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At 1/31/09 07:27 PM, Alphabit wrote: There are two kinds of people in the US; democrats and retards.
And I don't mean retard as an insult; I'm just saying that they are 'slow'; still living in the past and unwilling to adapt.

O rly? People with a wordsum score of 8 or 9 are the most likely to be Republicans. People with wordsum scores of 0 are the most likely to be Democrats. Since wordsum is a proxy for the general intelligence factor used by the General Social Survey, it's clear that Republicans are not very likely to be the ones unwilling to adapt.

Next time do the research.

At 1/31/09 12:14 AM, Kwing wrote:

So, although this will have been the 3rd time I've said it, I wish to leave you with the big discussion question: Why is religion a social activity? Should it be?

It sounds like Unitarian Universalism might be what you're looking for.

At 1/30/09 10:37 PM, Christopherr wrote:

You have your terminology wrong. A government tax on a good such as gasoline isn't called a sales tax, but an excise tax. You've got to get them right if you want people to understand you.

The idea behind a stimulus package is that it forces money to flow through the economy, and not get hoarded by rich people. A tax cut isn't a stimulus, as Der Lowe has pointed out time and time again, because people will save most of the money that they get from the government.

The real issue is that while I agree with the idea of a stimulus package, I don't think that Obama is spending the money very efficiently. Let's look at where the money is going:

BBC wrote:

Tax cuts: $27bn

As I've already explained, tax cuts are largely going to be saved or used to pay off debts.

Increased federal funds for Medicaid: $87bn

Decent move, although I wouldn't really consider it stimulus.

Moves towards clean, efficient energy: $54bn
Rebuild roads, bridges and buildings: $90bn

Can't really disagree with this.

Modernise education: $141bn

The problem here is that most of the education spending is going towards need based college grants and subsidized government loans. The problem with need based college grants is that they enable kids to make bad economic decisions (like getting 6 years of education in a topic that they will never use).

The problem with subsidizing student loans is that it enables colleges to become more expensive, because the students aren't footing the bill. For example, my university (WPI, 3000 students) is building a 50 million USD recreational facility. I don't see how this sort of spending could be possible without the government subsidizing college education.

If I were in control of that 140 billion USD:

1. Create a Merit Grant program that gives any student who scores above a 2100 on the new SATs a 140k USD scholarship (costing 7.6 billion USD per year) and any kid who gets a 5 on the AP Physics/Calculus/Chemistry/Statistics test a full college scholarship to any state flagship university of their choice to pursue a technical topic (costing somewhere on the order of magnitude of 5 billion USD per year).

Note that the costs of those programs are quite small, because only a handful of students perform at that level on math and science tests. I'm not an order of magnitude off.

2. Sign a law that would make it possible for any student to default on any student loan. This would make lenders think twice about giving a 100k loan to someone getting a degree with no real career opportunities, and it would make the size of our education spending more closely reflect the real value of education.

3. Create a national tier system of BS, MS, and Ph.D. degrees based on the candidates going into the schools and their performance outside of the schools. This would make college less expensive by stopping the endless rat race of colleges outspending each other to get ahead on the USNews rankings.

4. Create a system of magnet high schools that allow kids to get specialized education at the primary and secondary levels. That's where the building comes in.

5. Give students a stipend for doing well on subject and AP tests, relative to their learning level (in practice, this is probably just what school they're at). This will allow bright young students to work fewer hours and still support their family. Kids from upper middle class backgrounds already have the luxury of not having to work during their adolescence. In effect we're just leveling the playing field.

Help for workers, unemployment benefit and training: $102bn

Fair enough. But it seems like for $102bn you could create a lot of new jobs, as opposed to providing funds for unemployment benefits and worker retraining.

It's loaded with random costs such as spending a few hundred thousand dollars on making federal buildings more energy-efficient, things almost completely irrelevant to helping the current state of the national economy. You can be sure that this was positively loaded with many wasteful costs, being the federal government.

Yes. What's kind of ironic and disturbing to me is that for all the rhetoric the left has thrown out about stopping global warming and achieving energy independence - the stimulus package isn't focused on building nuclear power plants.

Interestingly enough, building more nuclear power plants through federal funds is a universal win-win proposition. The demand for construction workers would reduce unemployment and give more wealth to the working class. The demand for nuclear engineers would drive up engineering salaries across the board and stimulate American education in science and technology. And finally, the reduction in CO2 emissions would improve America's reputation with hippies among the world. Or maybe not, they might oppose nuclear anyway.

