revprez

Which is no different than the authority given to parents over their born children, except perhaps in your definition of reasonable terms (i.e., time) for destroying the embryos. I propose we at the very least treat embryos as we would any other potential organ donor, even if we don't grant them personhood status. There is no inconvenient or unhealthy pregnancy attached, just a frozen embryo in storage. Rev Prez

More like it's about passing off ass-end snap commentary as informed analysis. Why don't you show us some evidence that the far right generally dismisses "the role science has played in our success?" In the past thirty years, we've seen the Democratic party's national and state power diminish as Republicans piled on election victory after victory until they controlled the White House, the Congress and the majority of the statehouses. So where's the evidence that the far right is ignorantly surpressing scientific and technological progress? This is just rank ignorance. You don't even bother to state the ethical arguments here or even present this so called larger ethical consideration. You also fail to show that refusing to generally provide federal funds for embryonic stem cell research hinders our ability to compete. For all this talk about the beauty of empiricism, a lot of people in this thread feel comfortable talking out of their asses when it suits their political predisposition. I mean, Jesus. Pangloss, did you even read that last sentence? "[O]bjectively instead of ideologically?" Without support you've just reduced both terms to meaningless approbrium. Blue county "pragmatism" hasn't done much better in recent years. And how so? When abolitionism was an extremist position, did it kill this nation? What about the notion that there should be a government safety net? Or that federal taxes should capped at 40% instead of 70%? Or that we should have a standing army, or that separate but equal is never acceptable? Nothing sickens me more than the faux relativism of the center-left; simply because they're too chicken or ignorant to admit their own principles everyone else should abandon theirs. If you're going to argue something is "bad," tell us where you lie ethically and how you view reality. And do us all a favor and at least try to honestly represent the other side's views. Rev Prez

In what way is that a deficiency? And I wish we could throw secularists out of the country. Aren't you glad we live in a country where neither of these extreme views prevail? When you invent an empirical ethic, I'll stop thinking of you as a hypocrite. Why should Bush value your life more than an embryo's? You don't even like him. Rev Prez

You should follow along with the courses. Books are expensive and simply flipping through them doesn't constitute training. On the other hand, your lecture/recitation notes and problem sets are invaluable. If you still feel the need to trudge ahead, why not try building up a foundation with differential equations, linear algebra, probability, approximation and real and complex analysis? No one expects you to have an in depth understanding of any of these subjects--in fact, an introductory diff eq should touch on basic linear algebra and analysis (transforms). Rev Prez

Is this what you're talking about? Rev Prez

I'll second that. And as a preface for students with mulivariable and vector calc under their belt I'd recommend revisiting both with Apostol's Calculus. Rev Prez

Any suggestions? Online? Textbooks? Rev Prez

Fair enough. Rev Prez

And...? Rev Prez

Personhood is an ethical status, and as I've stated before that's the real crux of the debate. That's easy enough to check for yourself. The Constitution doesn't specify birth as a precondition for citizenship, although it does declare all persons born in the United States are citizens. It does require you to be a "natural born citizen" to hold the office of President, but then I don't know of any unborn children who've been gestating for 35 years. Either way, the 14th Amendment doesn't simply apply to citizens, and neither does the term American. There is no law against doing so. The question is whether Americans should have to pay for murder, and there we have a republican process in place to determine whether Americans should be compelled to do something morally repugnant. No more than it would if we murdered the dying to harvest their organs. Once again, the opposition isn't objecting to using embryonic stem cells, but funding the process by which they are acquired. Pass law to amend that process to offer embryos the respect and dignity we give the dying, I'm sure you won't find much opposition if any to destroying them for medical research. Of course this brings us to the crux of the debate, whether the embryo is worthy of personhood status. And that is not a scientific question, but an ethical one. Rev Prez

Yes, under present law the embryo is not worthy of the same 13th Amendment protections as other Americans. You know, if you just accept that principled pro-lifers attach the same personhood status to the embryo as they do to others, its pretty easy to figure out what we think parents should be able to do with their children--born or unborn--or what authority over the life and death of the dying we believe kin or other relevant parties should hold. Rev Prez

Do you know the trig identities?

The cell lines start with the destruction of blastocysts not transferred to the mother. These embryos are frozen and viable for years. HR 810 proposes federal funding for research operating on cell lines derived from blastocysts that have time to live and be adopted precisely because there's no law regulating how they are discarded. In fact, HR 810 specifically directs NIH to fund research using donated cell lines--that is the woman gets to determine whether a life she's not even carrying gets live or die. I'll say this much. If we went out of our way to save these embryos, and in the end the only possible fate for them was deterioration in cryopreservation, I would have no problem seeing their destruction lead to some worthy purpose. I see no reason why we shouldn't at least offer these embryos the same dignity we offer the dying. Rev Prez

I'm most certainly not. I'm advocating the freedom of Americans to refuse lending their tax dollars to research that kill embryos. I did refute your point, that is I denied I held the principle you attributed to me. I stated we do not know if the public's moral position is duly informed. We do know, from the polls I linked, that they support the measure. It's abundantly clear what the public is backing, it's simply not clear whether the public understands what they're backing. And that's no indictment of them; the issue is difficult and obscure. What do you think the primary debate is? No one worth discussing has argued that harvesting stem cells from embryos is immoral in principle, but that few if any interest in medicine is worth deliberately terminating innocent, healthy life. Given a generous (to the pro-lifer) interpretation of the polling data, the vast majority of Americans would be behind a technique that either preserves embryonic life or a system that gives that embryo every opportunity to survive before being commended to the researchers. And that's where the really interesting debate is. You either look at it with clinical dispassion or you don't, so the real crux of the debate isn't interesting. But I would love to know which position will prove more appealing to Americans in the long run.

