Obama's Pastor

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
561

[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:

BostonBarrister wrote:

It is NOT the same thing to refrain from helping someone as it is to actively harm someone.

Professor X wrote:
WTF? They DID actively harm someone the moment the first child was born with congenital syphilis when they had the cure sitting in the office.

Are you that blind to the impact this had?

Only if you assume the people would otherwise have gotten treatment but for the study. You need that assumption to get something we lawyers refer to as cause.[/quote]

In the era this occurred, what are you talking about? They roped these particular people in because they were uneducated on the issue. Many of these people were farmers or part of rural areas. These weren’t 2008 college grads who didn’t deal with much racism growing up.

It is like you are trying to make it seem as if they weren’t the victims that they were. Where were they going to get treatment from? On one of their many plane trips to New York on vacation?

Get fucking real.

562

One more thing, you seem to be looking at this through the eyes of a lawyer instead of the eyes of a DOCTOR. If I begin treatment on a patient, their health becomes MY responsibility. If I have penicillin or even have knowledge of it but don’t give it to my patients in favor of seeing how the disease will progress, that pretty much destroys that whole oath we took to not do harm to someone else.

I really can’t believe anyone is actually arguing against this.

563

[quote]
BostonBarrister wrote:

Only if you assume the people would otherwise have gotten treatment but for the study. You need that assumption to get something we lawyers refer to as cause.

Professor X wrote:
In the era this occurred, what are you talking about? They roped these particular people in because they were uneducated on the issue. Many of these people were farmers or part of rural areas. These weren’t 2008 college grads who didn’t deal with much racism growing up.

It is like you are trying to make it seem as if they weren’t the victims that they were. Where were they going to get treatment from? On one of their many plane trips to New York on vacation?

Get fucking real.[/quote]

So, the uneducated, poor, rural farmers were MORE likely to have gotten help if the study weren’t being conducted? If the study weren’t being conducted, their access to medical care and proper treatment would have been better how? Would the doctors have even been there?

Once again, this is the whole “cause” analysis in which lawyers engage. The study didn’t cause the syphilis. In the kooky conspiracy theory, the government causes the AIDS - not only the individual infections, but the disease itself. It’s categorically different; it’s a bad analogy; and the kooky conspiracy is not any more plausible, not one iota more plausible, because of the Tuskegee Experiment.

This should go without saying, but you seem to need it explicitly pointed out: This isn’t a defense, in any way, shape or form, of the Tuskegee Experiment. It’s an attack on ridiculous conspiracy theories, and a ridiculous justification of them.

564

[quote]Professor X wrote:
One more thing, you seem to be looking at this through the eyes of a lawyer instead of the eyes of a DOCTOR. If I begin treatment on a patient, their health becomes MY responsibility. If I have penicillin or even have knowledge of it but don’t give it to my patients in favor of seeing how the disease will progress, that pretty much destroys that whole oath we took to not do harm to someone else.

I really can’t believe anyone is actually arguing against this.[/quote]

No one is arguing against a doctor’s moral obligations based on the Hippocratic Oath.

No one is defending the Tuskegee Experiment.

What I am doing is pointing out the fatally flawed reasoning in an attempt to analogize the Tuskegee Experiment to a theory that the U.S. government invented a disease and unleashed it into the population for the purpose of effecting genocide against a racial minority group of American citizens. Preposterous.

565

[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:

BostonBarrister wrote:

Only if you assume the people would otherwise have gotten treatment but for the study. You need that assumption to get something we lawyers refer to as cause.

Professor X wrote:
In the era this occurred, what are you talking about? They roped these particular people in because they were uneducated on the issue. Many of these people were farmers or part of rural areas. These weren’t 2008 college grads who didn’t deal with much racism growing up.

It is like you are trying to make it seem as if they weren’t the victims that they were. Where were they going to get treatment from? On one of their many plane trips to New York on vacation?

Get fucking real.

