The News Thread

Dak said:
https://www.scmp.com/news/world/uni...manuel-aranda-went-looking-someone-kill-after

China reporting on this more than the US.
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Surprised he pled guilty on those terms. Very rare that something makes it through the justice system in a timely manner.

SCMP is a bit different from the rest of the Chinese press, it's Hong Kong-based and afaik still relatively independent in its reporting, but in general I know that the mainland press is waaaaaay more content-heavy than anything you could find in the West. I've googled protein names corresponding to my research to find Chinese media reporting in full-jargon and relatively specific explanations, in a manner as good as any 200-level undergraduate class I've taken, about the most recent publications in scientific journals by Chinese scientists. Here we get the occasional #HerTurn black hole story and lots of tabloid garbage about how chocolate was proven to cure cancer and erectile dysfunction, but that's about fucking it. China will absolutely steamroll us by the end of the century.
 
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HamburgerBoy said:
Surprised he pled guilty on those terms. Very rare that something makes it through the justice system in a timely manner.
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Yeah, especially since I'm dealing weekly now with Incapable To Proceed cases that kind of sound like how this dude was described. Low/borderline IQ blacks and hispanics (50-75 IQ), schizophrenic driven psychotic violent or nonviolent illegal acts. Can't understand/in denial about what they did and/or can't understand basics in the legal system to even be considered able to enter a plea. We get a white dude here and there but they are usually ready as soon as they get stabilized on meds.

HamburgerBoy said:
China will absolutely steamroll us by the end of the century.
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The only hope the US has in the long run is a total blockade on 3rd world importing and the Chinese being unable to halt their population collapse. I don't expect an actual takeover because militarily speaking, defense is way cheaper at this point than offense, unless we start talking about gene-targeted bioweapons or something in the future. There will be no Chinese Red Dawn scenario I guess is what I'm saying.
 
By "being unable to halt their population collapse" do you mean a top-down problem where elderly vastly outnumber the young and strain social services, i.e. similar to what Japan and much of the West are dealing with? Hadn't really heard/thought much about that wrt China but doing a quick google it looks like they do have a pretty much 20-30 aged baby boom, that could cause issues of course in another 30-40 years. But they also don't value human life as much, which is a big plus economically at least. Also makes it feasible for them to import 3rd worlders where it would be crippling for us to do so (assuming they haven't heavily automated by then).

I agree, not implying any kind of military steamrolling. I see our position in the future as being roughly equivalent to the UK or France's ~100 years ago, and their position equivalent to where we were 100 years ago. They'll first eclipse us in raw production as we did with steel at the turn of the 20th century, gradually they'll become the clear technological leader (already America lags behind China, SK, and Taiwan in things like transistor sizes, which used to be a point of pride for us), use their economic dominance and African neocolonialism to depend less on us for certain rare minerals/materials, become strong enough to completely ignore Western IP laws/trade blocks, create and dominate entirely new markets among the massive SEA/Oceania populations, and finally complete their One Belt One Road plan and undercut our Atlantic Ocean advantage as well. China's in their Gilded Age right now, and they've got a lot to look forward to on their current trajectory.

Meanwhile we're just pissing away a massive WW2-era geopolitical advantage: world reserve currency to pile on debt to give unproductive people/businesses gibs; world's biggest economy geared largely towards speculation, fashion, and easily-borrowed ideas; world's biggest military to play world policeman and serve as a second welfare wing; two continents under our thumb just to import their worst into our nation (and cheap guac). I think things have a lot of potential to change positively for us, but at a minimum we'd need a return of the strongman president to disregard both Congress and the tens of millions overly-accustomed to their cushy 40 hr/wk office jobs and cheap entertainment. In a world where China is the eminent economic power and people have no reason to care about us beyond what we can immediately produce, we can still exist and live relatively comfortable lives just as the French do today, but it will be purely managed-decline mode.
 
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So it's a continuum.....so we can establish life at any point we want? At conception or at 18 years old? There would be the possibility of a compromise here but we have conceptionalists on the one hand and people who like playing with dead babies on the other. There's no practical middle ground to be had.
 
Viability for life outside of the womb, albeit (and, for what it's worth, important to remember) with respiratory assistance, i.e. the third trimester rule. Note, directed @Dak -- Seems pretty clear, imo, or maybe just say it begins at 18, why not? :rolleyes: The heart beat rule was a fringe argument of conceptionists 10 years ago. It's absurd and effectively an abortion ban, which is a fact not lost on conceptionists. The third trimester rule doesn't say it's not life--it's just not viable life, i.e. can't exist.

@CiG Already know where you are on this, and I don't find sophist debates interesting. If I remember correctly, practically speaking, we aren't too divergent on opinions on the issue. I just don't find the life question to be very interesting.

Australia doesn't come up often enough in the news. Opinions on the ABC raids?
 
I reject the implication that I'm a sophist, or that when it concerns me, the abortion debate is about winning. If I simply wanted to win, I'd pick one of the dichotomous positions to support. Honestly I view majority of both sides (pro-life v pro-choice) as extremists. I come at the issue via humanitarianism and this is why I focus so much on the concept of viability as it has progressed due to scientific development in the area, as well as our capabilities to technologically keep a human alive.

