I think Tyche is trying to point out that the liberal moral value system is inherently Christian.

The difference is that liberals try to take the egalitarian elements of Christianity to a whole new level - unchecked by Darwinian reality - where as Christians stick by what has more or less worked for the past 1200 years - till they stopped hanging people - which would be the bible.

To say something a friend of ours might say…

"… wat"

I thought he was talking about Lyanic and trolling or something.

There needs to be an ignore user command on here. Is that in the works?

lolololololol red handed

Of course, it reminds one of the scene in Casablanca.
I'm shocked to discover there is trolling going on in this forum.

BTW Tyche, don't forget to collect ammunition to use against me from i3:

http://ebspso.dnsalias.org/i3logs/

Note that the imc2 logger has a feature that lets you opt out of being logged,
so you're not guaranteed to get every juicy confession. The i3 logger tho, is
faithful to a fault.

-Crat

PS When it works, that is. Figures it's broken the day I link to it >:|

Apparently, the thread title wasn't enough of a clue. :evil:

THANK YOU! :tongue:
Though, don't forget I did my magic Jedi mind-trick hand-wave in the first line of the first post and told everyone to ignore the title. It worked well for 60+ posts, eh?

That doesn't make any sense. :rolleyes:

Hah that was teh best God faq I've ever read… read the whole lot from beginning to end.

Sheer brilliance, and edumacational too! Amazed you all managed to keep it civil.

at the risk of starting this all off again, heres something interesting i stumbled on:

map of world resources

I vote Lyanic's member title be changed to Drama Llama.

Long term sustainability of the human population might work a lot better if environazis weren't out there convincing people to burn their food supplies as fuel.

Soylent green is the solution to all of this.

I'm very happy to argue in favour of eugenics. I wish Scandum wouldn't, as it really doesn't help the cause to have someone like Scandum espouse it.

Speaking for myself, I chose long ago not to have children because I know that some of the genes I'm carrying are ones that the human gene pool is definitely better off without. Unfortunately, most people who carry such genes are not as responsible as I am. (sigh)

Some of the arguments against eugenics are either not actually arguments against eugenics at all but merely arguments against other practices previously carried out by people who claimed to be doing them in the name of eugenics but who actually weren't (e.g. a whole bunch of stuff that happened in Nazi Germany). Other arguments against it only apply to a eugenics programme conducted in a particularly stupid and counter-productive fashion (e.g. the notion that it would reduce genetic diversity - preservation of genetic diversity would actually be one of the primary goals of a sensible eugenics programme).

But I'm happy to listen to arguments that do not fall into either of those camps.

I am very sorry to hear that, I hope it is something more serious than you think you're just not nice looking or something…


Well the definition of eugenics is:
– which is exactly what the nazis were doing by selecting (encouraging) only "pure" Germans and gassing (discouraging) disabled people and Jews.

Any eugenic "programme" forces a reduction in the selective gene pool, and is therefore generally bad. Nor does any "programme" generally lead in the direction that is hoped for. It will not follow for example, nor will it ever follow, that two ugly people will always have ugly children or vice versa.

Personally I like the fact the world is full of funny looking, good looking, fat, thin, bald and disabled people. It makes it far more interesting.

I guess at the bottom line of your decision it that it is a personal choice, and if you've decided this then cudos to ya. However, forced eugenics or govn't programs of eugenics generally are a bad thing, n'es pas?

<3 <3 <3 <3 shasarak

Ok, before people keep talking totenkopfs, let's try to understand what
Shasarak has said.

What I gather from shas is that there are arguments for and against
eugenics that do not involve getting emotionally wrapped up in
the awful things people have done in the name of eugenics.

There are, for example, constructive discussions to be had about religion
that attempt to examine aspects of it without resorting to inflammatory
historical references of auto da fe*.

So, let's forget about what stupid people have done with eugenics,
for now. Let's discuss what shas actually said, which is that he is
in favor of eugenics done right.