What is my principle? My point is that you obviously don't believe the USshould harvest Jews for their gold teeth just because Germany was doing it in the 1940s, which means "lead, follow, reject" is otherwise qualified. That ethical qualification revolves around the personhood of the embryo and competing interests, and that is the crux of the debate. Which is clearly not the case. The "disengaged, superficial [American] public" is clearly backing a choice to refuse to fund, although not ban, embryonic stem cell research with reservation, regardless of whether or not they've thought through the implications, addressed the underlying question, or heard the principled argument against. Nonsense. There's always a moral or ethical position taken in a decision to fund or refuse funds for this research. Your own position--that trading embryonic tissue as commodity is wrong--is already addressed in international law; it is illegal in much of the world to commercially deal in human tissue. And of course the opponents of embryonic stem cell research have considered the possibility they would lose the debate; everybody expected HR 810 to pass the House and its not too hard to imagine a Republican President after this one signing it into law. If by "realistic interpretation" you mean "plausibly implementable policy prescription" falling from principle, then I would say the principle pro-life movement stands as much chance at succeeding as the abolitionist and civil rights movements; that is I don't expect to win the debate in the short term.

You can try, but it would be surprising if both religioustolerance.org and pollingreport.com missed it. In which case the significant parties are the true believers, and that's the population that's closely divided and ultimately decides these issues. My point is that polling doesn't give us a useful sense of where American moral sense lies on this issue. And my guess (and my opinion) is that people would be willing to support legislation that would prevent excess embryos from being discarded and only used after any medical hope of using them has evaporated. Neither of these restrictions are included in HR 810. That's another question. The issue here is whether American taxpayers should have to support such research. This isn't about women choosing to do what they will with their bodies, but Americans being forced to spend their hard earned dollars to kill embryos in deep freeze. This principle, taken to its logical conclusion, would've demanded we take the lead in slaughtering Jews during WWII to weigh in morally on the fate of their gold teeth. The point is we can't divorce this discussion from the personhood and competing interests question anymore than we could in the abortion debate. Rev Prez

We don't know where American moral opinion on this subject lies. The vast majority of polling does not ask whether the federal government should be funding activity that deliberately kills embryos in the interest of medical research. We know that all significant parties support stem cell research of some form or another, and most would support embryonic stem cell research if the process wasn't fatal to the blastocyst. The one poll we do have measuring American public opinion when it is made clear that harvested stem cells come from living, not dead, embryos and that the process kills them, shows majority opposition. If you were to ask me if we could acquire useful pluripotent stem cells from living embryos without killing them or from embryos that have already died, then I'd back federal funding embryonic stem cell research. We're straying into an area that is potentially far more offensive than abortion. We're not longer talking about embryos inside the womb and reproductive rights. We're talking about embryos no one is burdened to carry, and that can be adopted years later and mature into children. That embryos are discarded is irrelevant; you can easily legislate otherwise. Put another way, not a single ethical or legal argument for abortion save one, that embryos are not worthy of personhood status, is even remotely applicable here. If those embryos are worthy, we wouldn't even be talking about throwing them away or murdering them for medical research. Why do you care? If the embryo doesn't deserve the respect and dignity of personhood, then it's pretty late in the day to treat it or anything harvested from it as anything more than mere commodity. Then this discussion is entirely over whether or not there's any pragmatic or ethical value to your anti-commercialism. Rev Prez

You said the moral question is whether or not we can draw the line where the researchers draw it. You then said they draw the line at conceiving embryos for the express purpose of harvesting stem cells. You then go on to say that this is a reasonable line because it "weeds out" any commercial interest in the enterprise. I'm not going to even touch the last point. I want to know why you feel researchers should hold ethical authority on this question.

So you would cede ethical authority to the researchers?

In what way? I don't even care what you think the "Religious Reich" wants. There are entire boards dedicated to conspiracy mongering, I didn't come here for that sort of nonsense. When you said "banning stem cell research...is stupid...from a medical POV." I did. I just think you haven't clearly thought through what you were about to post. Like I said, if you don't accept that hunting down, slaughtering and castrating African Americans is acceptable even when there is rock-solid evidence that doing so will save lives, then you clearly don't carry the principle that aspirations justify the means to its logical conclusion. It helps if you honestly present what's going on here. The debate over HR 810 is over whether American taxpayers have an obligation to support the research, not whether the research should be banned. You don't seem to believe the same about my hard earned dollars. Neither do I, but then I'm not hiding behind euphemisms like choice. But I still have to pay for the research to develop those treatments. What an incredible compromise. But you are, through a most venal form of coercion--taxation. You are using the threat of force to require millions of faithful Americans to support actions they consider to be murderous. Let me guess. You support the Iraq war, right? Rev Prez

First, since all stem cell research is entirely legal, what is your point? Second, you confuse science with ethics. If we had rock solid evidence that hunting down, slaughtering and harvesting African Americans for their penis tissue today would save hundreds of millions of lives tomorrow, I sincerely doubt someone as sincerely progressive as yourself would be here shouting "castrate the niggers!" With embryonic stem cell research, you have little more than the hope that pluripotent stem cells that are biologically foreign to the patient will yield medical treatments. So regardless of where you stand let's not pretend there's a general ethic maintaining anything done in the name of science is ethical. Instead, why don't you be honest about how you value embryonic life? Rev Prez

Most biologists believe there are insufficient totipotent stem cells to meet their research objectives. On a political aside, HR 810 may pass the House, but it will ultimately end up in conference and it will either die there or die by presidential veto. There are not enough votes to override the President, and in the end we will probably do one or two things; increase funding for multipotent stem cell research and for techniques that preserve that blastocyst. Rev Prez

Well, can we see some of your completed homework, then? Rev Prez