him to really fubar himself.

Whee! Kill the Downs!

That's fucked up, seriously fucked up.

Downs folks are happy, functioning people.

Cystic Fibrosis or whatever, very different story. But Downs? Seriously?

mean_liar wrote:Whee! Kill the Downs!

That's fucked up, seriously fucked up.

Downs folks are happy, functioning people.

Cystic Fibrosis or whatever, very different story. But Downs? Seriously?

Who said anything about killing them?

I said aborting them if for whatever reason the body fails to do it itself. Once they are born, they are people and then we have a moral obligation to provide them medical care.

The vast majority of Downs fetuses are aborted spontaneously. Intervening to cause a miscarriage if that mechanism fails is no more of a subversion of nature than is giving insulin to people whose pancreas fails.

-Username17

...and this is why you come across like a deranged Aspie, Frank.

You're advocating an ethically repulsive abortion for a child that has a developmental abnormality that is more annoying for parents than the child.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11478542

Annoying? It increases their infant mortality rate by two thousand percent. It reduces their lifespan by 20 years. Many of them will never be able to read in their whole lives. What the fuck man? Yes, when they are alive they are humans and we try to keep them alive, but what the fuck would possess you to want to do that to someone? I mean, their lives have improved a lot since the bad old days, ad that's good. But there's no damn reason to voluntarily bring someone into the world and condemn them to This.

Now... Cystic Fibrosis is another story altogether. It actually is heritable. And it's recessive. And it has effects other than the one where your ABC transporters are fucked and your lungs crystalize and smother you. So while it's something of a death sentence to have, we as a species would actually be losing some genetic variability that might well come in handy were we to eliminate the genes altogether.

Down syndrome is an example of something that we can never get rid of from the future because it happens new as a nondysjunction event each time. But there's nothing for humanity in letting it happen in any case where we have prenatal examinations. Cystic Fibrosis is an example of life threatening disease that we will eventually want to eliminate entirely, but which we should probably wait on doing that until we get all GATACA on the problem because reducing humanity's genetic variance is dangerous.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:...What the fuck man? Yes, when they are alive they are humans and we try to keep them alive, but what the fuck would possess you to want to do that to someone?

LOL.

"Do that to someone"

Yes, letting them be born naturally is "doing something" to them.

It's not like your profound lack of empathy and/or horribly deficient understanding of ethics is some sort of surprise, but every once in a while it does still flare up in a dazzling display of profound and ignorant cruelty.

You do not "let" someone be born. It doesn't just happen. It requires 40 weeks of hard labor by a real live person and the expenditure of effort and resources by people around them to make that happen. If the potential mother just goes about her business doing what she did before her pregnancy she will starve to death and the baby will never even be formed.

Fuck, let's look at the "study" you linked to. They interviewed Five Adults with Down Syndrome who were coping. Now, they selected non-institutionalized people and adults, so they were taking a very special sample. To get those five adults, there were statistically speaking forty Down Syndrome fetuses. Here's the breakdown:

• 30 of those fetuses will end in abortion by the body's natural processes. Some of these natural abortions will be horrendous or even life threatening, depending upon where the woman is and what she is doing when they happen.
• 2 of those will fetuses be born and become real humans only to die before their first year. One from heart abnormalities and one from failure to thrive from malformed intestines.
• One of those fetuses will be born and become a real live human who knows their own name only to die painfully from catastrophic organ failure before reaching their 18th year.
• Two of those fetuses will be born but be of such limited mental functioning that they will never enter society or be able to give their consent to be interviewed by some hack sociologist.
• Five will be born, learn a language, and reach adulthood. They will probably live their entire life feeling extremely lucky because they will know how completely the odds were and are stacked against them. Those are the five that the study talked to.

Don't give me that shit about not having empathy. Where's your fucking empathy for the other 35 mothers? Hell, where's your empathy for the five children who had to live with crippling disabilities when they could have been born 4 months later instead?

-Username17

And that is much better than, "all 40 mothers have a social obligation to have their kids aborted".

The only real question deals with those 10 that you feel are going to not be aborted naturally. Your response is to abort them all, knowing that half are going to be functioning adults and 3 are going to be poorly-functioning people that are an economic drag.

That you don't see that as a problem is something you might want to consider from a different viewpoint from your own.

