I was wounded twice in Viet Nam. Neither time was it an ectopic pregnancy.
But, according to your prior posts, you suffered skeletal injuries, not intercine bleeding or any of the related organ problems that can entail.
FWIW, I was wounded multiple times in combat. One incident did involve relatively significant internal bleeding (most the damage was to my right shoulder and neck, but multiple bone fragments (not my own) and metal fragments did penetrate my chest). So that experience is at least remotely connected to the subject. After all, I am here, writing, which makes me, if nothing else, living proof that shock and internal bleeding are not “near 100% fatal” (as you then insisted) in the modern age of plasma and antibiotics.
I actually had not considered such a superficial argument. My point had only been that I had been trained to treat such injuries and had direct experience in the relative effectiveness of treatment (I actually administered the ‘first aid’ in the incident above to myself). But if you would like to digress to the inane, I’d suggest providing more details of your Vietnam injuries so we can decipher why you emerged from them with such an incorrect understanding of the treatment ofshock and hemorage.
Your relativism, not mine.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, there have only been two views presented. Yours, which you asserted was a ‘correct’ and ‘non distorted’ reflection, and the Church’s, quoted from the Catholic Encyclopedia. It is impossible for me to be a causal factor in the discrepency between them.
Similarly, the multi-pronged approach which considers all the interrelated factors is characteristic of people actually working personally to deal with the problems of the country, not those who push government programs as the solution to all our problems.
Again, your ‘correct’ leads nicely to my point. You have asserted that abortion leaves you no choice in voting. But that leaves you in the position of politically supporting the largest explosion in discretionary spending in the 20th century. In other words, you profess that government is not a solution, but then support an enormous expansion of government.
Similiarly, you are in the position of supporting greatly expanded government powers, at the cost of states’ rights and individual freedoms. So, regardless of the ideology you state, when it comes to
personal action you support a much larger, much more powerful government.
And this appears to be just one of the compromises you make. Whatever their “intent”, you support political policies which have overseen a prolonged period of stagnant wages, anemic job growth, shrinking economic mobility, and record setting debt. You may vote about ‘abortion’, but you are also voting for the other actions of those you support. Changes to Medicare which drive inflation, changes to bankruptcy laws that make it much harder to escape medical debt and much easier to walk away from a mortgage, and public policies which promote the outsourcing of US jobs.
In today’s empty political discourse we pretend that this is largely opinion. But these are the things we can measure. We have inflation, we have negative savings rates, we have a contracting job market, and we have record corporate profits. President Bush once referred to CEOs and the wealthy as his “base”. There is little doubt that they have been well served by this administration. Look at the last acts of the GOP congress before it lost control.
The question is, having collapsed the faith to a single issue, are social conservatives being as well served? The measurable evidence says no. The decline in abortions has slowed (even reversed direction in some states), gay rights have been expanded, and poverty is expanding. All the while we find ourselves at odds with Rome on issues like war, torture, and our humanitarian obligations to Christians we are helping to persecute.
I’ve always found it fascinating to hear folks boast about their ‘conservative’ voting when the VP’s old employer, in which he still has a financial interest, gets $2.4B to, among other things, serve rancid food and tainted water to US troops in a time of war. Are greed and corruption the ‘good ol’ fashioned values’ people want to return to? The same man publicly supports his daughter’s decision to have a child inside a gay union, publicly asserts things which are demonstrably false, declares himself a unique, uncontrolled, branch of the government, runs his office so poorly that misshandling of classified materials leads to
two criminal convictions, demonstrates the sort of judgement that includes drinking alchohol before shooting someone in the face (having grown up in farm country, I still can’t fathom the sort of incompetence it must take to screw up ‘hunting’ domesticated birds), and declares that publicly berating fellow elected officials with foul obsceneties makes him “feel better”.
I volunteered for a war I had grave doubts about. He dodged service while claiming to support the war. Why, exactly, am I supposed to conclude that these people share any of my core values?