So, the uneducated, poor, rural farmers were MORE likely to have gotten help if the study weren’t being conducted? If the study weren’t being conducted, their access to medical care and proper treatment would have been better how? Would the doctors have even been there?

Once again, this is the whole “cause” analysis in which lawyers engage. The study didn’t cause the syphilis. In the kooky conspiracy theory, the government causes the AIDS - mot only the individual infections, but the disease itself. It’s categorically different; it’s a bad analogy; and the kooky conspiracy is not any more plausible, not one iota more plausible, because of the Tuskegee Experiment.

This should go without saying, but you seem to need it explicitly pointed out: This isn’t a defense, in any way, shape or form, of the Tuskegee Experiment. It’s an attack on ridiculous conspiracy theories, and a ridiculous justification of them.

[/quote]

Please. You clearly aren’t a medical lawyer. If I have a patient with an infection of ANY KIND and I have access to drugs that can help cure it, but I don’t give it to MY OWN patient because I want to see what happens, I AM AT FAULT.

Are you saying I can’t be sued and lose?

Are you saying it isn’t my responsibility?

566

[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
Professor X wrote:
One more thing, you seem to be looking at this through the eyes of a lawyer instead of the eyes of a DOCTOR. If I begin treatment on a patient, their health becomes MY responsibility. If I have penicillin or even have knowledge of it but don’t give it to my patients in favor of seeing how the disease will progress, that pretty much destroys that whole oath we took to not do harm to someone else.

I really can’t believe anyone is actually arguing against this.

No one is arguing against a doctor’s moral obligations based on the Hippocratic Oath.

No one is defending the Tuskegee Experiment.

What I am doing is pointing out the fatally flawed reasoning in an attempt to analogize the Tuskegee Experiment to a theory that the U.S. government invented a disease and unleashed it into the population for the purpose of effecting genocide against a racial minority group of American citizens. Preposterous.[/quote]

You are doing one hell of a bang up job on that.

567

[quote]Professor X wrote:

Please. You clearly aren’t a medical lawyer. If I have a patient with an infection of ANY KIND and I have access to drugs that can help cure it, but I don’t give it to MY OWN patient because I want to see what happens, I AM AT FAULT.

Are you saying I can’t be sued and lose?

Are you saying it isn’t my responsibility?

[/quote]

My fingers are getting tired of typing the same characters.

The argument doesn’t have anything to do with medical ethics.

This isn’t an analogy of the responsibility of doctors to anything - to what would it even apply? Is part of the conspiracy theory that doctors invented AIDS, and were thus violating their Hippocratic Oaths?

Fault is a moral concept. Cause is a legal, logical concept.

Tuskegee is not logically analogous to the kooky conspiracy theory - that’s why the kooky conspiracy theory isn’t made any more likely by the existence and historical fact of the Tuskegee Experiment.

568

[quote]Professor X wrote:
BostonBarrister wrote:
Professor X wrote:
One more thing, you seem to be looking at this through the eyes of a lawyer instead of the eyes of a DOCTOR. If I begin treatment on a patient, their health becomes MY responsibility. If I have penicillin or even have knowledge of it but don’t give it to my patients in favor of seeing how the disease will progress, that pretty much destroys that whole oath we took to not do harm to someone else.

I really can’t believe anyone is actually arguing against this.

No one is arguing against a doctor’s moral obligations based on the Hippocratic Oath.

No one is defending the Tuskegee Experiment.

What I am doing is pointing out the fatally flawed reasoning in an attempt to analogize the Tuskegee Experiment to a theory that the U.S. government invented a disease and unleashed it into the population for the purpose of effecting genocide against a racial minority group of American citizens. Preposterous.

You are doing one hell of a bang up job on that.[/quote]

As they say, you can lead someone to water…

569

[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
Professor X wrote:

Please. You clearly aren’t a medical lawyer. If I have a patient with an infection of ANY KIND and I have access to drugs that can help cure it, but I don’t give it to MY OWN patient because I want to see what happens, I AM AT FAULT.

