TTI is known for its intellectuals. This is a place for thinkers to gather and exchange quotes, thoughts, or other topics that might not appeal to the average gamer.
We’ve had some hot news about a personal injury lawyer Andrew Speaker, who was recently diagnosed with tuberculosis and told not to travel. This lawyer’s father-in-law works at the CDC, so by all appearances he is extremely well informed. He definitely can not claim to be ignorant. The sick lawyer decided to act against doctors orders and travel to Italy, potentially exposing hundreds of people to a deadly virus.
The CDC further characterized his as an extremely dangerous drug resistant sub-type of TB. The CDC tracks him down, and learns that he has traveled to Italy in defiance of medical orders. They tell him he has now been flagged and is on a "no fly" list. They order him to seek local quarantine in Italy. Instead he decides a second time to circumvent medical advice. He gets himself to Czechoslovakia somehow and flies to Canada, and with much hassle and taxpayer expense gets himself back into the US for quarantine.
Speaker's father told WSB-TV: "The way he's been shown and spoken about on TV, it's like a terrorist traveling around the world escaping authorities. It's blown out of proportion immensely."
The articles I have read claim that Speaker has not committed a crime. But to me it seems at very least Speaker is criminally negligent for knowingly exposing other people to this dangerous disease. And if one of the exposed people does contract his TB, it would seem to me that he’d be guilty of greater crimes.
The US government and colonists routinely used intentional infection with diseases to incapacitate and kill indigenous people. Some literature reports that this biological warfare was the single most effective mechanism for genocide in the Americas. Isn’t drug resistant TB one of the WMDs that everyone worries about? How can an individual deploying a WMD be anything other than a terrorist?
Last edited by musashi on Fri Jun 01, 2007 12:34 am, edited 4 times in total.
Keep your sharpened steel sword, this wooden one will be all I need!
"I'm sick and tired of this mutha ******* disease on this mutha ******* plane!"
Sorry... had to.
I believe he should be treated as a terrorist (to some degree). Knowing you can endanger the lives of others even to small extent, why would you expose people to that kind of danger. And to knowingly circumvent security makes it that much worse.
Think of it this way. If one carried a bomb onto a plane knowing that it could go off at any moment, wouldn't the bomb carrier be to blame?
Simply put though, this is just one way of putting physical force on another. Of course it is wrong.
If Tolmart doesn't have it in stock, you get a free shuttle!
(Must be something with a BPO cost of less than 20 mil. One shuttle a day and per an item.)