At 1/30/09 12:16 AM, TimeLordX wrote:

Uh, no they are not. Tax cuts got us out of the malaise of the 70's and into that prosperous decade known as the 80'. "A rising tide lifts all boats"-that's tax cuts in a nutshell.

Even though the tax cuts were financed with debt?

That being said, I don't necessarily oppose tax cuts. If the government has no useful way to spend the money, or if we want to increase the savings rate - tax cuts are a good idea.

At 1/30/09 12:12 AM, Der-Lowe wrote:

I don't fully disagree with Obama's plan. As PISA has found out (page 34), the biggest determinant in academic success is socio-economic level.
If you base grants in merits only, you'd be subsidizing those who can afford to go to college.

I don't think that this would necessarily be a bad thing. Why not invest the largest sums of money in the most qualified students, and then redistribute their income later? A wealthy man with a great gift in mathematics could probably do way more with 200,000 USD then an engineer-in-training like me, even though I need it more than he does.

Even for the wealthiest of students, 160k USD is not a trivial amount of money (which is where I got the 9 billion figure from).

What could be done is to establish a grant that is based on academic performance, but favors the poor; eg a person that comes from a family that makes less than 40k a year gets an extra point in his/her GPA.

That's not a bad idea. Given equal qualifications, a poor person should probably get one boost to correct for the impact of their education on their academic merits, and then a second boost for the purpose of building equality. I don't have the numbers to know how big such a boost would be, although 1 point on an American GPA is a HUGE boost. At my HS, a 3.5 was a mediocre GPA. A 3.8 was good. And a 4.0 was great.

I see the incentive problem, yes.
Why was the impossibility to default students loans established in the first place?

Lenders go along with it because they get more money. Students go along with it because our society has a mythos of "Education is always a good investment", which reflects the fact that education is useful - but doesn't reflect the reality of the costs of education or the jobs that could be done with less education. The government keeps supporting it because they want more student loans to be given out, to let poor people go to college (even if they don't learn any useful job skills and rake up loads of debt).

Oh you and nuclear :P

Well, it seems like a good idea. It'll create construction jobs for the working class, engineering jobs for the upper middle class, and free radiation for the mutant class.

Also, you got the spending/tax-cut difference, here's your Keynesian cookie!
*Keynesian cookie*

Mmmm... If only the Keynesian multiplier applied to cookies.

At 1/29/09 12:51 AM, Der-Lowe wrote:

At 1/28/09 09:36 PM, Al6200 wrote: I don't think that the bailout is that bad of an idea. They way the money is going to be spent isn't great, but it's not all that bad either. Spending more money on college education and infrastructure is prudent, but I wish that there would've been more allocation based on merit as opposed to need, IMO.

For example?

The money is not being used efficiently. The budget of the (entirely need based) Pell Grant is going to get an extra 8 billion USD. For that amount of money you could give every kid with an SAT of 2150 (about 2 standard deviations above the mean) or higher on the SAT a full scholarship to an expensive private college. Putting the money into Pell Grants will just send more poor people to college for free, whether or not they are studying something useful or making a relatively good investment. Giving the money to the most gifted high school students

Furthermore, college education could be better improved (and for free, I might add) by requiring that it should be possible to default on all student loans. Democrats would whine about how it would stop poor kids from going to college. But isn't it better for them to not go to college than to be saddled with a huge debt that they can't pay back.

You read stories all the time about people who easily get 85k of student loans to get a liberal arts degree from a fourth tier college. No one would give a loan to that person and expect them to pay it back, but that's not a problem for an unscrupulous lender if they can't declare bankruptcy.

--

Tax cuts are also a dumb form of stimulus, because all but the poor and working class will save any money that they get. More money needs to be spent directly, like on a national program to go 100% nuclear.

You have the dollar-making machine, you are the richest country in the world, you have never defaulted your debt. Money is fleeing from emerging countries into the developed world: The US, Japan, and Germany mostly.

Fair enough. If I were the leader of Zimbabwe, I'd probably use the euro or dollar as an official currency, just so that people will think that the country is a reasonably safe investment.

I'm surprised that no one is addressing the question of whether loli makes men who view it satiated and less tempted to look at real child pornography or molest children, or aroused and more likely to break the law.