I am generally speaking against eugenics because I think, at present,
we lack the knowledge to know how to do it right, so it is not even worth
thinking about.

However, suppose one day we did have perfect knowledge not only of
all our genes, but the mindbogglingly complex interactions between
not only genes but gene structures and all the meta complexity thereof.

Suppose one day we do completely and perfectly master this knowledge.

Well, I suspect that by then we won't be limited to gene manipulation
through procreation. I suspect by then we'll be walking into embetterment booths
to syncretize our heritable disharmonies and immanentize our eschatons.

So again. Moot.

Before we reach such a plane of knowledge though, trying to implement
eugenics seems to me to be akin to trying heart transplants in pre-Columbian
mesoamerica. An interesting idea, but the execution is bound to not do
what you want*.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net


*lol see wat i did thar?

Well, I have an interesting opinion on eugenics. I don't believe that we should directly interfere with, encourage or discourage any particular method of "enhancing" our gene pool. If you think about it, we really don't have too. As it stands, we give more support to those that are in need. If a particular person is not capable of taking care of themselves we will generally assist them in having their basic needs met. An example would be that if a man were seriously mentally retarded, had a terrible case of OCD and was highly autistic he would not be able to provide for himself adequately enough to survive in our world. As such, our government will provide for his basic necessities and make sure he is taken care of, at least well enough to survive. This individual cannot be considered a productive human citizen and is unable to make useful contributions to our society. He does however lower the effectiveness of productive human beings in his area by becoming a financial burden on anyone that pays the taxes that care for him. The problem I have is that it doesn't make sense to me that productive citizen's have to be hampered by unproductive citizens, leading to a less productive society. Government programs that encourage or all individuals to be unproductive obviously damage the level of productivity of the world. The longer it continues the more society as a whole becomes unproductive, leading to more programs to sustain unproductive individuals. We need not do anything about this, that's the beauty of our universe. The problem would simply take care of itself if nobody interfered. We don't need to create concentration camps, or gas non-ideal individuals. If we let people take care of themselves in that respect then my understanding of natural selection will take care of this problem. Individuals unable to take care of themselves will cease to exist, and our world will no longer be an enabler. Many humans seem more than willing to take an easy path through life, if we continue to offer that easy path, at the expense of those that take the hard path, what good are we doing anybody? Why should I continue to take the difficult path while providing others the opportunity to others to take the easy way out? Discouraging humanity from improving itself is a terrible mistake that we have been making for a long time. It is of course perfectly acceptable to take care of someone yourself if it makes you feel better, or if you feel the need. That is actually productive because it either makes you happy or helps you cope with the situation. So taking care of your elderly father or providing food for your mentally challenged brother is not an issue at all. Relying on the rest of the world to do that for you is not acceptable, in my opinion. It seems that as human being we are the only species stupid enough to make decisions that are detrimental to our survival. Have you ever seen a large collection of animals feeding another animal that was born without the ability to understand that it needed to eat? Of course not, it would be detrimental to their survival and prevent them from properly advancing as a species.

Well, I'm not going to give you a full list of all of my medical complaints, or we'd be here all night. :-) But, for example, there is a tendency to progressive hearing loss which runs down my father's side of the family.


I can't really bring myself to describe what happened in Nazi Germany as "eugenics". First, it had nothing to do with actually improving the species, it was based on an entirely INCORRECT notion of racial superiority. It is preposterous to imagine that a person is genuinely genetically desirable merely because they have fair hair and blue eyes.

Much more importantly, eugenics (when practised sensibly) has little to do with discrimination and nothing whatever to with killing people. I, to take an example I've already brought up, have what is clearly a genetically controlled tendency to progressive hearing loss. This isn't, by any stretch of the imagination, my fault. Living in a compassionate society I would expect that the state would pay for my hearing aids (which it does, as I live in Britain). It is probably reasonable to deny me a job as a telephone sex operator, because I wouldn't be able to hear what the customer was saying reliably enough to give a satisfactory service; but it isn't reasonable to deny me a job in most other arenas. It would be more than slightly bizarre to suggest that, because I am deaf, I should be shot. On the contrary - I make a good living in a service industry, I'm not an excessive consumer, I probably contribute more money to the state than I take back out.

