I wrote an interesting paper in college (got an A) about the 'fallacy of the intrinsic value of human life', which in short said because 'value' is a capitalism term derived from a demand/supply function where any ratio <1 lowers value and anything below a certain point makes the 'value' a negative, or said another way when the supply becomes so much greater than the demand, having more of the thing has a negative value (costs more than it's 'worth'), and we met that criteria for humans at least 4 billion people ago, if not far more than that, in my opinion. (I understand I'm not normal) That's not to say there isn't potential value, just that there's a 'glut' in the 'market' so bad that more people have no current positive 'value'.
(It's all an exercise to point out that using economics terms for people (or other things with 'intrinsic value') doesn't work in the way expected)

There is no such thing as a useless person.

I don't see how everyone else let this comment slip.

Less "use" for humans doesn't mean less humans. People are not a use-based entity. But perhaps that's simply my value system.

What this potentially all means is massive pain and poverty to intrinsically valuable human life, not useless people.

Also, there will always be a need for human to human care, empathy, and love. Something a bot would never be able to do that would be acceptable by a person.

Completely saddened by your lack of decency and disregard for human life.
I'm sorry you can't see to separate yourself from the hate and violence and propaganda that overcomes you.
Hate breads hate. See if you can correct your path in this world, because even if you believe in a afterlife, it won't want you.

That position doesn't make any sense. Context matters and there are always exceptions to every rule. It seems to be a common ideal of the right that complex systems can have simple solutions. Sometimes they can, but mostly they don't.

Rationalism may allow me to "take a consistent position based on unchanging principles", but it doesn't mean I have to blindly apply those principles regardless of the circumstances.

For a really simple example, let's take homicide. Killing, I'm sure we're agreed is wrong. So everyone who takes a human life should be sanctioned, yes?
Except in self-defence.
Except in a war.
What about other mitigating factors too. Accidental death. Killing by someone mentally incapable of knowing what they're doing.
We could debate the merits of each individual case all day long, but the end point is that yes, at some point we make a judgement, and ultimately that leads to a law.

So it goes for IP law. Yes, current IP in the US is not only broken, but badly broken and broken in many different ways from patent trolling to DMCA lunacy.

That doesn't mean we just throw out the whole damn thing.

We don't have to make an empirical claim about all law. We make judgements based on what a "reasonable person" considers fair. Yeah, that shifts back and forth and sometimes (like now) it's hideously broken, but that's why we have the ability to change laws.

It's not like that everywhere. NZ, for example, has some quite reasonable provisions in it's IP law (or had, they may have changed recently). I can't sell copies of a song I bought, but I can format shift it, time shift it, etc. That seems reasonable to me (and I suspect, to most people).


I must confess I had to look up "hermeneutics" (good word).

Assuming the 'negative outcome' scenario, also the nature of human consciousness (so simply and patently codified), what 'preparation' beyond one's will would prepare a human for a planet made hostile to humanity BY humanity?

Life itself is an injustice according to the parameters we are willing to accept as just or fair or equitable. So Emily here decides to film her abortion procedure for her own benefit, her own ego, a journalistic form of self-therapy perhaps? I would challenge any American white woman's spoken motivations for ending a pregnancy and find by peeling the layers of the onion away in about 10 minutes of Q&A that that little piece of meat growing inside of her needs to go because it's gonna be an inconvenience to her lifestyle, a challenge to her own limited consciousness of the nature of life and the universe.

Swat that little nuisance before it lands on my food, for crissakes.

First, calling David Suzuki "Colonel Sanders" is embarrassing to the entire human race.

Also, to the suggestion in the comments above that 'technology will save us', ..one of the major points of the video is that it buys us 'two minutes'. It has, and it won't keep buying us comparable time. Actually, part of 'science saving us' is this video itself. Population models, and everything we know about life on this planet tell us that we need to radically change how we do things, or widespread famine, war, and environmental and social destruction are inevitable. If you want science to save us, you need to start listening to it.

..and about colonizing other planets. There is no planet we could ever get to, EVER, that would, in its current condition, support a human colony. We can't seem to turn around a one degree change in Earth's global temperature. It is not rational to assume that we could make another planet suitable for human life.

A more reasonable path to a semblance of sanity with regard to the abject state of political and representative corruption at the state and federal level is to stop listening to the incessant rhetoric coming from the television during these predictable and mind-numbing campaign propaganda attacks on an individual's innate common-senses during these election cycles, especially since the trend is for growing numbers of peeps who more and more by the second, get their information from sources who are not simply soldiers and propaganda arms of the very machines screwing the world over by usurping rights, making laws to enslave people daily, and further entrench their own powers to control every aspect of human life.

I would hope personally, that during election cycles both state and national, that the underlying emphasis of speeches and campaign education would firstly be the complete insanity and insult to consciousness of there being only republicans and democrats to choose from, because these arcane delineations of part are the root cause of the reason nations (Especially the United States) are heading down the path of crony-screw-everyone-but-the-people syndrome. Start by discarding the two major parties, who have done absolutely nothing but bankrupt the nation as well as your minds.

Then comes the blood in the streets, the blood of these charlatans and liars who are attempting and succeeding in becoming the omnipresent omnigarchy of the 21st Century.