Intuitively, the former makes a lot more sense. But it would be irresponsible to claim it as the truth until definitive evidence emerges one way or the other.

I don't think that the bailout is that bad of an idea. They way the money is going to be spent isn't great, but it's not all that bad either. Spending more money on college education and infrastructure is prudent, but I wish that there would've been more allocation based on merit as opposed to need, IMO.

With that said, I have trouble understanding why anyone is going to buy the T-bills to fund this thing. Isn't the government afraid that someone is going to lose confidence and stop financing our debt?

At 1/28/09 01:48 PM, Tancrisism wrote:

Except add evidence agreed upon by all scientists except those paid for by corporations, and shifting climate patterns in an unhealthy way, to the odds in favor of climate change existing.

People have financial interests, whether they work in academia or in business. Don't forget the experience of Larry Summers, who was forced to step down from his position at Harvard for making offensive, but empirically defensible, suggestions about gender differences.

With that said, I think that there is a preponderance of evidence that global warming is happening and is to some extent caused by humans. The real question is whether it's worth spending resources to fix (let's not forget that the last period of global warming contributed to the end of the middle ages and the beginning of the modern era in a non-trivial way.

At 1/28/09 03:49 PM, Achilles2 wrote:

You're born poor and in a bad part of the country
You don't have enough money to move
There are no good schools around
You can't afford a good college
You don't have the requirements for a good job
You don't make enough money from your bad job
You can't pay your bills
Your credit plummets
You have children

The poverty cycle is a lot more complicated than that. If it was just a matter of giving them money, then we could give them a lump sum of cash and there would be a positive feedback loop that would bring them into the middle class.

As America's experience with the "Great Society" programs show us - it's not that simple. But the success of programs like "Perry Preschool" show us that, with investment, there are significant steps that we can take to reduce poverty.

At 1/28/09 09:20 AM, RubberTrucky wrote: This reminds me of my econometrics class this year. Even on the examinations we had to determine wether blacks are significantly denied bank loans on their skincolour solely.
The answer was positive.

Does that mean that they were denied bank loans just based on their race?

At 1/28/09 02:58 AM, SomeCrappyUsername wrote: In loli hentai nobody is actually getting hurt it is just a drawing, but in regular porn there are regular people who are exploited. That is why loli is more ethical that regular porn.

I don't know why everyone thinks that people are exploited in regular porn. Do they make less money then they could get working outside of the porn industry? The Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't list porn stars, so I honestly can't answer that question.

NG is really diverse politically. I'd say that economically it's probably dead center, and socially it leans slightly to the left.

At 5/21/07 01:33 AM, cellardoor6 wrote:

It's not about civil rights. The reason blacks pay higher auto loans is because blacks are more likely to be in a socio-economic margin where this takes place.

Yeah. I'd be willing to bet that if you looked at bankruptcy statistics, you'd see some group differences. It's not like there's some intrinsic property of minorities that makes them less able to repay their loans, it's just that they're more likely to have a lower SES.

It's not about skin color, it's about the fact that blacks tend to have less credit and be more of a risk for loans than most whites who statistically are more wealthy and are therefore statistically more likely to be reliable.

It's not racism, it's economics.

Bingo. Does a gap persist after controlling for income, and other variables?

At 1/27/09 07:50 PM, Elfer wrote:

What I'm saying is, you never see a mathematical proof that only uses a single step, why do you expect the same of legal proofs?

Right, but I could look at what your proof is and the results and see if its right or not, without looking at all of the intermediate steps.

For example, if you said that you had a proof that all upper triangular matrices were diagonal, then I could easily show that you're wrong by pointing out a counterexample. There would be no need to investigate your intermediate steps.

Anyway, since it seems you're actually incapable of coming up with a specific objection to the ruling, I don't think there's much left to discuss here. The reason the supreme court exists is to interpret the constitution, including the non-obvious consequences of the text of the constitution. That's why it's composed of extremely experienced legal professionals, rather than bloggers.

Well, Justice Scalia seems to agree with me:

"The reality is that the Constitution says nothing about abortion either way and the states are therefore allowed to permit it or to prohibit it."

http://www.nrlc.org/news_and_views/Oct07 /nv101807.html

At 1/27/09 07:01 PM, Elfer wrote:

Again, we already know that the constitution can't be directly interpreted in a single step to get to this ruling. What happened is there was a succession of small decisions which ultimately lead to the final one. If you can't find one of those decisions that you disagree with, or you can't find a flaw in the combination of those decisions, then you're not really saying anything relevant about the law or the supreme court. Either make a specific objection to something in the ruling, or just admit that you don't know what the supreme court actually does.

