Thursday, October 01, 2015

There is a line in Serenity I've found more and more appropriate

as the SJW types push more and more to make people- in their view- 'better':
Sure as I know anything, I know this - they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that.
First thing I thought of when I read this.  I'll borrow a few bits and leave it to you to read the rest.
In 2012 a philosopher named Matthew Liao co-authored a paper that proposed altering human biology to combat climate change.
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In the paper and in subsequent interviews Liao and his co-authors said that they’re not necessarily advocating for any one of these modifications in particular. Instead, they just think scientists should look into how feasible changing certain aspects of human biology might be. Co-author Rebecca Roache (who we talked to for the Eternal Life in Prison episode) told Leo Hickman of the Guardian that “human engineering may ultimately be unworkable; but this should be because it is impossible to implement, or because its costs outweigh its benefits.” 
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Another modification that Liao proposed was an induced allergy to meat, to help people reduce their consumption of animals.
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Next we talk about breeding people to be shorter, something Liao says could reduce our carbon footprint.
And now we get to something more current, something some of his fellow 'progressives' have suggested variations of:
But what about less physical ways of decreasing someone’s impact on the climate? The next method Liao talks about is using cognitive enhancement to decrease the number of babies each person has. He proposes giving people access to things like Ritalin and Modafinil to increase their cognitive ability because there are some links between cognitive ability and having fewer children.
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And this brings us to the last modification that Liao talks about: empathy. You might remember that just a few weeks ago we talked about empathy on this very podcast! And you might remember that empathy is actually a really hard thing to define. Liao’s idea is to give hormones like oxytocin and seratonin to people, and to perhaps decrease someone’s testosterone.
The author notes that nobody is(currently) talking about forcing anyone to do this, oh no; but nobody was talking about force being involved when the eugenics movement started, either(at least not openly).  Question: anyone out there think that there are not people out there who just looove the idea of forcing this?  On others, of course.  Test subjects.  The lower orders who wouldn't agree.

And I'll be most of the ones who like the idea are also horrified at the commoners having arms.  In part because armed people make it somewhat more difficult to show up and take them in for modification.

Oh yeah, the comments are interesting.  Including some like this:
Totally agree. but where is it said that any humans have inherent ‘rights’.
They don’t.
 Maybe not in your estimation.


1 comment:

Toastrider said...

Oh ho, that's Rose Eveleth. That bitch is a dyed in the wool third-wave feminist-SJW type.

Speaking from a transhumanist mindset, while the concepts are intriguing, the removal of free will is anathema to me. People should choose to take that next step themselves.