Viability doesn't really allow one to have a zealot's position on this subject, unlike "life begins at conception" and "woman's body, woman's choice" does, because they are unshifting, unevolving positions. They don't require much more thought beyond a political or religious conviction.

Roe v Wade is usually interpreted within the bounds of my position, I consider it to be a reasonable ruling for the most part, and most abortions are restricted to the pre-viable period (late second trimester tends to be the rule) so I don't really view my position as radical in this case. Radicals are people who think a clump of cells has a soul, or that a viable fetus can be killed because it's inside a woman instead of outside.

As to the ABC thing I've only just started to pick it up on my radar, so no real thoughts yet.
 
CiG said:
I reject the implication that I'm a sophist, or that when it concerns me, the abortion debate is about winning. If I simply wanted to win, I'd pick one of the dichotomous positions to support. Honestly I view majority of both sides (pro-life v pro-choice) as extremists. I come at the issue via humanitarianism and this is why I focus so much on the concept of viability as it has progressed due to scientific development in the area, as well as our capabilities to technologically keep a human alive.

Viability doesn't really allow one to have a zealot's position on this subject, unlike "life begins at conception" and "woman's body, woman's choice" does, because they are unshifting, unevolving positions. They don't require much more thought beyond a political or religious conviction.

Roe v Wade is usually interpreted within the bounds of my position, I consider it to be a reasonable ruling for the most part, and most abortions are restricted to the pre-viable period (late second trimester tends to be the rule) so I don't really view my position as radical in this case. Radicals are people who think a clump of cells has a soul, or that a viable fetus can be killed because it's inside a woman instead of outside.

As to the ABC thing I've only just started to pick it up on my radar, so no real thoughts yet.
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That's what I mean; we don't really disagree on this issue, practically speaking.

I haven't researched the story extensively, but from what I've picked up on: a couple of journalists/organizations who have embarrassed the government recently have been raided by police under the auspices of harboring state secrets. The new conservative government is playing the, 'I didn't know anything about it, but I like arresting law-breakers' card. Some are drawing parallels with the US and Assange, though imho a better hypothetical parallel would be the FBI raiding Glenn Greenwald's home.
 
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I think the comparison to Assange has to do with one of the stories which triggered a police raid was about how Australian special forces in Afghanistan apparently killed civilians and covered it up, but yes it sounds much more akin to the Greenwald raid. Just scanning the story now and everything about this feels wrong to me, but I'd need more facts (especially from unbiased sources, reading ABC about why ABC was raided is a bit much).

Apparently News Corp's Annika Smethurst hacked information about Australian Signals Directorate planning to spy on Australian citizens and released this information without having a warrant to attain said information. Worst part about this rebellion against the surveillance state here in Australia is we don't have a bill of rights protecting journalists from the state like the US.
 
CiG said:
Suddenly they care about the accuracy of language with regards to pregnancy and fetal development. :lol:
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They being... scientists?

Dak said:
So it's a continuum.....so we can establish life at any point we want? At conception or at 18 years old? There would be the possibility of a compromise here but we have conceptionalists on the one hand and people who like playing with dead babies on the other. There's no practical middle ground to be had.
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BO already said what needs to be said. The supposed "heartbeat" they're referring to doesn't belong to viable baby.
 
Einherjar86 said:
They being... scientists?
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Well no, because scientists don't typically do "debunk journalism" so I'm obviously referring to the journalists and activists who are pro-abortion, that typically engage in bizarre euphemism and outright misinformation, who are suddenly now marching out scientists to debunk inaccurate language as it relates to fetal development.

They're never around when others pull out the findings of embryology, because it actually isn't about accuracy or facts.
 
Einherjar86 said:
BO already said what needs to be said. The supposed "heartbeat" they're referring to doesn't belong to viable baby.
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Apparently the tone in my post wasn't clear. I'm not pro-heartbeat or conceptionist or whatever, I think "viability" is a better marker, but like CIG said it's a moving target, and it's moving earlier in the process, which is something that pro-abortionists aren't going to be happy about. But again, the fact is we have a group that will tolerate no abortion and a group that wants to treat the vagina as a magic portal bestowing legal status on existence (or at further extremes, not even that), so we aren't anywhere near some sort of rational compromise.
 
It might be a moving target, but it's moving so far in the nonviable direction that one can't avoid pointing out the scientific specifics. There's no ambiguity about it at the six-week mark. It's nonviable biomass.

Also, nobody's "pro-abortion." The extreme cases of termination close to birth are not the norm, and it's not as though people are fighting for the right to enjoy their late-term abortions willy nilly. They're done in the rarest of cases when medical circumstances put the mother's life in danger. This has always been the case. It's just that pro-life politicians and activists paint a disturbing (and disturbingly inaccurate) picture of what late-term abortions look like. They're engaging in sciamachy, a fight against a specter whose real-life occurrence is unreal or so infrequent as to be negligible.
 
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