Are you trying to say that the supreme court can't abstract the constitution to absurdity in one case, but can do so if it breaks it down into multiple rulings that slowly abstract and warp the document's meaning? I just want to get this clear because I want to make sure that I'm accurately representing your argument.

At 1/27/09 04:58 PM, Leeloo-Minai wrote:

..to what ends?

I've said, over and over again, that I'm not debating for any particular abortion policy - nor am I debating the ethics or morals of abortion.

I know you don't wanna say, but it's a tired old fact of life. Speaking of life, shouldn't it be protected in a manner conducive to critical thought?

How is respecting the constitution not conducive to critical thought?

I just want to know what the clinic did wrong by carrying out an abortion. If you say it's against state law, then you need to recognize federal law.

I never said that abortion should be illegal, nor did I say that the clinic did anything wrong. My position is strictly that the supreme court interpreted the constitution far too loosely when they decided Roe v. Wade.

That's not a moral argument, it's actually a very very clean and succinct legal one.

Precisely, hence the reason why I created this topic.

"Roe v. Wade from a legal viewpoint"

A woman's health should be top priority when government displays interest (like a ban), especially over the non-person that a fetus is. A constitutional non-person, I may add.

I don't think that the constitution mentions any of this. To my knowledge there is no discussion of the personhood of fetuses, or to what extent health should be a priority in government decisions.

And a blanket ban on abortion is, for the reason mortifiedpenguins pointed out.

He never really gave a reason for why you couldn't give abortion clinics due process.

I guess the context was so confusingly shockheaded, I assumed you knew how legal matters operate.

Where's your loophole again?

"Shockheaded". I'm not sure that's a word. But if it is, I can assure you that my point about how an abortion ban wouldn't necessarily violate due process was not "shockheaded".

So you'd incarcerate the clinic. Cool.

I never said that. My position is strictly that the supreme court was wrong to rule Roe v. Wade unconstitutional.

If you don't wanna work with me it's your loss.

???

You don't have a point, as you've admitted time and time again. You say the court can't make a ruling. Prove it.

I already gave reasons for why the supreme court should interpret the constitution and not declare a law unconstitutional unless it clearly goes against the constitution.

At 1/27/09 01:06 AM, LazyDrunk wrote:

Marijuana law is =/= abortion law.

My point was that you can prosecute the supplier without prosecuting the consumer.

About prosecuting clinics, why?

I know that you're trying to draw this into a debate about the morality or ethics of abortion, but you have to realize that that's been discussed too many times to count on this forum. If you want to refer to those arguments, feel free to do so.

Also note that, as I have already stated, I am not supporting any particular action on the part of the legislature, only their authority to make laws which are not unconstitutional.

You seriously need to knock the crap off if you expect to get anywhere in this. I'm trying, but you need to understand that an all-out ban creates derision between the state and federal governments. Last I checked, the north won the civil war and federalism > states rights, especially when it comes to life/death scenarios.

When did I say that I wanted the state legislature to create abortion law that conflicts with any sort of federal legislation?

Are your legal grounds for banning abortion merely, "marijuana is outlawed, so abortions should be, too", solely on the grounds that it's government telling you what [not] to do with your body? I'm starting to wonder if maybe you'd like fellatio w/swallowing ejaculate prosecutable as murder.

Did you seriously not read my point about the marijuana laws, and not understand the context? I was pointing out that one could construct on abortion law that didn't violate due process.

...what would you sue the clinics on the grounds of, again?

Sue? You do realize that that's tort law, right?

I'm just glad Roberts made it in. There aren't enough like him or Thomas or Scalia.. ha

I see that you didn't try to address my point. Fair enough.

Meh, the SCOTUS is no more powerful than congress or the president. They just deal in spades. They get to say what MAY or MAY NOT as according to the constitution, and CASE LAW.

My point is that if they can interpret laws beyond what's literally written in the constitution, then the population has a greater interest in trying to stack the supreme court.

At 1/26/09 11:44 PM, LazyDrunk wrote:

Because you can't prosecute someone for scraping their uterus.

But you can prosecute the clinic. In Massachusetts, marijuana is decriminalized but there are still federal laws against selling the stuff.