It is, however, entirely reasonable (in my view) to suggest that I shouldn't allow this tendency to deafness to remain within the human gene pool. The human race does not benefit by having more members who are partially deaf. Other things being equal, it is better to have a child with normal hearing than a child who is deaf. It makes sense for me not to have a child, and for someone without that problem to have a child instead. Aside from anything else, the money that would otherwise be spent on hearing aids can now be spent on school-books instead!

The problem is, as I said, that most people who possess undesirable genetic traits aren't as responsible as I am. Indeed, arguably, some of those very genetic traits actively work against people behaving in a responsible fashion. Scandum may be tiresome, but he is quite right when he points out that less intelligent people tend to have more children than intelligent people do; and intelligence has a strong genetic component. The consequence of this trend continuing unchecked is really quite scary.


So it's bad to remove the gene for Huntingdon's Chorea from general circulation? It's bad to reduce the number of haemophiliacs, or the number of people with muscular dystrophy?


Unfortunately the consequences of doing nothing are likely to be even worse.


Alas, if people are not responsible enough to refrain from damaging other people of their own volition, then it is right for the state to step in and prevent it.

Up to a point that is true. But the technology certainly already exists for us to completely eliminate Huntingdon's Disease in a single generation if we chose to. Why not do that?

There are plenty of other genetic diseases whose incidence could be sharply reduced by eugenics. Only about a third of haemophilia cases are first generation, and one can potentially screen for a number of conditions like this at the 8-cell-embryo stage if people want to, which could lead to them being eliminated entirely.

It gets more complicated when you consider a condition like schizophrenia. We don't yet know all the ins and outs, but what probably happens there is that you have maybe half a dozen different contributing genes. If someone has all of them, they will probably get schizophrenia. But you can't simply breed them all out, because having just some of them may well produce desirable traits such as lateral thinking and creativity.

The way to handle that is to encourage the relatives of people who have schizophrenia to have children with people whose relatives do not - that will tend to spread the beneficial effects of the genes without concentrating them enough to do any damage.

The important point there is that you don't actually need to know what the half dozen genes are or exactly what they do in order for this to be a useful practice. Encouraging genetic diversity ("out-breeding") is a goal of the programme anyway.

We don't have the technology to do eugenics perfectly, but we certainly do have the technology to make things better than they will be if we do nothing.

How would that be done?

This may sound argumentative, but it is sincere. You've obviously looked into this
more than I have, and I'd like to know exactly what you mean by this.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

Actually "completely" is a slight exaggeration, but you could almost eliminate it. It is exceptionally rare to encounter a first-generation Huntingdon's case; virtually every sufferer is the child of a parent who has it. A genetic test for the condition was developed back in 1993: it's caused by a single faulty gene. So, in principle, all you have to do is test absolutely everybody, and then either insist that those who carry the gene do not reproduce or (rather less drastically) if they do want to then produce several embryos and then screen them and implant only those that do not carry the gene.

This may seem like a rather sledge-hammer approach, but Huntingdon's is unusual in that the gene that causes it is dominant, not recessive. So you only need to inherit the gene from one parent to develop the disease. It is also virtually always expressed - if you have the gene, the chances of you not developing Huntingdon's symptoms are virtually zero. So there is no such thing as a "carrier". As it stands, the chances of any child of a Huntingdon's sufferer inheriting the gene are 50-50 - not good odds.

In fact, given these characteristics, we actually had the technology to virtually eliminate Huntingdon's a hundred years ago: if you forbade anyone whose parent had the disease from reproducing, that would have done the trick. These days there are more elegant ways of achieving the same thing (i.e. screening embryos).