Alex Jones isn't a real crazy person, he just plays one on TV. He has said so clearly under oath. He's playing a nut job character, like Colbert on crack.

If the CIA could discredit a conspiracy theorist by making them look crazier than they are, wouldn't they have started with Trump? He birthed the right wing conspiracy movement with his insane birther bullshit, and is a clear enemy of any intelligence (agency or otherwise).

Unknowingly of noble birth, receives a call to action, is the only one who can save the day, blah blah blah. It might be an exciting movie if you've never seen an epic before. In other words, bring the kids.

I have a few French friends, and as I see it there's quite a fundamental cultural difference at play here. I'll do my best to explain it, although I don't fully understand it myself.

There's a very fundamental French principle of equality that's considered as sacred as American freedom of speech. It means that when you're French, you're French, and explicitly not a member of a sub-culture. I heard about this when they banned wearing a hijab (I think) in schools: the children are French first, and must comply by French norms above others.

The French government have fought very hard to fight the foundation of religious and ethnic sub-cultures within France. This is obviously very different to the American approach of embracing your heritage and, just as Freedom of Speech has unwanted side-effects, so does this. The players are French, not African. Their cultural past was indeed wiped when they became French (at birth or otherwise). Yes, they're of African descent, but that's considered very different to being African.

Now, it's fair enough to argue the the American approach is better, but I think it's important to understand that this is not the French approach. There is a fundamental cultural difference there, and without understanding that, you're going to miss the point of their argument.

Bob, I'll try to ignore your having just being an ignorant douchbag who rudely dismissed those with far more knowledge and personal experience than you possess, simply because they disagreed with your non- medically based, non-scientific based, thoughtless, inhumane political position and I'll try a different tact.....

How is it that, in 2018, you are advocating slavery more foul than the African slave trade....yes, slavery.

Forcing one person to fulfill all the bodily functions of another, brain dead potential "person" (and make no mistake, a blastocyst is not a person, but for sake of argument and your limited understanding capabilities I'll let you claim it is one this one time)....that's Mengele level inhumanity and slavery.

You claim to believe in individual liberties over vague social responsibility....except when you don't.

Forcing one person to physically support another is so far to the left of full socialism you seem to think it went all the way around to the right. It doesn't work that way.
To add the typical right wing slippery slope argument, if the government can force one person to be life support for another potential person, they can force healthy people to give up organs to the unhealthy, or be consigned to hospitals to be used as human dialysis and so forth.
Until those cells can and have survived on their own without support, and can and have functioned as a mammal (meaning breathed, circulated body fluids, and consumed and evacuated foodstuffs) they have not reached "living human" status, and even if you can't grasp that fact, at no point can there be a requirement that another person acts as their sentient intensive care unit without reinstating legal slavery.

Why do you advocate slavery?

When are you donating your kidney and partial liver, and your children's? If you aren't, by your logic you're at least a double murderer and so are they. Why should I or anyone take morality advice from a double murderer?

Design a procedure where the offending not yet human can be safely removed without any (or at least less than an abortion would cause) risk to the mother, but survive on it's own without an incubator-slave, then come back and we'll talk.... until then forced incubation and forced birth is monstrously draconian socialism of a kind even Mengele would turn away from in disgust.

Edit: I came up with an argument I think might change your mind....how many baby Newtboys would you force on the planet before you decided abortion should be mandatory in some cases?

Don't talk to me about abortion you dumb prick. Laws preventing abortion in my state are keeping me from having a family.

That's right. If my wife and I could have abortions, our family would be bigger now.

Some people need to be able to have abortions. It's not murder any more than me jerking off and my wife having a period. Laws against fatricide are wrong. You don't get a fertilization certificate, you get a birth certificate.

It's like I'm talking to a Putin sock puppet.

The corresponding article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/

@newtboy

"saying humans are born with either a penis or vagina isn't a hateful statement against people."
It absolutely is hateful to hermaphrodites, clearly saying they aren't human. Use the qualifier "usually" or "almost always".