Remember in Mars Attacks when the leader of the martians vaporized the entire senate during that televised news conference?
Loved that movie....

"In the 1990s, the U.S. Army decided it could not afford to continue developing complicated, maintenance-heavy vehicles for this purpose. The Grizzly program was canceled in 2001. The prototype developed never made it to the production lines."

THIS is why we "liberals" don't like so-called success. This. Success for what? So we can call human life a trifle? We can't afford to develop appropriate life-saving vehicles, and yet we have so much wealth in this godforsaken country.

It's godforsaken, because your Christ did NOT advocate material success. He cared for the tired and the hungry. Guardians of Democracy? More like a bunch of A-holes...

At least the military had an answer. I like the military, but I hate our "successful" American Judas'. Selling out their fake Jesus eeeeeevery freaking day. And for what? I hope His love doesn't buy them past the pearly gates because THAT would be a tragedy. I'll see you all in hell.

That was a totally disingenuous argument from Friedman.

Yes, at some point you must place a dollar figure on human life, but it depends on what is going to be done with the money saved. If you say, we're not going to treat a dozen patients with a rare disease that would cost the state tens of millions of dollars, and instead use that money on highway safety, or to improve healthcare for others, with the net impact that you save MORE lives with the money, that is a valid argument.

What he's proposing is that some billionaire (or at the least, multi-millionaire) should pocket a few million extra they saved by not installing the safety feature.

Not all money is equal. That's easy to prove.

Give a million dollars to ten families that are on the edge of bankruptcy and it will change their lives.

Give a million dollars to Mitt Romney and he'll forget your name as soon as you walk out of the room.

This is clearly not snuff.

"Please do not post pornography or "snuff" films (which we define as the explicit depiction of loss of human life displayed for entertainment).

Note: The presence of human fatality is acceptable and not considered "snuff" if presented as a limited portion of a lengthy educational, informative news report or documentary. Our definition of "snuff" does include but is not exclusive to any short clip in which a human fatality occurs whether or not any victims are actually visible on camera."

Was gonna come on to say exactly that.

It's too bad that having an actual debate on abortion is nearly impossible.

People that believe life begins at conception are morally opposed to abortion as based on that belief abortion is taking a human life and only tolerable or forgivable if done to save another life.

People who do not believe life begins at conception are morally opposed to dictating what a pregnant human can and can not do with their body, again based on that belief.

The debate IMHO must, absolutely must, be around when life begins but nobody wants to talk about that. People want to decry the baby killers and the woman hating religious bigots.

Meanwhile, that digging in of everyone's heals leads to abortion clinics being bombed to save the children, and people lobbying for abortions to be legal up until the day before the child would be born(current Canadian law I'll add). I'd dare say neither extreme is supported by the majority, but people's biases on the subject don't seem to allow enough compromise to condemn the extreme ends of there own 'side'.

Here are the sift guidelines when it comes to "snuff"

Please do not post pornography or "snuff" films (which we define as the explicit depiction of loss of human life displayed for entertainment).

Note: The presence of human fatality is acceptable and not considered "snuff" if presented as a limited, incidental portion of a lengthy educational, informative news report or documentary that encompasses a much broader narrative. Our definition of "snuff" does include but is not exclusive to any short clip in which a human fatality occurs whether or not any victims are actually visible on camera.
http://videosift.com/faq#posting_guidelines

To remove the video just put *kill or *discard in the comments and it will be removed.

Well, I have tried it, and it's fucking awful.

And millions of people like terrible things all the time. Twilight, Celine Dion, Nascar... popularity is no indicator of taste.

Finally, don't let the fact that I compared it to murder let you think that I was being anything other than 100% serious. Honestly, it's exactly equivalent to deliberately ending another human life.

This is really crap.

This imperialist fuck's argument amounts to this:

1) The US will need to defeat Japan through military means
2) The US wants to avoid "another Okinawa" (with a quote from Truman)
3) The US needed to drop the atomic bomb

So, lets look first at that Okinawa analogy. Okinawa, as with other pacific islands, were particularly brutal because of both their strategic importance to the Pacific front as well as their terrain. Both because of they needed to be seized in order to cutoff mainland Japan (and isolate it) and their small, heavily dense terrain caused warfare to be at times hand-to-hand, the battles here were desperate and ugly.

This leads us to the next point: the whole presupposition with the imperialist fuck's argument is that there was no other way but occupation, in the form of Okinawa, to end Japan's empire.

This is false. The US had other options to end the war. Occupation of Japan wasn't a strategic necessity in the way occupation of the pacific islands was. The US could have maintained a bombing campaign while getting the rest of the world to pursue political/diplomatic talks with Japan.

The reason the US dropped the bombs wasn't to end the war (which was already war, de jure shit aside). It was to a) ensure supremacy over Japan (which isn't the same thing as ending a war) and b) to ensure global imperialist hegemony.

Amerikkka doesnt give a shit about saving lives. What about all the people firebombed in Dresden? What about all the imperialist adventures before and after WWII? Don't give me some ethical crap about a country, at least 1/4 of which was still under apartheid conditions, that wants to save lives because it respects human life so it drops atomic bombs on an already defeated people.

Oh I know, human life isn't worth much in the cesspools of the third/developing world.