NoodleFood - Latest Comments

Re: New Questions in the Queue

Diana Hsieh — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 17:07:54 -0000

I switched around some other questions this morning so that I could answer it on Sunday!

Re: New Questions in the Queue

Bill Perry — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 15:41:56 -0000

You'd better answer Ryan and Morgan's question!

Re: The Fable of the Cardiac Surgeon and the Organization of Health Practitioners or Why I Don’t Support Libertarian Organizations (at least not any more)

Mark — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:25:36 -0000

Objectivism does not equal refusing to speak to people with differing views ... even badly flawed ones. Ayn Rand read the bible, spoke to christians, etc. It does not compromise your position to speak to anyone. Refusing to engage with someone because they don't agree with you does.

Re: Spitfire 944

Mel_M — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 19:21:41 -0000

Wow indeed! What courage this guy had, and how lucky we are that there were many more like him.

Re: New Questions in the Queue

Diana Hsieh — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:14:26 -0000

Wow, amazing story about 4chan... Good for them for reporting him!!

Re: New Questions in the Queue

John Pryce — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 05:51:31 -0000

Couple of comments, Diana:

1) I really hope you take the fetus/assault one, because I've had some serious difficulty with that one myself.

2) On the subject of banning infidelity, consider the security concerns. An adulterous soldier or officer could be more vulnerable to coercion via blackmail. This was why the CIA and MI6 and such used to remove officers who were homosexual. They have also required that officers resign for infidelity (re: Petraeus).

3) On the insane killer one, I'm generally of the opinion that if they can't be cured or confined prior to their killing spree, then yes, we should put them down.

4) Very interested in your take on the "trolley problem".

5) With regards to the infatuation one: I was once a regular member of 4chan, and I once saw a comment thread where a man confessed to being similarly in love with his underage niece (I think she was 14). One commenter asked about the girl's shirt (the man provided a photo), to which the man responded that her shirt was a school shirt. Using that, the commenters were able to track down the girl's school, examine the online yearbook to find out her name, search for and find her family members, and successfully locate the name of her only uncle (as well as his wife's email address), upon which the thread and the man's comments were sent to his family. I don't know what happened to him, but this question reminded me of that.

Re: Easy Sautéed Pineapple

Stephen_Macklin — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 20:14:30 -0000

This will make a delicious alternative to my favorite of Granny Smith apple slices sautéed in butter with ginger and honey. (Substitute cinnamon for the ginger for a more traditional apple pie flavor.)

Re: Help Miranda Barzey Become a Costume Designer!

Miranda Barzey — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 13:42:13 -0000

Thanks for the signal boost!

Re: Thyroid Update: Desiccated Thyroid and Iodine

Harvard Philosopher — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 13:21:16 -0000

Your post only seems to talk briefly about homeopathic medicine. "Energetic science" you may be surprised to learn was developed in the 20th century by a truly brilliant (and much maligned) scientist, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R....

Re: Mighty Mule Gate Openers: My Experience

Rich — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 23:30:10 -0000

Sign me up for a class action suit. Its pathetic product and service support. Home depot has gotten a letter describing the crap they sale from GTO. I feel better now:-)

Re: Body Temperature: Personal Results

kelleybug — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 08:45:40 -0000

I have hashimotos disease. I'm currently taking synthroid. My normal temperature is 97.7. My mother says that I rarely ran a fever like my other 3 siblings. My temperature ranges from 97.7 to 93.6. The only way I get through the coldness is to stay in bed covered up with a heating pad.

Re: May’s Tip Jar Needs Your Love!

Martin L. Buchanan — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 23:26:43 -0000

A hopefully constructive comment: I have no problem with the solicitation, but the Objectivist in me had a strong negative emotional reaction to "Needs" in the title, so reading Atlas Shrugged a dozen times has definitely affected me.

Re: Happy Birthday, Lila!

northierthanthou.com — Sun, 02 Jun 2013 14:20:36 -0000

Beautiful horse. I hope you feel better soon.

Re: Preview: Sunday Radio: Abortion, Obama, Infidelity, Family Time, and More

James — Fri, 31 May 2013 12:44:32 -0000

I had a thought on the third question: Laws against marriage infidelity, particularly when they are not enforced, undermine the rule of law. They present conditions in which the laws is ineffective, and in which there are no consequences for violating the law. Such laws corrode respect for the law (not that our current legal system needs any help in that department--non-objective law is another corrosive legal concept, and is the foundation of our legal system it seems). This disrespect includes respect for valid laws--laws that are necessary to allow humans in as diverse a society as the United States to function effectively.

It also begs the question of who gets to decide the rules for a marriage, but I think that's obvious. I'm more interested in the impacts such laws as this--laws that are really just token efforts to satisfy some special interest group--have on the concept of rule of law in a society.

