Rand Paul: solve vaccination issues by making children into property

You’ve been reading the RNC’s website again, haven’t you?

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So, are you proposing Brave New World or Logan’s Run as a solution?

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Universal immunity to disease probably isn’t possible, but it would decrease suffering. In small part because that would depend on a certain level of prosperity that actually does tend to go with reduced birth rates. In less happy small part because there are other ways people limit their population.

But in the largest part because we could always settle on population control by shooting random people in the street, and it would still not cause more suffering than how diseases take care of things. No, I don’t see that happening any time soon, but then I also don’t see measles and its horrible friends really keeping us from an Easter Island situation anyway.

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No, but he did say, “I have heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.”

I’d hope that a lawmaker would rely on actual facts with references that can be checked by others rather than citing hearsay, but, hey, hope in one hand, shit in the other…

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Not just a lawmaker, an MD.

An opthalmologist, admittedly, and one with a very odd looking series of disagreements with his certification body, but an MD nonetheless.

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Well, so much for the people saying he’s not a Libertarian. After all, the basis of Libertarian ethics is that all rights are property rights, including your ownership of yourself. Since kids aren’t able to enter into contracts etc. it follows that someone must do so instead, and that’s pretty much by definition an owner/property situation.’

So, yeah, he’s pretty much right on the Libertarian money.

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I meant “long term” in the meaning of “the effects of the choice being made for the child are not immediately apparent, and could manifest the next day or after a span of decades”. And since I was talking about the individual choice of a parent here, I don’t see how they’re going to be any better at individually making decisions that impact the entire long-term survival of the species…

I think we would need to make a lot more inroads towards “defeating” old age and disease before we would need a serious debate on mandated birth control, let alone “refuse” it as an option. And there are other environmental factors that impact birth rates, after all.

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Assuming that Rand Paul votes the way he talks.

This was an interesting article last year. Nobody really knows what to do with Paul.

I still think Huntsman would have made a decent candidate.

Edit: forgot the article…

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I doubt there’s many Slayer fans in Congress.

Motion to rename the “libertarian” movement to “propertarian”, because, let’s face it, they’re more concerned with property and the ownership thereof than they are with liberty and the sharing thereof.

All in favor?

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Immortality just means we need to step up our space travel game.

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It’s not just a clumsy formulation. There’s a history in the US of treating children as property, and thus having no rights. And obviously, that’s connected to a history in the US of treating human beings as property.

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This is exactly what I thought when I saw the headline that Obama was making a speech encouraging people to vaccinate. It just made my shoulders slump thinking this would just make the anti-vax crowd scream conspiracy even more shrill-ly (shrillier? with more shrilliness?)

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Maybe not, but Indonesia did elect a Heavy Metal fan as President.

It seems that it is difficult to predict the politcal leanings of heavy metal fans:

The Echo Nest, a company that analyzes online music plays for companies such as Spotify, MTV, and several record companies, compared artist plays with self-professed political leanings (culled from Facebook and other social networks) to determine if there was a correlation between artist and political leanings. The results aren’t terribly shocking: Fans of country artists are most commonly Republican, while Madonna, Jay-Z, Lady Gaga, and Rihanna top the Democratic list.

According to the analysis, it was impossible to predict the political leanings of heavy metal fans. Marilyn Manson, Pantera, Alice in Chains, and three other heavy metal bands are among the top 10 artists with the “highest confusion.”

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Since 90% of kids are vaccinated I fail to see how this could possibly be a winning strategy for the Stupid Party.

You can’t spell EBOLA without BO – Barack Obama is responsible for ebola! And body odor!\end{sarcasm}

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To your second point, you are correct. However, IMO the default behavior should be “vaccinate your kids unless you have a specific medical reason or religious tenet that prevents you from doing so” rather than “you don’t need to vaccinate your kids unless you want.” Opt-out [for a specific reason, with support from a medical or religious authority] instead of opt-in.

As to your third point, to a certain extent. But if a parent sends their kids to school in freezing weather in nothing but a T-shirt and shorts, the state should (and probably will) step in to prevent the child from freezing to death. If a parent chooses to let their 8-year-old drive the family car on a public road, again in most circumstances the state should (and probably will) step in to prevent harm to others using that same road. If a parent chooses to let their child be a carrier of an illness that may harm others in their vicinity, should the state intervene and prevent that potential harm?

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It’s also worth reading the author’s story who wrote the book, though it’s heartbreaking:

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Well, since he’s Barrack HUSSEIN Obama, that would be BHO, so I’m not sure where that fits into it anymore (other than KENYA).

OTOH, anagram of HBO?