- Interesting payment scheme for music. Basically, you pay as much as you want.
- Don’t research a paper on Maoism or the Department of Homeland Security will show up, lecture you, and not let you read the book.
- Redneck Mother’s wedding story is hilarious… and a cautionary tale!
- Just what the world needs: a biblica T&A calendar.
- Don’t try to rape a woman in Thailand, she might bite off your tongue.
- Best description of my own take on the problem of when an embryo becomes human ever. Reprinted below in case something happens to it.
Edited to add: apparently the story about Homeland Security hassling the college student is a hoax. *sigh*
I have a big pile of wood, a load of nails, and some concrete lying around. I want a house.
An architect just drew me up a blueprint – do I have a house yet? No? Well you just described conception. The DNA has been laid down (the blueprint), but not too much has been built.
I just bought the land and cleared it – house yet? There’s your implantation.
Laid the foundation? Put up the rafters? Rigged the electricity? Added a roof? At what point does this thing become a house?
Why is it that most people have no problem saying “The blueprint isn’t a house, the thing you sleep in at the end is, and there’s really no hard line in between,” but can’t handle that idea with human gestation?
It’s a continuum. The fertilized egg is not a baby. The screaming thing that comes out nine months later is. Everything in between is somewhere in between, with denials of human status getting more and more dicey as you get closer to the end point. But claiming that a single cell with unique DNA deserves equal status as a fully functioning human is (to me at least) demeaning to the fully functioning human you’re proposing to indenture to produce it. Building the darn thing is dangerous. I nearly died in my second pregnancy and I’m a young healthy middle-class woman with no health problems. It’s not a trivial issue, this whole pregnancy thing.
