If I was president

[Aimless]

You have an awful lot of grandiose ideas about a self-avowed Nazi.

I have learned the hard way that nothing you say should be taken at face value without extensive exploratory discussion I also think you are an individual and let myself be seduced by your past posts on suffering

[Nessus]

I have learned the hard way that nothing you say should be taken at face value without extensive exploratory discussion I also think you are an individual and let myself be seduced by your past posts on suffering

Well, Chaloobi's whole idea smacks of the same large-scale social engineering the Soviets and other communists tried; of course liberal Westerners accustomed to a democracy and a general fuck-it-all-philosophy about life in general would find his scheme horrible, and would protest having stuff injected into them, just for the sake of protesting. But that's not an argument I'd consider persuasive in the mind-set that concocts these schemes, the basic premise is that people are dumb animals that don't know their own good. Their mewling is not a consideration, and after a couple of generations they newcomers would view the situation as normal anyway. The mass extermination of some part of the population was also opposed by the people being exterminated, but this didn't stop the exterminators, the rationale behind the killing was strong enough that their protests became meaningless. Chaloobi wants to control people even more than Stalin or Pol Pot, and we both know how well that would turn out in any real world scenario. But in the world of outcomes and means, his idea aims for a great good and the protestations of the ignorant are just a hindrance, not anything that'd make anyone consider what they're doing as wrong or immoral.

[Aimless]

Okay but you're not a dumb animal and neither is Chaloobi. How would you two react if you were treated as dumb animals in order to bring about some greater good? Cue another discussion about Chaloobi's gigantic house.

[Nessus]

How did the people in Soviet Russia, and their occupied territories react? And what came of that?

[GGT]

But in the world of outcomes and means, his idea aims for a great good and the protestations of the ignorant are just a hindrance, not anything that'd make anyone consider what they're doing as wrong or immoral.

I'll bet that's what the zero-population-growth-human-hating guy said to himself, when he took hostages at the Discovery Channel with bombs strapped to his body.

[EyeKhan]

I really didn't. I thought you more than anyone else would hesitate to (even implicitly) portray the novelty of these attitudes as an argument against them. I also thought you would be less likely than anyone else to disregard suffering in favour of expediency. And I certainly didn't expect you to believe that people's discomfort trumps all else. My point was that such things need to be taken into consideration, not that they trump all other considerations. If they did then we would indeed be completely paraloused.

Aimy, you really are taking a lot of license here, declaring suffering and discomfort then knocking them down with your super ethics. You don't have a real argument unless you start with speculative assumptions to support you. You call autonomy the issue, even though you agree it's exercise is the worst thing teens can do. And if autonomy is important to you then a teen mom is a grievous loss of freedom, potential and certainly autonomy. You contradict yourself and argue disingenuously, insisting on the health consequences even after I first asked to examine the argument assuming health could be preserved and then conceded that if health were not preservable then the policy would be discarded. The bottom line is there is otherwise no harm in this policy at all and the truth is greater autonomy is preserved because all teens will have greater freedom without the spectre of teen parenthood hanging over them. Compare the autonomy of a typical teen to that of a typical parent. Please. You have no argument beyond idealistic and impractical principle.

[EyeKhan]

Well, Chaloobi's whole idea smacks of the same large-scale social engineering the Soviets and other communists tried; of course liberal Westerners accustomed to a democracy and a general fuck-it-all-philosophy about life in general would find his scheme horrible, and would protest having stuff injected into them, just for the sake of protesting. But that's not an argument I'd consider persuasive in the mind-set that concocts these schemes, the basic premise is that people are dumb animals that don't know their own good. Their mewling is not a consideration, and after a couple of generations they newcomers would view the situation as normal anyway. The mass extermination of some part of the population was also opposed by the people being exterminated, but this didn't stop the exterminators, the rationale behind the killing was strong enough that their protests became meaningless. Chaloobi wants to control people even more than Stalin or Pol Pot, and we both know how well that would turn out in any real world scenario. But in the world of outcomes and means, his idea aims for a great good and the protestations of the ignorant are just a hindrance, not anything that'd make anyone consider what they're doing as wrong or immoral.

Fuck you you fucking Nazi bitch. That's not it at all. This isn't about control, it's about freedom.

[EyeKhan]

Okay but you're not a dumb animal and neither is Chaloobi. How would you two react if you were treated as dumb animals in order to bring about some greater good? Cue another discussion about Chaloobi's gigantic house.

We're all just trained fuck in' monkeys. That's the biggest reason for your opposition ya fuck in' robot. And no, you should not bring up that topic, even when we're all just kidding around. I know you asked yourself that.

[GGT]

....You have no argument beyond idealistic and impractical principle.

Fuck you you fucking Nazi bitch. That's not it at all. This isn't about control, it's about freedom.