Alright, if used to deliberately dehumanise someone, almost anything can be hateful. Omitting "almost always" is just convenient, like stating the sky is blue. Sure, the sky isn't always blue, but it's correct often enough to be treated as an accurate general statement. As I gave in my example, saying humans have five fingers and five toes isn't hateful or dehumanising to people with a different number, it's just a generally true statement.

I argue it's in the brain, which today can't be changed. Gender is different from sexuality, clearly, no?

Let me try to be more succinct.

Physical sex is a birth attribute, not as my opinion, but as a provable objective fact.

Gender is in the brain, is an opinion. I do not share that opinion. This is a point on which we should have the liberty to agree to disagree.
Edit:My opinion is that if not defined as biological sex, gender has no real meaning aside from societal norms.

Legal, yes. Culturally accepted, not so much, slavery always had cultural opposition by the non ruling class. Natural, WTF?! Show me an example of pure non human slavery (not harems, not parasites) and I'll discuss it.

Granted, I don't know exactly how they measured, but his gene expression is what they measured, not his pure DNA. This goes to my point, that environment determines how your DNA is expressed, so twin studies are flawed from the onset by thinking they begin identical, they don't. They don't even start with identical DNA, just close.

"Genes and the environment", but not pure gene study....at least not like people think. People think twins are carbon copies, so one can be a control to study effects of what they're studying. That's not quite right. Certainly they are useful in genetic studies, but not that way. From before birth, they diverge in how nearly identical DNA is expressed. They might be good for finding what genes/traits need closer scrutiny, but only with large samples.

Grounds for individuals to (privately) discriminate, perhaps, but not (public) businesses....at least not in America. Our national identity is a melting pot of cultures, intolerance for the different is antithetical to that idea.


Gender, nope, you can totally choose that now.
Race, many people change their racial identity...Rachael Dolizal comes to mind....as does the term "passing".
Ethnicity, people pass as ethnic groups they weren't born into, sometimes unknowingly, daily.....again, Dolizal springs to mind.

So, I'll argue that all you mentioned for all intents and purposes are today often the result of free will and not beyond the control of every individual, but a full grasp of brain chemistry and design and well understood methods to change them are well beyond our current knowledge, so their behaviors and actions are, in part, out of their control and not the result of free will but of brain construction.....now what?

@newtboy

"Discriminating against people for their legal, culturally accepted, natural behavior makes the person doing the discriminating an asshole. "

Slavery also exists in nature, so it's natural, and once upon a time it was legal and culturally accepted. Discriminating against slave owners though, even back than, is contrary to your claim, quite noble.

"The space study with twins showed that in under a year their genes permanently diverged a full 7%"

You gotta be careful there exactly what is being measured, they did not find that fully 7% of his DNA changed and now was that different. Depending what you measure people also claim that human and chimp DNA only differs by less than 2%...


"Twins aren't genetically identical, even at birth. ...That makes twin studies a piss poor method of gene study."

If you read your own linked article it states:
Twins share the same genes but their environments become more different as they age. This unique aspect of twins makes them an excellent model for understanding how genes and the environment contribute to certain traits, especially complex behaviors and diseases.

If you bother to read the list of peer reviewed articles I linked, they are comparing mono-zygotic twins to di-zygotic twins. The very basic and largely accepted theory being that if a trait has a genetic component, 1000 twins split from the same zygote should share the trait more often than di-zygotic twins.

My argument though really doesn't care much though. I simply argue that beliefs, choices and behaviours are the result of free will and grounds to judge(discriminate) for and against those you deem good or bad, hurtful or harmful. Similarly, gender, race and ethnicity being things that are in zero way the result of free will and beyond the control of an individual and NOT grounds to judge(discriminate) for or against.

