5.19.2006

Collateral damage

I often notice the “culture of life” hypocrisy because wingnuts are OK with collateral damage in warfare, and hell even warfare itself. Then they turn around and want to protect every fertilized egg as sacred. Jon Stewart of The Daily Show recently took the editor of the National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru, to task asking (and I paraphrase), "if collateral damage is OK to spread Democracy, then why isn’t collateral damage OK to cure Parkinson’s disease?" An EXCELLENT point INDEED! Please wingnuts, answer this, because your guru on The Daily Show kind of had a deer in the headlights look about him on that one.

2 comments:

koalabear said...

Religious zealots may be predominately right-wing in their politics, but not all right wingers are religious zealots.

Only religious zealots try to protect every fertilized egg as sacred. As a wingnut who is not a religious zealot (my imaginary friend happens to be Bob, but since he broke my X-Box we aren't talking much lately), I want to protect every fertilized egg because I believe in the right to life. Please allow me to explain just what I mean.

Either human beings (or people in general) have a right to life, liberty, and property all at once, or they have absolutely no rights at all. These three rights are simply the most fundamental rules that human beings must recognize and obey in order for society and civilization to exist. You, for example, probably believe in the right to life, or else why are you kvetching about "collateral damage" at all?

Who gets to decide what a human being (or a person in general) is? If an embryo from a human being is not itself a human being, then when does it become a human being? At birth? What if the embryo is raised in an artificial womb, then when is it a human being? When the womb's fluid is evacuated? When the egg-timer bell rings? When? Who's to say that some embryos will never become humans, regardless of how much you cannot tell them apart from real humans once 20 years have elapsed from their initial fertilization? If you cannot accept my premises, consider that someday there may be people who are not human beings. Maybe there will come a day when apes or whales can communicate with humans and claim personhood. Maybe computer intelligence will one day do the same. When do these non-human entities become people. My premise is best phrased as: when do human beings (which fertilized human embryos are) become people?

If you do not think, or cannot even comprehend, that the creation of a sub-class, presumably enslaved, human-derivative race is the natural evolution of excluding human-derivative embryos from personhood, then you know nothing of the history of humanity.

koalabear said...

The flip side of all this is the moonbat contingent that wants to bestow personhood on chimps and 200 year-old trees, so I recognize that this swings both ways with equal negative consequences. So, what's your solution?