Are you saying I can’t be sued and lose?

Are you saying it isn’t my responsibility?

My fingers are getting tired of typing the same characters.

The argument doesn’t have anything to do with medical ethics.

This isn’t an analogy of the responsibility of doctors to anything - to what would it even apply? Is part of the conspiracy theory that doctors invented AIDS, and were thus violating their Hippocratic Oaths?

Fault is a moral concept. Cause is a legal, logical concept.

Tuskegee is not logically analogous to the kooky conspiracy theory - that’s why the kooky conspiracy theory isn’t made any more likely by the existence and historical fact of the Tuskegee Experiment.
[/quote]

The moment those patients walked into a doctor’s office, that doctor became responsible for that patient’s health and well being for any situation that may arise from their interaction with that patient.

That means worrying about where they MAY have gotten treatment is irrelevant. It is so because their own doctor became responsible for their health, especially when they LIED to those patients to avoid actually treating them.

It means that trusted figures in society (since patients didn’t go to any sort of school for medicine) became responsible for the treatment of these patients. That means ANY further progression of the disease was CAUSED by the inaction of those doctors.

I will wait while you try to deny that.

Actually, I won’t wait because I have some place to be right now. I’ll respond to anything you wrote later…especially since I doubt it will actually involve the way things work in the medical field.

570

[quote]Professor X wrote:

The moment those patients walked into a doctor’s office, that doctor became responsible for that patient’s health and well being for any situation that may arise from their interaction with me. [/quote]

This is irrelevant to the point.

[quote]Professor X wrote:

That means worrying about where they MAY have gotten treatment is irrelevant. It is so because their own doctor became responsible for their health, especially when they LIED to those patients to avoid actually treating them.[/quote]

This is also irrelevant to the point.

[quote]Professor X wrote:

It means that trusted figures in society (since patients didn’t go to any sort of school for medicine) became responsible for the treatment of these patients.[/quote]

This is also irrelevant to the point.

[quote]Professor X wrote:

That means ANY further progression of the disease was CAUSED by the inaction of those doctors.

I will wait while you try to deny that.[/quote]

It doesn’t mean they caused the disease to progress. It means they didn’t take any action to stop it. The cause was whatever gave the people the disease in the first instance.

This is an example for the purpose of illustrating cause, not for analogizing animals to people: When videographers on a nature shows, armed with high-powered rifles, tape a zebra getting killed by a lion, the videographers aren’t causing the zebra to be killed by the lion, even though they could have easily shot the lion. They aren’t causing anything that subsequently occurs because the zebra dies either.

Another example: We aren’t the cause of genocide in Darfur simply because we aren’t intervening to stop it.

Really, do you think it would be the same thing for you to inject someone with AIDS as it would be to not treat him? And that’s only one difference…

[quote]Professor X wrote:

Actually, I won’t wait because I have some place to be right now. I’ll respond to anything you wrote later…especially since I doubt it will actually involve the way things work in the medical field.[/quote]

Good, I need to go to bed. But before I do: The point, again, is that the Tuskegee Experiment, as bad as it was, was a medical study pursuant to which government doctors withhold treatment for a disease from a small, set group of minorities who already had the disease; it is categorically different from, and it was not at all analogous to, a kooky conspiracy theory holding the CIA or some other government agency invented a disease in a lab and then injected it into the population (without even having a cure) for the purpose of effecting a genocide against black Americans. It doesn’t matter that racism would be the motivation for the conspiracy theory and that the conspiracy theory involves a disease - they aren’t the same, and the existence of the former does nothing to increase the probability of the latter.

571

[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
It doesn’t mean they caused the disease to progress. It means they didn’t take any action to stop it.