Re: Memo to Tea Party Patriots: Stop Harassing Me with Robo-calls!

James L. Cronk — Fri, 31 May 2013 06:56:53 -0000

It always looks difficult to stop unwanted calls. If you block a number on your mobile phone, they will call you from another. The only way to stop all these marketing and other unwanted calls is registration of DNC or DND services.
For more info : http://donotcallguard.com/

Re: Challenging Your Own Entrenched Beliefs

Jennifer Snow — Thu, 30 May 2013 14:29:05 -0000

I don't have a lot of entrenched beliefs any more--I've gone through too many reevaluations of everything I previously believed for anything to stick that didn't have legitimate rationale behind it. Doesn't mean I'm not wrong a lot, but the wrongness isn't as sticky as it used to be.

Re: Challenging Your Own Entrenched Beliefs

Jeff — Thu, 30 May 2013 13:44:58 -0000

Hopefully we all strive to be less wrong. (See also: http://lesswrong.com/ )

Re: The Problem of Absent Tone in Email

Barb Short — Mon, 27 May 2013 19:03:19 -0000

These comments could apply equally well to written communication via media that were used 50 or 100 or 1000 years ago. Could it be that the reason for saying "email" rather than "written communcation" is simply that 99% of all written communication is via the internet, and correspondence in the days of postal mail was nowhere near as voluminuous as written communcation via the internet in the present day?

Re: Link-O-Rama

Tjitze de Boer — Sat, 25 May 2013 04:57:48 -0000

So there's a hole in the chicken culling market? :D

Re: Jason Stotts on Polysexuality

Barb Short — Thu, 23 May 2013 16:32:51 -0000

Here's another sexual-ethics-related item I just came across:

"18-Year-Old Faces Felony Charges For Lesbian Relationship"

http://www.care2.com/causes/18...

Re: Tacit Consent to Pregnancy? No!

choiceone — Thu, 23 May 2013 04:56:35 -0000

There are two main arguments that enrage anti-abortion advocates because of their potential as legal arguments: the arguments of Judith Jarvis Thomson (A Defense of Abortion) and Eileen McDonagh (Breaking the Abortion Deadlock: From Choice to Consent). These do not depend on asserting that the zygote/morula/blastocyst/embryo/fetus is not a live human being with the legal status of a person and so reveal why fetuses are unqualified for personhood. Critiques of these arguments seem weak from a legal perspective.

Human zygotes, morulae, and blastocysts do have human DNA and biological life in separation from women's bodies because they can be grown in lab dishes. Though the law does not allow us to grow them thus longer than 14 days, mammalian ones provided with ordinary nutrient with oxygen have the same life spans there as before implantation. An artificial supernutrient can double a zygote~blastocyst's life span and so for human case we could expect extension of the life span to 16-2 days. However, without implantation in the body of a female member of the species, this is most we can expect. And after implantation, up to viability, an embryo/fetus will die if the woman does, just as her limbs and organs do, so the embryo's life span is being extended by the woman's own life because her blood oxygen, nutrients, and antibodies are transferred out of her blood to the embryo.

In Thomson's argument, persons have their own life and take oxygen and nutrients from common sources, for even medical help does not require the use of the blood or body of any person who refuses consent to their use. In her philosophical experiment, the violinist who cannot live without being medically hooked up to your body for nine
months does not have the right to forcibly effect or maintain such a connection. In fact, US law does not allow the government or anyone else to force you to donate blood or an organ or be biologically linked to your body even to save a born person's life, including the life of your own born child. The truth is that, if we changed the law so as to
force a woman to continue a pregnancy to save the life of the embryo inside her, we would have to accept eventual change in the law so as to force any person to donate blood or an organ or be biologically exploited to save the lives of any humans.

The reason the argument is compelling is because the possibility of such an eventual change in the law, which would be the logical result of claiming that a human right to biological life takes complete precedenceover all other rights of persons. It is possible to imagine a nation in which your liberty, privacy, and health could be continuously violated for years in order to keep some unconscious person's body biologically alive. Involuntary servitude is the logical outcome of the pro--life camp's claim that the right to life is hierarchically more important than the right to liberty.

McDonagh argues precisely from the point that you have the right to refuse to have sexual intercourse. If you refuse to have sex with someone and that person uses force to have sex with you, you have the right to use deadly force if necessary against the person threatening you with rape or actually raping you, and a third party also has the right to use it to help defend you. Federal as well as state law allows the use of deadly force in cases where you perceive, with cause, a threat to your own life or that of someone else and you or that someone else has no means to retreat to avoid using this degree of force. However, it also allows such a use of force in cases where you perceive, with cause, that you or someone else is being threatened with rape, sexual assault, kidnapping, or robbery or actually being raped, sexually assaulted, kidnapped, or robbed even when you know that your life or that of someone else is not threatened, because rape, sexual assault, kidnapping, and robbery are felonies considered to inflict grievous bodily injury. However, the only real difference between rape or sexual assault and consensual sex, between kidnapping and voluntary travel, between robbery and voluntary generosity is consent.

