This dude. And his kidneys. Should run for US Congress.
Sometimes you just stand there, with a mouth full of teeth, gaping, dumbfounded.
The following thread happened on twitter:
The Motherhub: So furious everytime I hear reference to the ‘debate’ on abortion. How come the whole country gets to debate on my body? My rights?
Stephen McKillop: In fairness there’s more to it than just that. There’s an unborn child whose life and future is also affeccted by this issue.
…
Victoria Smith: Do you worry this much about the lives and futures of those who might benefit from that extra kidney of yours?
And the dude’s gobsmacking response:
Jesus take the wheel.
Really? I mean, really?
What do you think pregnancy is? The woman as some kind of ceramic pot? She carries a homunculus around until it’s grown big enough, no doubt by absorbing quintessence straight from the aether, to be born?
There’s this thing called a placenta. It’s a stupendously complicated organ that interfaces with the fetus’s circulatory system and allows the mother’s lungs and digestion and kidneys to perform all the vital functions for the fetus.
The fetus is using her kidneys, as if she was a human dialysis machine. Her kidneys allow it to live.
Just as your spare kidney could be removed and given to someone who’s dying for lack of a transplant.
So, now that you know she’s not just a pot, and you apparently feel people must save others’ lives at the cost of their own bodies, you’re going to understand when a kidney is surgically removed from you, right?
After all, there’s an adult human whose life and future are affected by that issue.
This comment is not about your astute post – it’s point is one I’ve made to willfully deaf female ears for literally decades now – but to share one of those human advances that keep me from just going out to the woods, finding a cave and holing up for the rest of the century:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2134843-chinese-satellite-beats-distance-record-for-quantum-entanglement/?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#link_time=1497603596
If I understand this correctly, this is the first pass at the instantaneous communication necessary to long distance space travel and beloved of sci-fi fans everywhere.
Bonus is that it’s based on what Einstein himself said was “spooky action at a distance”.
Also neat, in a Krugian sport of way, but bewildering in an old cold war sort of way, that this incredibly advanced science has been shared with the world by China, a Communist country. Whereas Russia, that former bastion of Communist secrecy, is as furtive as ever, but now as a stronghold of corrupt capitalism.
Earlynerd on June 16th, 2017 at 13:49
Yes, that quantum advance is really something. If we could keep the telcos grubby mitts off it and use it like the commons it really is, it would eventually make satellite-based internet useful anywhere in the world.
If we let the telcos do their thing, we’ll have the privilege of paying the equivalent of a three course dinner to send a cat pic from our own phones to our own wall displays. Or some damn thing. :/
quixote on June 16th, 2017 at 23:30
All very true about the greedy capitalists (adding to the deliciousness of it being a communist country that came up with this), but isn’t the science neat?
Or is it old hat? I really am very much of an amateur here, but it seemed to me that near-instantaneous transmission over a not physically connected medium was pretty new and cool.
Earlynerd on June 17th, 2017 at 02:22
It’s not old hat at all. They’ve been sending and receiving entangled photons for a few years now. But if I remember right, they’ve been doing over fiber and the maximum distance was on the order of tens of meters. So wireless beams from satellite over distances orders of magnitude greater is a huge deal.
One of the articles pointed out that they managed to receive one out of six million photons sent. With that error rate, they’re not quite ready for prime time, but at the rate tech progresses, give them a few years and we’ll be carrying secure satellite phones and thinking nothing of it. 😀
quixote on June 17th, 2017 at 20:45
“So wireless beams from satellite over distances orders of magnitude greater is a huge deal.”
Because not even sound (waves in air), not even light (waves in whatever) but NO WAVES AT ALL!
Maybe I encountered science at too young an age, but I can still remember that feeling in chemistry class when our genius teacher got it through to us that humans are surrounded by things that make humans work. Air was one, light was another.
Much as I appreciate this highly evolved form, I can’t help but be entranced by something that seems to transcend its limitations.
Earlynerd on June 18th, 2017 at 00:19
I used the transplantation analogy once for pregnancy, making the same argument as you, and the right wing male I was debating immediately replied that it wasn’t analogous because pregnancy was “natural” and transplantation was not. I was nonplussed and didn’t know what to say at the time, as it had never occurred to me that “natural” or “non-natural” was relevant to the point I was making, so I said nothing and the prick “won.” Now it’s pretty obvious to me what I should have said – if women were to be forced to carry pregnancies they don’t want or that are even dangerous to them because it’s “natural”, then he should be left to die of treatable disease and not be given intensive care or a transplant, because that is also “natural”! Somehow, I don’t think he would’ve agreed with that. Honestly, these people come up with something new for every day of the week.
Branjor on June 22nd, 2017 at 18:56
I know, right? Depriving anyone of control over their biology or body, taken to extreme, is just a form of torture. Withholding medicine, or not allowing someone to relieve themselves, or a hundred other things, are all in that class.
But it’s only the ones that affect only women where suddenly withholding control from the woman is some kind of good thing. “Natural.” “God’s will.” And whatever other drivel they can think of to cover up the small point that it gives someone else total control over women.
You can enslave anyone if you take control over their biological needs.
quixote on June 23rd, 2017 at 00:36
Quixote, OT, but those tags are very confusing. I don’t understand how they work.
What on earth is that and what does it do? How do you make a link consisting of a few words rather than the url of where you’re linking to?
Branjor on June 25th, 2017 at 13:51
No worries. It’s confusing. They left all the critical bits out :/. (I’m on WordPress, but this is wordpress.org, where you set it up yourself. Not wordpress.com.)
<a href=”put-the-http:etcetc.html-here”>put the text you want here</a> The last bit tells it “okay this is the end of the link.”
<blockquote> text you want blockquoted </blockquote> The last one, again, tells it “this is the end of the blockquote.”
<code> text entered here will not be formatted at all, but shown exactly as you entered it </code>
<em> italics </em>
<strike> strike out text (i.e. with a line through it) </strike>
<strong> bold text </strong>
“cite” and abbr and the others I don’t use. Not even sure what some of them do. You’d use them the same way: angle brackets around whatever, the text you want inside, and then angle brackets with a front slashbeofre whatever.
Hope that helps. If you get frustrated, just let me know what you’re trying to achieve and I can enter it and give you an example of how it’s done.
quixote on June 25th, 2017 at 16:59
Thanks! Let me try these out.
Test for perfect pitch/tonal memory here.
So far, so good! Now blockquote.
Still good!
Not exactly sure what this one, code, is supposed to do.OK, whatevs. Now for italics.
Italics, I say!
Yes!
I watched part of a
scaryboring movie this afternoon.Yes, that works too! Now for bolds!
OK, great! 🙂 The tags now make sense to me. Thanks, quixote!
Branjor on June 25th, 2017 at 18:42