We're all just trained fuck in' monkeys. That's the biggest reason for your opposition ya fuck in' robot. And no, you should not bring up that topic, even when we're all just kidding around. I know you asked yourself that.

FREEEEEDOM? Hey, Happy Labor Day!

[Illusions]

Fuck you you fucking Nazi bitch. That's not it at all. This isn't about control, it's about freedom.

O'rwelly?

[GGT]

O'rwelly?

It's for THE EYE's freedom, ie his peace of mind, so he won't have to figure out other options for kids of teen moms, or teen moms with kids.

[EyeKhan]

O'rwelly?

[Aimless]

You don't have a real argument unless you start with speculative assumptions to support you.

What, speculative like drugs that don't have side-effects?

You call autonomy the issue, even though you agree it's exercise is the worst thing teens can do. And if autonomy is important to you then a teen mom is a grievous loss of freedom, potential and certainly autonomy. You contradict yourself and argue disingenuously, insisting on the health consequences even after I first asked to examine the argument assuming health could be preserved and then conceded that if health were not preservable then the policy would be discarded. The bottom line is there is otherwise no harm in this policy at all and the truth is greater autonomy is preserved because all teens will have greater freedom without the spectre of teen parenthood hanging over them. Compare the autonomy of a typical teen to that of a typical parent. Please. You have no argument beyond idealistic and impractical principle.

Please, YOU have no argument beyond Crazy. I'm arguing from the foundations of modern medical ethics so maybe you live in some bizarre world where there are important actions that have no negative consequences, but that's not this world. So maybe you live in a world where it's okay to take liberties over someone else's body for stupid reasons, but that's not this world. So maybe you live in some world where it makes sense to treat everyone the same, but that's not really this world either. Your argument about this initiative preserving autonomy is phony, because that's only true of the teens who would have become teen mothers. Most of my female friends are educated girls who've been sexually active since their teens, and only a few use oral contraceptives. You would like to force them to use a method of contraception that they don't want, and for no good reasons, and that's just creepy.

And please stop being crazy, getting pregnant is not the worst thing a teen can do and I don't think I've ever said that it is.

Would you like to apply any of your reasoning to adults and the mistakes they may or may not make? For the Greater Good? If it's okay to do this sort of thing to teens then there's no reason why it shouldn't be okay to do it to adults as well. That's where your house came in. It's a dead horse, but let's face it, the human race needs to start curbing its wasteful and extravagant consumption right now. We'd gain a lot more from controlling adults than we would from putting hormones into teen girls.

We're all just trained fuck in' monkeys.

Not all monkeys are the same and it's stupid to pretend that they are.

[Aimless]

Let's explain some of that quantitatively:

I live in a country where teen pregnancy is a very minor problem. It's a sexually pretty liberal country, so clearly teens here are mostly choosing to not have babies, using various methods, of their own free will. If you remove that choice and force all teens to use implants you'll have infringed on the autonomy of many teens, but "safeguarded" the autonomy of relatively few. Congratulations to your phony argument

[GGT]

minx, he admitted it was his own thought experiment, his own little game. Moving right along to election policy. Sloppy solipsism from THE EYE. He only sees what he wants to.

[Nessus]

Fuck you you fucking Nazi bitch. That's not it at all. This isn't about control, it's about freedom.

Dr. Joseph Goebbels also spoke often of freedom. And he was sincere. One of the most confounding things about studying Nazism is the fundamental disconnect between language itself; concepts refer to entirely different ideas. For Dr. Goebbels, freedom was the ability of the German people to come together in their faceless mass, the Volk, a congregation of people in unison with each other, and the German soil, and culture. What the word "freedom" means in the current vernacular is the exact opposite of what Dr. Goebbels saw as freedom! The same applies to several other key words and concepts, which by the way seems to generate a lot of confusion in people trying to make head or tail out of the Nazis' lunacy.

Your plan is to free the people from their urges, and the disconnect between what is beneficial in our asphalt wasteland of a capitalistic culture, and what Nature saw fit to place in our glands (and heads) about sex and reproduction. Like all grandiose thinkers and righters of social wrongs, you need to adopt a new meaning for the common word, freedom. And by doing so, you are already consigned in your heart to committing mass murder.

The lunatics in charge of the Third Reich, Cambodia, USSR and China all acted based on some reasoning aimed at improving society. I wouldn't describe their motives as helping people, per se, and the level of delusion each tyrant had about their own benevolence isn't exactly a constant. But they also realized, to some (varying) degree, that their dreams entailed curbing the resistance of people. The cruelty and immeasurable human suffering created and generated in the Lager was far worse than what goes on in US prisons, and worse than the worst times in the Gulag, but the principle is always the same. People are threatened with bestial, demeaning behaviour to keep them from frying their brains with dangerous chemicals, or in your case to keep people from abstaining in state-mandated birth control.