Even if your Backwater, USA town bans abortion outright, the defendant would still be entitled to an appeal... which ends with the SCOTUS. Because your idea of social justice through moral legislative action blanket banning abortion procedures doesn't account for WHY abortions should be banned, I don't see how I can show you what legal matters mean and how law works a certain way.

Help me out?

To avoid this from becoming the 999th thread on the morals and ethics of abortion, I specified that this thread only be for the discussion of the legal aspects of abortion.

But shouldn't it be up to the legislature to decide if it is a good idea to ban abortion, if it is not unconstitutional?

Because the legislature is part of Congress, it must be held in check by the Supreme Court and the Chief Executive. President via vetos, SCOTUS via rulings.

That's a reasonable point, but I'd argue right now that the SCOTUS holds too much power. A great number of people vote for the president just so that they can get them to stack the supreme court to their advantage, which obscures the real policy issues that the candidates should be campaigning on.

Describe your hypothetical abortion ban [amendment].

No. The argument I am presenting is that the legislative bodies should be able to make laws if they do not explicitly go against the constitution. I am not advocating a specific law.

Your use of "legislating from the bench" further illustrates your inability to grasp what legislation is, and how it can be unconstitutional in either state and/or and/or district and/or federal courts.

If the supreme court can abstract the constitution to the point of absurdity, it becomes more like a legislative body then a court. What's so hard to understand about this?

Where in the Constitution does it say you may legislate without first checking it's constitutionality?

What kind of a question is this?

At 1/26/09 08:05 PM, LazyDrunk wrote:

Until viability, the government may not dictate personal life decisions without due process of the law, ie.,

How would it violate due process of the law to ban abortion? I have no clue what argument you're trying to make. Why couldn't you give people due process if you prosecuted them for breaking the law?

what interest does the government have in non-constitutionally recognized persons such as fetuses, embryos, sperm and eggs?

Why isn't that for the legislature to decide?

By banning the practice of abortion (to what ends, exactly? I wonder..), you need to justify why it should be banned, and then discuss the merits of such a prohibition.

Where does the constitution say that you can't create a ban that has no merits or purpose? This really just gets back to my point about them legislating from the bench.

How exactly does an abortion ban violate due process? I could see plenty of ways to enforce it without taking away due process.

At 1/26/09 05:51 PM, LazyDrunk wrote:

You guys don't like the logic used in the Roe v Wade ruling. What logic would you use in place of the justices' majority opinion?

I would've said that the constitution does not mention abortion or the right to privacy explicitly, so the Texas abortion ban was not unconstitutional. If people don't like that then they can make their legislators changes the law, or amend the constitution.

At 1/26/09 04:32 PM, Elfer wrote: So your claim is that there is absolutely no right to privacy in the united states?

Privacy is a fundamental interest that all good policy should take into consideration, however the constitution does not explicitly say that people have a right to privacy, so the supreme court should not have the authority to declare a law unconstitutional on those grounds.

At 1/26/09 03:42 PM, LazyDrunk wrote:

The Roe v. Wade decision requires us to do precisely that.

How, exactly?

I'm confused.

They basically said that there was an implied right to privacy that conflicts with a law banning abortion (which is dubious at best), even though the constitution (for obvious reasons) has no such right written out.

At 1/26/09 03:24 PM, Elfer wrote:

This is the very reason the supreme court exists. Their job is to take a law and test it, through careful examination, to determine whether or not its action is ultimately compatible with the constitution.

Of course, but that's pointless if they're not going to read the constitution literally, but rather pick out vague implications to support their particular viewpoints.

If they were only allowed to deal with matters specifically handled in the constitution, there would be no need for them to exist.

I'm not saying that they can't interpret what's actually written the constitution, like determining if wearing black arm bands in school is protected by the right to free speech and protest.

I'm merely saying that they can't declare something unconstitutional if the subject isn't mentioned at all in the constitution. Imagine if the supreme court declared that based on the 2nd amendment, the constitution implies a "General support for the concept of gun ownership" that requires everyone in the US to be taught in school how to use a gun. Yes, they'd be interpreting the constitution, but they'd be abstracting it to the point of absurdity.

And that's exactly what happened with Roe v. Wade. They decided that the constitution implied a right to privacy (even though it's nowhere mentioned in the constitution, nor really even supported) and then used that to support completely irrelevant policy.

