Problem is, hamburgers aren't covered under HIPAA statutes, and don't/won't have privacy concerns.

Pity you didn't RTFA, because it says no such thing - even among climate scientists, let alone "scientists". ;)

Hiding in semantics is a cute trick, but what I meant still stands - I'll clarify it for you if that helps:

You either provide the best and strongest proof, or the number of acolytes to your presented theory mean nothing.

Given the bad assumptions you make (how do you know it'll be absolute squalor?), you are ego-centered, albeit in another aspect. There is also the demand that others live according to your standards.

For example, take the indigenous tribal societies in South America, Africa, etc. They're born, they live, and they die in conditions that haven't changed since around 15,000 BCE or so, and would easily qualify for the term "squalor" in almost every sense of the word. If that's how they live, who are you to demand they no longer do so?

Actually, one scientist already destroyed this whole 'overwhelming numbers agree' argument.

Short version: It does not matter how many or what percentage of a given group agrees with a politically-charged position. What does matter is who is actually right. Anyone trying to make an argument based on majorities is doing so from a failing position. Don't just agree with each other - prove it irrefutably, else the first scientist to come along with better proof than yours will knock the whole house of cards down.

Why not? As long as they leave you and your community alone, how the hell does it affect you?

That's not what I meant. What I meant was - since when does a right require that others provide labor on your behalf, let alone specialized labor? What I'm getting at is this: a right should not require that I unduly burden others in order to exercise it.

No, it is not, and your response shows that you do not understand what I was getting at. The question still stands: What if I choose not to participate? Every actual right as listed in the US Constitution does not force me to participate in or to exercise it. I can choose to be atheist or to not speak out in public. I can choose to allow the government unfettered access to my home, and even invite them to put up a few soldiers there. I can choose to not own a firearm. Result? No forced compliance - I don't face fines and penalties for deciding to not exercise any right as listed there.

However, in your "right" to healthcare, I am now forced to participate in that "right" whether I want it or not. This is the antithesis of an actual right.

One small problem:

Define "Health care" as a "right".

Does this "right" include exorbitant measures to extend life? Would it include plastic surgery (you know, for self-esteem reasons)? Does this "right" diminish with age, since old people getting a scarce resource (e.g. organ transplants) wouldn't see nearly the benefit from it that a younger patient would? I could go on, but you get the point. Obviously there has to be limits on what should go into health care. That said, it's one thing to set those limits impersonally. It's another to see these limits in action when it's your spouse, parent, or child that runs up against them.

BTW - two things:

1) since when does a right include automatic access to another's labor? Speech, privacy, and all the fun rights listed in the US Constitution don't require another's labor, time, or money. Your "right" to health care does. Why is that?

2) If I choose not to exercise an enumerated right (again, c.f. US Constitution), it costs me nothing. If I choose not to exercise this "right" to health care, I still have to pay for it. What the hell?

I would say the FSF could make one, but I don't want it to have a beard.

Too late; it's already been invented.

Depends, though - the growing number of jobless would likely end up being entertained and sent to a perpetual merry-go-round of panem et circensus. You know, just like the unemployed/unemployable folks did back when that phrase was spoken natively.

Judging by what we've seen so far among the perpetually unemployed, I'd expect the majority of folks would instead be doing XBox, drugs, and reality TV.

Not very cheerful, is it? You do inadvertently bring up a good question, though - what would people do with all that spare time? I suspect suicides would go up by quite a bit, as well as a lot of crime associated with people who are highly energetic but not all that bright...

Boss, hell - I'd settle for a Linux fembot with a penchant for evil.

...what? Just me?

Shit.

Sometimes it takes time to kill something so that there's no chance of it coming back. Think of it like getting rid of fleas after your dog brought a few in.

Well, to be fair some dystopia novels do serve as a good hard warning. As a non-scientific political/ideological example, I present 1984, written precisely at a time when all the intelligentsia were eager to create a global socialistic (albeit not quite communist) utopia.

Same with science, really. I'll set it up to explain why:

75 years ago, scientists were handling radioactive elements like they were as harmless as lumps of play-doh, and every 'good' mother was out there bathing their kids' feet in X-rays for shoe-fitting, at dosages/levels that today would get your kids snatched away by Protective Services if they found out. Eventually, we learned about things like radiation poisoning (though TBH it took a freakin' atomic bomb or two going off before anyone outside of a few select physicists even knew what that was). In other news, during that same time period Eugenics was once considered a solid (and even respected) science... and we all know where that went. The sad part is, that's nothing compared to the almost countless examples of treating science as panacea, without an eye towards ethics or morals, or even caution.

While no, you're not going to spawn a black hole at LHC (the laws of nature are rather resilient against that, and the entire Earth hasn't enough mass to make one), there are some good, hard uses for dystopian fantasy-type warnings. Human genetics stands out as a pretty good one - while I certainly wouldn't expect a 60-foot-tall man-slaying homonculus to come out of it (hell, it wouldn't survive gestation), I can see how genetic mucking-around can open whole populations up to pathogen immunity problems** and eventual congenital defects, among other things - and I haven't even touched on the ethics of the situation.

Besides, some damned good sci-fi has come out of dystopian views of hard science, and yet somehow hasn't retarded scientific progress in spite of it.

Overall, I guess the only reason I'm defending the dystopian genre isn't because I like the topic matter (let's face it, there's a lot of crap novels out there that try to use it), but because it does serve an important watchdog function. Sure, we think we've evolved beyond superstition, but honestly? It doesn't matter how frickin' much we've evolved, because we have yet to evolve beyond human failings: greed, avarice, lust, hatred, etc. So unless your name is Mother Teresa, you suffer from these as much as I do (and she likely suffered from it too, just that she was really good at controlling them).

** note that such problems would likely require many, many generations to surface.