Is consent to sex implied consent to pregnancy? When you consent to sexual intercourse with a man, you consent to his putting one of his body parts in a specific place inside your body for one relatively brief duration. This does not imply that his siblings, friends, or born children now have consent to put their body parts inside your body or that even that man has consent to put that body part in other places in your body, other body parts in that or other places inside your body, or put that or other body parts anywhere in your body for several months or every day for a year. It does not imply that the man has consent to continue even if it causes you a pain. Each unique person has to get a separate consent. And you have the right to refuse consent to different body parts, penetration in different places in your body, different durations, and many different conditions across the process.

How, then, does your consent to sex with one adult imply that a zygote claimed to be a unique, different person now has consent to be inside your body?

How can it imply that the zygote has consent to be in your uterus, penetrate into your bodily tissue, use some of that tissue to make a placenta, direct that placenta to kill some of your immune cells, chemically cause some of your other immune cells to be starved of a basic amino acid and forced into latency so that they cannot protect you from invasive viruses and infections, and re-channel your blood?

How can it imply that the zygote has consent to take oxygen, nutrients, and antibodies out of your blood, put toxic waste products into it, and leak some of its own cells and isolated chromosomes other than your own into your bloodstream?

And how can it imply that the zygote has consent to cause you to suffer even morning sickness or to penetrate your vagina in an eventual vaginal birth or cause a medical need for the invasive surgery of a caesarian birth?

The pro-life answer is that you knew when you had sex that you were risking procreation of a person. But that argument can't work in cases of rape, of someone having sex with your sleeping body, of minors below the age of consent. It can't work well where the woman insisted on the use of contraception as a precondition for sex, which was a clear statement that she did not consent to procreation. Even where no contraception was used, scientists estimate that more than 50% of zygotes/morulae/blastocysts/embryos either fail to implant or become disimplanted as early embryos and that the risk of pregnancy is about 1 pregnancy per 21 separate acts of sex, so the woman has reason to argue that she did not consent to procreation.

The woman may also have reason to argue that, though she did not object to the zygote~blastocyst as long as it did not implant, she did not consent to providing her blood and body as life support to extend the blastocyst's life span - that its own natural life span, even with the maximum support from science today, is shorter than the duration between normal menstrual periods.

In fact, the entire of a non-consensual pregnancy can be claimed to constitute a threat, with cause, of the penetration of the vagina by the fetus/child in a vaginal delivery or the surgical invasion of the uterus by medical professionals in a caesarian delivery. The former actually fits the legal definition of rape and the latter fits the legal definition of aggravated sexual assault. The pro-lifer will argue that this is ridiculous because the fetus and the doctor do not intend to rape or sexually assault you. But the fetus is like a legally insane rapist and the doctor like a person hypnosized by a criminal to do his bidding - the right to stop their behavior with deadly force while they engage in the behavior does not depend on their intentions.

So whose intention is behind the crime? Not nature, because we have the power to stop that threat. There is only way non-consensual pregnancy can be claimed to make that threat of vaginal or caesarian delivery as rape or sexual assault. Only the government that bans abortion violates the rights of the woman. It alone prevents her from defending herself against the sexual violation of her body by someone who did not obtain consent either to be in her body or to receive life support from her body. It alone threatens her with vaginal rape by the fetus/child or sexual assault by a medical professional in the delivery months later. And that government would have an intention that fits the definition in the rape and sexual assault laws.

Re: Color Video of London in 1927

Patrick Black — Tue, 21 May 2013 17:32:56 -0000

Wait, you mean Calvin's dad (Calvin and Hobbes) lied when he said the world used to be black and white until sometime in the 30's? I'm so disillusioned!

http://www.reoiv.com/images/ra...

Re: Color Video of London in 1927

Tjitze de Boer — Tue, 21 May 2013 17:00:12 -0000

"More than one American has offered to buy that tower and erect it on palm beach as a bungalow!"

Oh you adorable silly Americans. XD

Re: Craziest Chemical Reaction

Tjitze de Boer — Tue, 21 May 2013 01:40:55 -0000

Ok, anyone up for a horrifying universe principle?

Re: Partisan Hackery Rule of Thumb

mtnrunner2 — Mon, 20 May 2013 14:33:35 -0000

Exactly. The last two times I've brought this up online were 1) conservative complaints about how long it took to get the Boston bombers, and 2) "Umbrellagate". I don't think either one of those things would have been in the conservative press under a Republican administration.