response 101 of 104:

Jul 7 18:43 UTC 2002

Question:  How many grexers does it take to miss the point of 
an article?

response 103 of 104:

Jul 8 05:24 UTC 2002

Re #101:  Perhaps it was the author who missed the point, or readers
who don't share the prejudices of the author's target audience see it
as simply absurd, so they look deeper into the whys and wherefores.
Like, who is the author preaching to (the converted), what buttons is
he pushing (the code phrases are good indicators), how do his arguments
hang together, and so forth.

I'll speculate that Krauthammer is trying to get his audience to believe
that the continuation of cloned therapies means that cloned babies 
(toddlers? grade-schoolers?) will be created to order and then killed
for their organs.  He doesn't actually *say* this, but the arrows all
point in that direction (the histrionics of his choir are certainly
consistent with nothing less).  Thus, It Must Be Stopped.  To refute
this, all I have to say is:

1.)     Cloned therapies would not come from babies, they'd come from
        petri dishes.  Tissue-culture is already at the point where
        tissues can be grown on substrates which form them into more or
        less functional organs.  This has been demonstrated with non-cloned
        muscle and epithelium to form new urinary bladders in beagles,
        to give another example of which I'm aware.

2.)     More importantly, the public would never accept such things; on
        the other hand, the public is not squeamish about tissue culture.

Point 2 is why the Pro-Lie forces need to kill the technology before the
public understands why the bogeyman isn't real.  If the Pro-Lie side fails
to spin the public debate with such fabrications, they'll lose; they can't
win on the facts.