Hacker News Reader

Comment by paxcoder | Hacker News Reader

Well, it looks like we can advance science without pretending killing human beings is ok, after all.

This comment and others you've posted break the HN guidelines. Please (re-)read them, and post civilly and substantively (or not at all) from now on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

Please specify which ones and exactly how.

Rules lawyering with the moderator isn't likely to work that well.

They have a pretty short comment history and no (visible) prior warnings (I was curious, so I looked). From the outside, the request is not unreasonable given the statement about "[t]his comment and others you've posted".

HN's rules don't work that way, partly because formalizing them would merely turn them into a long list with an infinite number of loopholes to be exploited, and partly because we'd die of boredom if we tried.

Users here are simply expected to live by the spirit of the law—civility and substantiveness—when commenting here. Snarky one-liners that characterize a (vague) opposing view as "killing human beings" fail the "civil and substantive" test. Plus there's outright rudeness in comments such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11663455 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11651181, which has no place here.

I always substantiate any of my one-liners. In this particular case see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11836930 . Few things are more deserving of "snarky" treatment.

The other two (chronologically disordered) examples are a product of my indignation with an obstinate person who wasted people's time and, brazenly ignoring their arguments as well as my own, continued arguing FUD.

Bottom point: I am not malicious and I contribute. So I'd appreciate if the trigger was not pulled on me even though it's probably the only way to get one's comments removed from here :-/

No one was ever performing abortions to obtain stem cells.

What I referred to is the death of a human early in its development (blastocyst) resulting from the steps necessary to derive embryonic stem cells (as opposed to those necessary for adult stem cell derivation like here and elsewhere)

You mean the leftover blastocysts that are otherwise disposed as medical waste after IVF treatments? I think I'd prefer they use them for medical treatments instead of fuel for an incinerator.

blastocysts aren't human beings so your post makes no sense.

As I understand, the blastocyst is a state of a human being in the early stage of its development, having in turn developed from the morula, and the zygote (the first cell).

If you want to argue semantics of the words or the phrase, we can do that. If you want me to use a dictionary to justify my use of the words "human" and/or "being", I'll do that. If you want textbook (medical) definitions, you can have it right away at https://goo.gl/ZFDcbg. And if you'd like more scientific literature backing, consult https://goo.gl/zXpbAu. If you are willing to cede that the nomenclature fits, but would like to now rank human beings by worth in relation to stage of development, I would like to provide arguments for why you shouldn't do that. Finally, if you have reconsidered everything, I would invite you to the Way, the Truth and the Life, as scary as that might sound. Peace be with you and yours.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com