In principle, it is possible to change society peacefully, far, far more slowly, as it is possible to get the College of Cardinals to enjoy cannibalism, provided you use small enough changes in carefully spaced increments. But like most lunatics who've decided to fix the woes of their nation, it is very difficult to be content implementing changes that take place over hundreds of years. Even with your Senators' long reigns. In order to over-come the psychological aspects Minx goes on about, you would have to threaten and imprison large groups of US citizens. And outright kill them, 2nd Amendment and all that.

And once that killing starts, there's no really rational point at which to stop. When the moral norms that prohibit it in what we call civilization come crumbling down, when it is acceptable to lock people up to be raped for not taking hormone implants and kill those resisting arrest, you might as well pack your bags and go home, that society is headed right into self-annihilation. Sooner or later; the Nazis were the most insane, and perished fastest, the USSR waxed and waned with their level of insanity, and crumbled slower.

The desire for autonomy and the (illusionary) possibility of shaping one's own faith is one of the strongest cultural memes of the current Western World. It would take generations to try and grandfather it out of the culture, and in matters of reproduction the amount of state-used oppression and violence required to change the situation over-night would probably lead to a revolution against the president insane enough to try.

It is not necessarily a bad thing to create a society of fearful dregs who're so accustomed to violence that they can adjust to an authoritarian regime; most discussions today simply choose to take the value of a human life for an axiom. That choice is partly based on the evidence we have on the instability of such Orwellian nations, but the funny thing about the human spirit is the boundless confidence that we could do it, we'd do it better, just give us the mandate! And so the Far Right is rising again in Europe.

[Aimless]

That's probably one of my favourite posts this year

EDIT: After "O'rwelly"

[EyeKhan]

Dr. Joseph Goebbels <snip> is rising again in Europe.

Thank you for the long and thoughful post. It provoked a thought or two that are largely off topic. Sorry. I'm thinking about election policy, but this had to come out.

1. Biology vs. Culture. Laying aside the specifics of this one discussion, there are a whole class of problems that result from biologically urged behavior that evolved under certain conditions, helped us to survive those conditions in fact, but conditions which neverlethese no longer exist. These problems are potentially a survival issue and our species, which has apparently always utilized some extent of external, learned dna, aka culture, struggles to deal with them via our culture rather than letting natural selection do it.

Obesity is the best example we struggle with today. Violence and competition another, and one which is arguably the best adapted to our modern culture (or vice versa). As for breeding, we all can agree we need to limit it (how many children a couple have and when they have them). But alas, we are obsessively preoccupied with the act, for obvious reasons. And we are insanely defensive of it, for equally obvious reasons.

2. Everchanging Humanity. So humanity has two forms of dna. Our internal, biological dna that builds and maintains the machine and influences behavior, and the external dna, the rules and knowledge of our culture, that vastly influence behavior, have lightly helped us preserve the innner (rules against inbreeding for example) and just lately is providing the tools to literally engineer it. (It may be the two will merge - our knowledge allowing us to fully shape and control our internal dna).

* * * * * * *

You're piece above is largely about how this external dna of our culture changes, either by brute force, light force, or natural evolution. From the ground up - within society - or the top down, via our culturally annointed leadership. Today the rate of change is vast compared to any time in our history. And its apparently accelerating, to what end we can only guess.

The changes in breeding are interesting - more children survive their first 5 years than ever, fewer people need be childless than ever , the number of children per breeding pair is on a rapid decline. And soon, as I said, we'll know how to guide, then control, then engineer the results of our breeding. And people are going to freak every step of the way. That's the pangs of cultural evolution, as our understanding of ethics changes to suit what we can and/or must do. Two steps forward, one back, a half back, or three back, then more forward.

Or not. I wonder if this trend of increasing complexity and rate of change can hold, or must hold. Or will it slow? Biological evolution doesn't go at any particular rate or in any particular direction as a rule. Is cultural evolution goaless as well? Is there an intent? Why not - it is at least in part a product of sentience, why can't it be guided? But human policy - top down cultural rules - seems to be having trouble keeping up with our capabilities, and our capabilities seem to be largely un-guided. As we've seen, if they get too divergent, you end up with dirty environment, very high body counts, way too many fat people, etc.

Now we face extinction at our capable hands. So leaders start thinking about how to speed things up, adjust the rules to fit the abilities before the abilities do away with us. This is easy to do quickly when disaster strikes. Take off your shoes in line at the airport, as an example. Nobody seriously complains about airport security. MAD changed the nature of warfare to fit the ability to murder everyone. So far so good.

What's next? Temporary sterility for young people? Global Jihad? The Matrix? Gray goo? Post-human homo-superior? Or simple, reasonable election reform?