Twins aren't genetically identical, even at birth. They begin separating from each other genetically when the zygote splits. Environmental factors determine how genes are expressed, and those factors are not identical. That makes twin studies a piss poor method of gene study. All it can tell you is how much the environment might effect their expression over time, and they aren't very good at even that.
http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/epigenetics/twins/

Now that genetic testing is cheap, we're finding out most identical twins aren't identical at all. Proper gene testing doesn't assume twins are identical clones for life, it actually disproved that hypothesis. The space study with twins showed that in under a year their genes permanently diverged a full 7% (with a larger temporary change initially that lowered as they returned to similar environments).
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-twins-study-confirms-preliminary-findings


I feel that people often misuse mistaken assumptions to validate their prejudices. If the science isn't clear and validated, using it against others is improper in the extreme.

Discriminating against people for their legal, culturally accepted, natural behavior makes the person doing the discriminating an asshole. Homosexuality is quite present in nature, is now culturally accepted in western cultures, and is legal. Tolerance is a learned behavior I wish was taught better, especially by churches.

"A twin study of self-reported psychopathic personality traits"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886902001848

Perhaps the above is more to the point. Similar twin study showing identical twins having similarly significant genetic component to psychopathy as the prior studies show for sexual orientation.

Should we be similarly upset at people assigning morality to psychopathic behaviours?

"Genetic and Environmental Influences on Religious Interests, Attitudes, and Values: A Study of Twins Reared Apart and Together"
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40062599?seq=3#page_scan_tab_contents

Religiosity shows the same thing, strong correlations for identical twins, raised apart from one another, and much weaker correlations for non-identical twins also raised apart.

If Tom Cruise claims his belief in Scientology is a birth right and how dare we judge him, is he really backed by the science?

Where I am coming from, is insisting that for all the factors involved in human decision and behaviours, I still want to conduct ourselves as though free will exists.

More importantly, the freedom to discriminate against people based upon their behaviours must be defended as strongly as the right to discriminate based upon purely in born, unchangeable attributes like race, gender and ethnicity must be opposed.

, I said it was more controversial.

I dare say even agreeing that we don't solely choose our sexual interests, when it comes to our actions I insist we treat those as the result of free will, aka choice.

When I'm not typing from a 4in screen I can pull up the references, but the peer reviewed studies on genetics hardly illustrate that sexual orientation and identity are dominated by it. Twins studies do show that identical twins more often share orientation than non-identical, which gives a correlation to genetics. However, I'll pull up the studies but last I reviewed them, more than half the identical twins in the studies did NOT share the same orientation. That is an arguably compelling indicator that genetics does not solely determine orientation.

Other twin studies comparing other behaviours like religion show a similar pattern. Studies with twins on violent and aggressive behaviour show an even stronger "genetic" component than the orientation studies, and nobody has any qualms about being politically incorrect declaring that violence is a choice and not a birth attribute...

Glad to hear you stating things as you did, I largely agree with you.

The trick playing out in Canada now is that because we've expanded the definition of protected classes more quickly than the US, the protected classes rights are interfering more and more.

I do not believe that religion should be a protected class in the same way as race, gender or ethnicity. Similarly sexual orientation and gender identity shouldn't be either. Race, Gender and ethnicity are all assigned at birth and can largely be determined by blood test and demonstrated to be something entirely outside an individuals control, choice and behaviour.

Religion is the most easily demonstrated as deserving a different status of protection than the others in that most religions ALL hold the others as heretical. Declaring other faiths immoral is necessary to religious freedom and I take as the very positive basis of America's freedom of religion notion being a wonderful agreement between Catholics and Protestants to agree to disagree over war.

More controversially, I would also class your sexual preferences and identity in with religion as a different degree of protected class. There is an element of behaviour and choice here that can not be determined at birth with any manner of blood test or parental bloodline.

More simply, the right to discriminate should not exist for immutable things people are born to and remain beyond their choice or control, while the right to discriminate based upon behaviours is entirely necessary and important. If you want to believe Scientology can help you heal broken limbs and transcend the world your free to it, but I'm gonna treat you differently than a sane person. To similarly treat someone different based upon race or gender though is unacceptable.

The other problem is, even in a western nation 50% of births are accidental, I'm not really sure how that can be prevented short of sterilization, but the lefties would never allow that to happen.

Gotta tackle the issue from every side imo.