Who else is on the eugenics chopping block, Frank? Where's the line?

mean_liar wrote:And that is much better than, "all 40 mothers have a social obligation to have their kids aborted".

The only real question deals with those 10 that you feel are going to not be aborted naturally. Your response is to abort them all, knowing that half are going to be functioning adults and 3 are going to be poorly-functioning people that are an economic drag.

That you don't see that as a problem is something you might want to consider from a different viewpoint from your own.

Who else is on the eugenics chopping block, Frank? Where's the line?

No. It doesn't have to do with the 10 whose bodies would fail to abort the fetus, all 40 of them will continue to have a fetus in them under a potentially life threatening danger of spontaneous abortion for months. The ones who are going to abort naturally would still benefit immensely by having earlier and safer abortions in a hospital setting. Assuming that they want children, they would be able to do that sooner and run less risks with tearing up their uterus.

But what you're persistently not getting is that Down Syndrome isn't even a eugenics question. It's a birth defect. Like fetal alcohol syndrome. It's something that happens to a single child and more than likely if they grow up to be able to have children of their own, those childen would just be normal children.

The question is incredibly simple because it doesn't effect the long term genetic makeup of humanity either way. It's just a matter of whether you want to roll the dice and have the 1 in 4 chance of successfully bringing the fetus all the way to term to have the 50% chance of having a baby that would grow up to be able to make a birthday wish on their 18th birthday. Or take an extra 3 months to have child that's healthy. If you roll those dice, you're an idiot and a monster. There's no genetic diversity to conserve, no eugenic burden. Just the slow and safe route vs. the quick and dangerous route that will permanently cripple your child even if it "works."

How important is your child's birthday?

-Username17

Right, so I know this isn't really "news", especially to most people here, but I just found out recently...

I didn't know the US was no longer on the gold standard. I didn't know we hadn't been on it for something like 40-50 years now, and that our currency is, effectively, meaningless.

Or rather, it's worth whatever we say it is.

Which means that, technically, our money is completely worthless, and we could conceivably solve our money problems by making shit up.

Prak Anima, our money was always completely worthless.

The reason why our economy was based off of gold and silver so long ago was precisely because gold and silver was worthless to them back them.

Money is just a medium of exchange.

PA wrote:Which means that, technically, our money is completely worthless, and we could conceivably solve our money problems by making shit up.

Which would cause inflation, which has its own set of problems.


Actually, you know what? Here's a very good website that details the history of money in an easy, conversational tone and why the gold standard completely sucked eggs:
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-gold.htm

Tzor, in response to "we still have Gitmo; we still have Iraq".

Are you misinformed, or just trying to misinform us? Yes, he didn't pull 175k soldiers out of Iraq upon his inauguration speech. That would be irresponsible and crazy... and is not what he promised. But we are pulling out and doing so responsibly, which is what he promised.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middl ... 13164.html

2003: 175,000 - original invasion force
2004: 108,000 - US starts withdrawal
2007: 168,000 - increase in violence
2009: 131,000 - troop levels trimmed

Early 2010: 128,000
August 2010: 35,000 - 50,000
2011: Complete withdrawal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War

The withdrawal of U.S. forces began at the end of June, with 38 bases to be handed over to Iraqi forces. On June 29, 2009, U.S. forces withdrew from Baghdad.

They're at least working towards it and movements are being made.

As for Gitmo, he has signed an executive order right after his inauguration declaring that it will be closed within the year. They are moving prisoners out, I hear new reports where people are bitching that he has done so. So why are you propagating this myth that he has done nothing?

Please take back your misinformed words "That’s why practically every fucking thing he said in the campaign he has broken in the first few months of his administration." That is not even remotely true and it is entirely disingenuous to even suggest it.

I have plenty of complaints about how he has handled the financial crisis (the irresponsible banks and AIG should have been taken over and broken up), and I find many faults with his administration as well and agree with Helen Thomas' rant that she had against them, but there is no need to spread lies about them.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Prak Anima, our money was always completely worthless.

The reason why our economy was based off of gold and silver so long ago was precisely because gold and silver was worthless to them back them.

I thought Gold had an inherent worth (well, sorta, like anything else, it's worth whatever the buyer will give)

Money is just a medium of exchange.

PA wrote:Which means that, technically, our money is completely worthless, and we could conceivably solve our money problems by making shit up.

Which would cause inflation, which has its own set of problems.

Yeah, I know, but, still, we could technically do it...