[/quote]

Which means any further manifestation of that disease was CAUSED by that inaction. They may not have CAUSED the initial infection, but they DID cause secondary and tertiary syphilis to manifest because they did nothing to stop it.

Bottom line, if a patient comes to me with high blood pressure and I do NOTHING about it (or worse yet, act like they don’t have high blood pressure and tell them everything is fine) and they die of a heart attack that night, I can be sued and lose because it will be viewed as being CAUSED by my inactivity, even though I didn’t CAUSE his high blood pressure.

These are things that doctors sit around and talk about…how not to get sued. That is why I know you are off base on this one.

572

[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:

Good, I need to go to bed. But before I do: The point, again, is that the Tuskegee Experiment, as bad as it was, was a medical study pursuant to which government doctors withhold treatment for a disease from a small, set group of minorities who already had the disease; it is categorically different from, and it was not at all analogous to, a kooky conspiracy theory holding the CIA or some other government agency invented a disease in a lab and then injected it into the population (without even having a cure) for the purpose of effecting a genocide against black Americans. It doesn’t matter that racism would be the motivation for the conspiracy theory and that the conspiracy theory involves a disease - they aren’t the same, and the existence of the former does nothing to increase the probability of the latter.

[/quote]

I think that you will agree though that a government by the people, for the people, through doctors that took an oath to do no harm, dispassionately let black men and their families suffer and die a horrible death for the “greater good”.

Seen this way, this pastors HIV theory remains bullshit, but his general attitude towards government, or white men in power, is spot on.

To the posters who claimed that he spread hatred. Maybe he does. However, are those young black people to forget what happened and could easily happen again? Could this man, or any man, honestly tell them to trust their government?

In the end it is better to believe one conspiracy theory to many than miss the one conspiracy that might destroy you.

573

Noone is even asking him to trust the government. But, don’t make up crap so you can keep your angry followers enthralled. Advancing the idea that HIV-a non-discriminating virus which has been widely researched around the world-is a very recent genocidal gambit by the white man, is dangerous rhetoric.

Couple that with his need to paint a black Jesus oppressed and killed by the white man. Now, maybe I’m wrong, but doesn’t the racist white Christian cults (like Christian Identity) stress a european looking Christ, oppressed and killed by the jews? No, I don’t mean as in a passing historical commentary. But that this point is stressed, to make Jews out to forevermore be the enemy of the Christian?

Wright is a divider, period. Just look at this thread. I don’t think any single issue has provoked this much negative attention towards Obama himself. But throw Wright into the mix…

574

If you’re interested in hearing what Wright said about the “chickens”, here you go:

575

[quote]pittbulll wrote:
BostonBarrister wrote:
pittbulll wrote:

Don�??t you think investing 20 years as an alibi at least makes you sincere?

Unfortunately, I’ve seen many people who, in my estimation (though not in mine alone), go to church for appearance’s sake.

But are you saying obama goes to church for the sake of appearance ?[/quote]

Either that or he hates white people. Since half his family is white I doubt that. I have no other way to reconcile in my mind how he listened to 20 years of idiotic rants like that in church unless he was just going to church to fit into the community and build support for his political career.

576

[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
BostonBarrister wrote:
pittbulll wrote:

Don�??t you think investing 20 years as an alibi at least makes you sincere?

Unfortunately, I’ve seen many people who, in my estimation (though not in mine alone), go to church for appearance’s sake.

But are you saying obama goes to church for the sake of appearance ?

Either that or he hates white people. Since half his family is white I doubt that. I have no other way to reconcile in my mind how he listened to 20 years of idiotic rants like that in church unless he was just going to church to fit into the community and build support for his political career.

[/quote]

I’ve already told you how. Whether you accept it or not is up to you. The fact that he has white family members should stand out to you how he can see both sides equally, instead of painting him as someone so ignorant that he hates half of himself.

577

[quote]Professor X wrote:
Zap Branigan wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
BostonBarrister wrote:
pittbulll wrote:

Don�??t you think investing 20 years as an alibi at least makes you sincere?

