Democrat party's secret AIDS plot...

Supposedly - and this is coming out in one of those investigative pieces in the next week - high-ranking US Democrats have been pursuing a centrally-orchestrated plan to spread the AIDS virus, starting in third-world countries.


Specifically, the scheme has called for the government-controlled distribution of so-called "carrier" drugs. What these drugs do, in essence, is to take someone who has the virus, and turn that person into a carrier by allowing the person to live a normal life, but without killing the virus.


The idea is, the more carriers they can make out of corpses, the faster AIDS, and the habits and behaviors that accompany its transmission, can be spread. Ultimately, the goal is a planet of government-dependent carriers, who can only live with government controlled disease-management programs.


Their greatest asset is people who have AIDS and have shown susceptibility to the carrier drugs. Their greatest fear is that these people will die, before the virus - as well as whatever habits enabled them to acquire it - can be transmitted.


More recently, they have actually begun a propaganda and outreach campaign, attemting to suggest that only viruses like ebola - which kill the host too quickly to be transmitted - are bad. They would like to characterize AIDS as something more aking to the common cold, in the future, which rarely kills and a single strain of which can be spread around the world in a matter of days.


Like the cold or flu, that is, except for to the extent you will have to give up 96% of your income to the government-pharmaceutical lobby complex, just to stay alive:) Really, it is not so much the lives of people which it is crucial to save right now, but rather the virus itself, and the rites which accompany its transmission.


eLROY

You've truly lost your mind.

Those goddam liberals have also come out with a how to video for transients. It's a little piece on the do's and do not do's of dumpster diving. I know it's true because I heard it on the Rush Limbaugh show, the same place eLROY gets his information.

Just when I got over worrying about the Illuminati, the Bilderbergers and the Trilateral Commission, now I've got to worry about Democrats?


Will it never end?

I'm not sure that this insane troll even deserves a reply, but you sucked me in.


What may I ask, do you believe is the motive of Democrats for spreading HIV? Why would they want HIV spread?


I guess you are trying to make the point that because the available treatments for AIDS prolong the lives of victims but often leave them capable of transmitting the disease, treating AIDS victims might lead to increased spread of AIDS.


Well, in case you haven't noticed, HIV has been spreading very well on its own. This is because, even though untreated HIV nearly always kills its host, it has a long incubation period during which the infected person is apparently healthy and therefore capable of infecting others. If you think that not treating AIDS victims will prevent the spread of the disease, you are an idiot.


Perhaps you feel that because AIDS is often spread by behavior that you consider evil or sinful that AIDS victims deserve to die. Well, I probably won't convince you that drug addicts, gays, non-monagamous heterosexuals or whatever groups your twisted, hateful mind believes to be deserving of this horrible disease don't deserve the disease, but perhaps you should consider that many of the victims contracted the disease because they are women who had the misfortune or bad judgement (take your pick) to be married to men who engaged in risky behavior. Do they deserve to die?


Many more victims are children who caught the disease from their mothers. Do they deserve to die? Also, I might point out that the available treatments for HIV are often effective in preventing mother to child transmission. How does this fact fit into your absurd conspiracy theory?


It would certainly be better if a complete cure were available instead of drugs which prolong life but potentially leave the victims infectious. However, if you believe that not using the treatments that are available now somehow is better than using those treatments, I can only assume that that belief arises from hate, extreme ignorance, or both.

In all seriousness, I deny people AIDS treatment every day, and so do you,CORed. In fact, you deny people everything from AIDS treatment, to ordinary doctor visits, to bus rides to their doctor.


After all, as long there is a single person in the world who can't afford one single thing, and as long as you have one dime in your bank account and don't empty your pockets to give that person more, you are denying him something.


So, every time somebody directs the use of a resource, or every time somebody enforces property rights, he is denying something to someone else. The absence of private property rights just denies access to everybody but the strongest and most violent!


So what would you deny me, in order to subsidize some other culture's idiot, immoral behavior? And just how much self-denial do you practice every day yourself?! And who will draw the line, when allocating from whom and to whom?


eLROY

Well, now you are at least getting within spitting distance of a rational argument. You may feel that finite money can be better spent for some purpose other than treating AIDS victims. Unfortunately, (in my view if not yours) there very likely isn't enough money around to treat all the AIDS victims in the world. I, however, am not opposed to seeing some of my tax dollars go to do what we can to alleviate some human suffering.


I'm not sure how you get from there to a conspiracy by the Democrats to spread AIDS. I think you display a remarkable ignorance about the disease and its treatment and transmission. First of all, most of the available drugs for HIV greatly reduce the amount of active virus in the patient. Most likely, this will reduce, if not eliminate the risk that they will transmit the disease to others. I don't think enough data is available yet to be certain. However, as I pointed out in my previous post, it has been established that treating a pregnant women infected with HIV greatly reduces the risk of the virus being transmitted to her child. Perhaps you feel that children deserve to be punished for the immoral behavior of their parents. I don't.


In fact, what I really take issue with is the whole notion that semms to be at the root of your arguments, which seems to be that, because some victims of HIV contracted the disease through behavior that you consider to be immoral, and that I would conside to be foolish, if not immoral, that they are somehow less deserving of treatment than someone who contracted Malaria from a mosquito bite. It is this notion that I find morally bankrupt.