Also, you could make all sorts of crazy laws about the internet, because there's nothing at all in the constitution about that.

You could obviously handle it through the interstate commerce clause, because the internet is just a specific technology for managing interstate commerce. It requires no bending or warping of the constitution's meaning, or abstraction of points to absurdity.

The Roe v. Wade decision requires us to do precisely that.

At 1/26/09 02:16 PM, AntiangelicAngel wrote:

My personal view is that Roe v. Wade was a mockery of our democratic republic. The constitution obviously says nothing about abortion, and the supreme court is supposed to interpret the constitution and not push their own views.

Because they differ from yours?

No. I think that the supreme court should interpret the constitution based on what's actually there. If you don't like the supreme court's decision, you should try to change the constitution or influence the legislature.

The problem with having a supreme court as a de facto legislative body is that it improperly increases the power of the executive branch, and in effect forces people to vote on timeless wedge issues rather than immediate policy. It could quite literally drive our country into the ground.

Also- the constitution doesn't explicitly say anything about many, many things.

And the constitution clearly says that people have the right to do things which are not explicitly stated in the constitution. However that does not mean that the supreme court can declare something unconstitutional if it isn't mentioned in any way, shape, or form in the constitution.

I think you may be a little confused on what the supreme court actually does.

How so? The supreme court has the implied power to declare laws unconstitutional, and in my opinion they abuse the power by declaring laws unconstitutional even if the constitution doesn't even mention or even allude to the subject of the law.

Ignoring all of the discussions about the ethics and morality of abortion, let's talk strictly about the legal dimensions of the abortion issue.

Did the supreme court have the authority to rule the way they did in the Roe v. Wade decision? Does the legislature have the authority to ban abortion anyway?

My personal view is that Roe v. Wade was a mockery of our democratic republic. The constitution obviously says nothing about abortion, and the supreme court is supposed to interpret the constitution and not push their own views.

If you can get "Abortion is unconstitutional" out of the constitution, then you can really get anything you want out of the document, and the supreme court becomes just another legislative body. And that's not how the system is supposed to work.

At 1/24/09 06:52 PM, Drakim wrote: If you allow prisoners to die, you open up for a new problem that is really troublesome.

Yeah, when I said that people have a right to die - I meant it as more of a pie-in-the-sky statement then an actual policy suggestion.

Ideally, if someone does not want to live, it is morally wrong to keep them alive.

Right now, if any prison let prisoners die, there would be a public outrage. The public is a watchdog for the prisons to keep the prisoners alive. So they simply have to do so.

If prisoners were allowed to kill themselves, then, what happens when a prison secretly starts killing it's prisoners? From the outside, it might seem all normal, seeing that we are allowing prisoners to take their own lives now. Even if a ton died, the prison wouldn't be in trouble because that's normal.

Indeed. As I said, just one picture of a skeleton-esque starving prisoner with an exposed rib cage would cause a media firestorm and a huge loss of credibility for the United States.

At 1/23/09 03:49 AM, poxpower wrote:

At 1/22/09 06:44 PM, Brick-top wrote:

"but since correlation does not imply causation the true relationship between these factors is uncertain."

Yeah that's a last-ditch type argument about pretty much everything. There MAY be other factors but I haven't heard any named. It's perfectly logical to assume that smarter people are less likely to be taken in by religions.
Hey it's possible that it's wrong, but where are the explanations?

Alternative ways of explaining the negative correlation between religion and intelligence:

1. Churches provide resources to people who are disadvantaged or who have poor living conditions, which makes these people more religious. Because intelligence correlates somewhat with eventually ending up in poverty (see NLSY, GSS), we can explain the correlation.

2. The correlation between religious differences and intelligence exists solely between ethnic and regional groups, and not between individuals within these groups. I'm too lazy to actually test this.

At Guantanamo Bay, there is a somewhat disturbing trend in which prisoners go on hunger strikes, and doctors at the base force them to use feeding tubes in order to keep them alive.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/wo rld/us_and_americas/article5518812.ece

If you were a US official in charge of Guantanamo Bay, would you use feeding tubes to force prisoners to stay alive?

I don't think that there are any answers. On one hand, I think that a person has a right to die if they really want to, and it seems unethical to force them to eat. On the other hand, there would be a lot of serious repurcussions of the US allowing these prisoners to starve to death. Imagine pictures in the newspapers of starving prisoners!