Unfortunately, I’ve seen many people who, in my estimation (though not in mine alone), go to church for appearance’s sake.

But are you saying obama goes to church for the sake of appearance ?

Either that or he hates white people. Since half his family is white I doubt that. I have no other way to reconcile in my mind how he listened to 20 years of idiotic rants like that in church unless he was just going to church to fit into the community and build support for his political career.

I’ve already told you how. Whether you accept it or not is up to you. The fact that he has white family members should stand out to you how he can see both sides equally, instead of painting him as someone so ignorant that he hates half of himself.[/quote]

I don’t think he hates white people. I think his attending that particular church was pandering to the local community. Now he is running for a national office and he is pandering to the national sensibilities.

That is why he is addressing this issue of race now instead of years ago. Because he is forced to. Not because he is a uniter, a special politician or any of that other crap.

578

[quote]
BostonBarrister wrote:

It doesn’t mean they caused the disease to progress. It means they didn’t take any action to stop it.

Professor X wrote:

Which means any further manifestation of that disease was CAUSED by that inaction. They may not have CAUSED the initial infection, but they DID cause secondary and tertiary syphilis to manifest because they did nothing to stop it.

Bottom line, if a patient comes to me with high blood pressure and I do NOTHING about it (or worse yet, act like they don’t have high blood pressure and tell them everything is fine) and they die of a heart attack that night, I can be sued and lose because it will be viewed as being CAUSED by my inactivity, even though I didn’t CAUSE his high blood pressure.

These are things that doctors sit around and talk about…how not to get sued. That is why I know you are off base on this one.[/quote]

That’s great - doctors could get sued for this, for violating a duty. Doctors have a legal duty to act. The violation of that duty is the basis for the suit. The actual cause of the guy’s death was still a heart attack. The doctor didn’t cause the high blood pressure, or the heart attack. Because the doctor failed to abide by his legal duty, he can still be held liable for something he didn’t otherwise cause.

To get hypertechnical about it, there are two types of causation: “but for” causation, and proximate causation. You generally need both to have “cause” - but in your hypothetical case, you don’t need proximate cause because of the legal duty that was violated.

“But for” causation is all you’ve got here - and this is the kind that’s easiest to show. You can attribute “but for” causation to your car accident to your wife who made you late in the morning - if you hadn’t been late, you wouldn’t have been speeding, and that car that hit you would have been far behind you. But you wouldn’t have the other element, proximate cause. She didn’t do anything to cause the actual accident.

A plaintiff’s lawyer would still claim he “caused” it to get the jury on his side - and the defense lawyer probably wouldn’t bother correcting him directly because it wouldn’t help his case and it’s confusing to the jury.

And that’s all still irrelevant to the point.

The overarching structure of the point is a distinguishing of the wacky conspiracy theory with the historical bad act. And you’re entire point in your last few posts has focused on something dissimilar between the two.

Your posts all go to why there was an ethical problem with the Tuskegee Experiment - and there was an ethical problem with the Tuskegee Experiment. But none of them add one thousandth of a percent of probability to the wacky conspiracy theory.

*Edited to add clarification.

579

[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
BostonBarrister wrote:
pittbulll wrote:

Don�??t you think investing 20 years as an alibi at least makes you sincere?

Unfortunately, I’ve seen many people who, in my estimation (though not in mine alone), go to church for appearance’s sake.

But are you saying obama goes to church for the sake of appearance ?

Either that or he hates white people. Since half his family is white I doubt that. I have no other way to reconcile in my mind how he listened to 20 years of idiotic rants like that in church unless he was just going to church to fit into the community and build support for his political career.

[/quote]

Hilarious, thankfully we don’t have to rely on your mind, which is barely able to muster the ability to fasten your Velcro shoes.

580

The belief is causing more harm today than the supposed conspiracy.