I do concede, I take more of an Old-Testament view than most bleeding hearts. The best example being, I am opposed to abortion, except in the case of rape, where the mother can decide whether the child is guilty of the father's crime.


The Christians, on the other hand, take an optimistic view of missionary activities. They believe the genes passed on are irrelevant, any baby can be raised to be a good Christian, exhibiting Christian traits.


So far as Malaria, that is perfect proof that you would indeed deny people their health for something that shines more brightly, CORed. How many millions of people have died of malaria, since they banned DTT over some scare story?


Finally, it is not behavior that I "consider" to be immoral. Behavior which results in a plague destroying a society is by definition immoral. That's how morals are arrived at, by being passed on by survivors. You survive, it's a moral!


But please, CORed, tell me what you think a "moral" is! Or do you even deny that morals exist? Or are morals what a given individual decides they are? It seems you are confusing morals with instincts.


Morals are designed to counter instincts. It is an instinct for your heart to go out (and your checkbook to open) to any poor, starving, wide-eyed thing. But name a moral prohibition, apart from incest, that doesn't go against instincs!?


eLROY

CORed, you said that risky behavior which I consider to be immoral, you consider to be merely "foolish." The problem with this is that it prevents anybody but those educated in microbiology from staying alive!


If people had to know how cell meiosis worked before they could decide to have children, there would be no people. If Southwestern natives had to know why to burn a blanket a rodent had run across, they'd have died of hantavirus!


In fact, there are only about five people on Earth - me being one of them - who seem to fully grasp the scientific basis of the private-property moral. Could Stephen Hawking predict that marriage would confer survival advantages?


How about stop lights. If you had never heard of them or seen them - if they didn't exist - could you possibly believe or predict that such an invention would survive, by achieving the success it has? Must we "know" before we can advance?


Your view of the world is what has been termed "The Fatal Conceit" by Friedrich Hayek. It is the presumption that human reason is capable of understanding or supervising the evolution of human action.


So, I made the point in another post, that the President of some African country, insisted publicly that AIDS is not caused by a virus. Wouldn't it be nice if even such foolish people could live too, by obeying morals?


eLROY

Interesting example: Malaria was banned in the USA. I believe it is still legal in much of the third world. The official reason for banning DDT was that it was carcinogenic. The reason many environmentalists wanted it banned was that it very nearly caused the extinction of several bird species due to egg shell thinning. This was not a "scare story". It was scientific fact. DDT (or breakown products) is also very persistent in the environment and in the fatty tissue of living organisms. It tended to bio-accumulate and concentrate as it moved up the food chain. I don't think DDT was really a significant threat to human health. It was a significant threat to birds, especially raptors and fish eaters. Whether the benefits of DDT to human health and agriculture were worth the loss of several bird species is debatable. The reason DDT is not much used anywhere in the world is not because of bleeding heart environmentalists. It's not used much any more because most of the insects it was used on developed resistance. DDT never really had much hope of being more than a short term solution to Malaria.

Actually, I'm not a Christian, although I did have a Christian upbringing.


Actually, the proposition that behavior that enhances human survival is moral, or that behavior that detracts from it is immoral, is one that I can agree with. I guess I would say that the distinction between a moral and an instinct is that instincts are passed from generation to generation geneticly, whereas morals are passed on culturally. Survival is the ultimate arbiter of whether a moral or an instinct is beneficial.


I think where I would disagree with you is the notion that HIV is primarily a result of behavior. Certainly promiscuous sex, especially (but not exclusively) anal sex, or needle sharing by IV drug users greatly speeds up the spread of the disease. However, given the long incubation period, promiscuity is not required to spread the disease. Certainly, if every human being on the planet had sex with one and only one partner in their life, and every one was scrupulously careful about blood transmission, no transmission route would exist. However, as long as there are people who have more than one sex partner in their lives exist (even if separated by several years), a transmission route exists. If each HIV carrier transmits the disease, on average, to one other person, the disease will persist. If each carrier transmits the disease, on average, to more than one other person, the disease will spread. Long term, I believe that the best approach is to try to develop a cure, a vaccine, or both.


What will happen if we do nothing? Most likely, as the virus and the host co-evolve, the virus will become less virulent (killing the host does not promote the survival of the virus) and people will become more resistant. Almost certainly there are resistant individuals in the population. There are already documented cases of carriers who have survived for many years without apparent deterioration. However, this co-evolution process will take thousands of years, while the plague continues to be devastating.


There are several closely related animal viruses to HIV. In some cases, where the virus has been in the species the longest, nearly every individual is infected, apparently without ill effect. HIV is viulent because it apparently very recently (probably in the 20th century) made the jump from chimpanzees to humans.


Should we try to persuade people to behave in a less risky manor? absolutely. However, I see no value in not using whatever means are available (and affordable) to alleviate suffering.

C'mon. You know that anyone who went and got themselves bitten by a malarial mosquito had to be doing something wrong. You also must know that anyone who argues with eLROY is a fool.