Yeah, I met the statement bitch once, and she was very clear on what she meant.

Sorry, but time is not an absolute clock that ticks the same everywhere. Time is a local phenomenon, and only a local phenomenon. We all live in separate time frames.

If you accelerate to 99% of the speed of light, the Lorenz factor is a little over 7, which means that for an outside observer counting one year on the clock, you will only have experienced 51 days.
As your speed creeps closer and closer to c, the time dilation increases. If you could reach 99.999% of c, the Lorenz factor would be 223. For an outside observer watching you travel 100 light years from A to B, 100 years would pass. But for you, less than 5.5 months would have passed.

If you could maintain a 1g acceleration indefinitely, you could travel to another galaxy and back within a human lifetime. It's not feasible, though, as you require more and more energy to accelerate the faster you go, and as you approach c, you approach needing an infinite amount of energy for an infinitesimally small boost in speed.

You cannot see how a virus or bacteria can be considered a predator? Or if you really meant to ask about lions, of course they pick off the weak. It's less work. This leaves the herd's average health better after the predation.

Both. Healthier individuals would have a greater chance of survival, and thus a greater chance of passing on their genes. People born with congenital heart failure, asthma or a variety of other conditions would have a higher risk of dying, and less chance of passing on their genes.

There's a by-country correlation between longevity before and after the Spanish Flu. In countries that got hit, longevity increased. Weaker individuals got culled more than healthier ones, and the net result after a generation is a healthier population.
Now, we're seeing the opposite. The number of people with defects (like, but in no way limited to, asthma) is going up. We put great effort into keeping the weak alive and able to reproduce. With a very predictable result: the defects flourish when there's no evolutionary disadvantage to having them.

How about the overall human health being at a higher level, so when a new marburg/ebola type virus catch us out of the blue, we have a higher chance of survival?

How about when the temperature and humidity raises across the globe, and many of us are too weak to survive it?

Or any number of unforeseen things that may happen, in which a healthier population has less risk of extinction?

Compassion for the weak and exceptionally strong parental instincts might have been a good survival trait in the past, given our long reproductive cycle. But that's no longer a concern. We're not just a few packs on the African plains struggling to survive despite 9 month pregnancies and 12+ years before becoming reproductive. Every life counted back then.
We're now billions of people, and propping up the weak is now detrimental to us as a species. A few tens of thousand deaths a year is now a negligible price to pay for humanity as a whole, to reduce the creep towards the average human being less healthy.

In fact, the US government, when it on its forms asks about "race", it does exactly that.

If you mean same species, sure we are. Just like a Great Dane is the same species as a Yorkshire Terrier.

As for how rapidly change can occur, that depends on the pressure. Flowers and animals have been cultivated with rather rapid divergence.
There's no reason why the sieve of "is this person fit to live in low-G" is any less effective than "is this dog fit to be my hunting companion".

It won't take long before we're at the stage of "I have nothing against spacemen, but I would not want my sister to marry one". And at that point, we have diverged enough that they're not "us" anymore.

Who said anything about a conspiracy?

The two "parties" grow close in an effort to please their funders and voters (in that order), and their grandstanding and partisanship is because the need to differentiate themselves is stronger the closer they get.
No conspiracy, just idiocy.

What two parties?
Here in the US, we have one ultra-conservative party owned by corporations, with two wings who are badmouthing each other like two football teams. It's posturing and arguing over trifles - the closer they get, the more they posture and badmouth each other, to make the masses believe there is a real difference.
And the astonishing thing is that the American public buys it, wholesale, apart from some even scarier people on the extreme right wing.

But up until recently, those children would have a greatly reduced chance of reaching adulthood. But due to things like vaccination programs, safe playgrounds and school healthcare, we skew the statistics in favor of the less fit, who now survive at a much higher rate.
Personally, I don't think this risk reduction is a good thing. It may be for individuals, but not for society, long term. If there's no genetic disadvantage to being stupid, stupidity will flourish.

You're begging the question at least twice here, using your belief that life should be saved and suffering avoided at all costs as justification for saving life and avoiding suffering through vaccination.

For costs, do you think I favor treatment when I don't favor vaccination? Let the weak die. It's the low cost solution. Spend that money on something that has long term value, like physics.

As for realization of human potential, sorry, you're wrong. As the weak die, they get replaced with other individuals who can realize their human potential. The higher the mortality, the higher the birth rate can (and will) be. It's a zero sum game.
If your kids die, change partners to try to make better ones, or adopt some poor but healthier 3rd world kids. No potential lost.

I care a lot - about humanity, and our far future, and far less about individuals who live today. Does that make me callous? Perhaps. I think that's needed, as a reaction to the kum-ba-yah society of today where everyone are indoctrinated to cuddle and care about their own culture, and not give a fuck about the future or those with different complexion.

The saying goes that one person dead is a tragedy, a hundred dead is news, and a million dead is statistics. I think it should be the other way around. Let hundreds die now to save millions in the future, and don't spend a second worrying about individuals dying. Individuals are a renewable resource, humanity is not.

On average, we lose more of those who are less able.

If the ability you refer to is the ability to survive exposure to certain illnesses without vaccination, why is it worth developing? We've got that covered with the vaccines.

No, what I refer to is that predators and illnesses tend to reap the weakest, increasing the average health of the herd. Inoculation protects the weak as much as the strong, leading to a herd that's on average less healthy than herds subject to predation.

It was answered to a post by a non-AC.
In short, it's not an acceptable chain because it relies on the unsubstantiated belief that death is inherently bad. I cannot accept that on face value. Back it up with something that doesn't beg the question.

But that's exactly the path we're on now, where we dictate that those with money or socialized medicine are more important and thus will be saved. If we ban vaccinations, we don't dictate who are more important. It's not our decision anymore then.

Yes, I say, let people die. We lose some geniuses, but we also lose some bible thumpers. On average, we lose more of those who are less able. That's how culling works.

When did "think of the children!" become a valid argument on /.?

Is culling of the herd necessarily a bad thing for humanity in the long perspective?

You first.

Culling != suicide.
I've survived the cullings so far. I survived measles, influenza, climbing trees and navigating traffic. In a while, I'll be old and more of an encumberance than asset to the herd, and I'll be picked off. That's fine with me.

What's your logical foundation for your belief that all human life is precious?
It is pure faith, ingrained in you by societal pressure, and that's precisely why you're offended. If it was based on logic, why would you feel offended?
I don't feel offended if people tell me that Bernoulli forces is all that holds a plane up in the air - I think they're wrong, and can argue it. But offended? No, that requires trampling on a belief.

Atheists can have faith too. They just don't have faith in deities. But they are usually quite burdened with cultural beliefs that have little rational reasoning behind them, but are taken on faith. Like taboos, and indeed the belief that death is evil.

It's the reason for the opinion that matters.

If someone says vaccinations are bad because a small number of vaccinations leads to complications, or bad because vaccines could be better, I'd say the reasoning is flawed.

If someone says vaccinations are bad because representatives of an imaginary deity says so, I'd say the reasoning isn't just flawed, but completely lacking.

However, I have a very hard time dismissing the argument that the belief that "all deaths are evil" should be dismissed from the equation as much as any other faith, and that evolution would work faster and lead to an improved species in the long run if we allowed culling of the herd and didn't seek to increase life spans, and that the enormous sums of money spent on medical research and treatments would have more impact for humanity if spent on other sciences.