(It's also extremely popular for people who believe, or at least wish others to believe, that that is a sufficient explanation for all difference in observed results—or at least those favoring men in positions of economic or social power and privilege—to misattribute all disagreement on the source of those particular differences to disagreement with the uncontroversial generality.)
But is your choice yours, or just your genes speaking? I'd also dispute the idea that there aren't universal indicators of genetic fitness that we all find attractive. Given free choice we would all prefer someone with better skin, brighter eyes, more lustrous hair, better teeth, etc. etc. wouldn't we? No one sets out to look for an ugly, physically lousy mate, do they?
> If the state does it, then I have no choice, plus I might be getting paired with someone who I don't consider to have "good" genes, or I might not even be allowed to breed at all.
Like it or not, Eugenics of a type is probably coming down the track anyway via gene editing. Who would turn down the chance to upgrade their offspring's intellect or height, given the option?
Search porn hub for BBW.
Saying that that makes us hypocrites about eugenics is like saying supporting adults freely engaging in consensual sex but opposing government-mandated compulsory intercourse as soon as one reaches the age of majority makes us hypocrites about sex.
Your hypothesis doesn't hold any water on the face of it, even before getting into much more complicated edge cases.
I once saw a comment on a cystic fibrosis forum by a woman with CF who had a previous boyfriend with CF. CF causes significant reproductive problems, including that 97 percent of men with CF have vas deferens, so their ejaculate contains no live sperm. On top of that it is a homozygous recessive disorder, so it's very controversial for someone with CF to want biological children of their own since you have no hope of not passing on a defective gene. Two people with CF wanting a child together would be guaranteed to have a child with CF and it would almost certainly require medical intervention to happen at all.
The CF community frequently has heated, emotional discussions about the morality of having more kids if your first child has CF, having biological kids at all if you have CF, etc.
I also have read of people with certain disorders having intervention so they could have a biological child and select out the ones that got the bad genes because they knew how torturous the condition was and had no desire to do that to their own child.
The ability to identify problematic genes via testing and the option to have certain kinds of fertility intervention is creating a whole slew of new questions. This complicated by the fact that genetic disorders profligate when they offer a survival advantage.
This is the story behind Sickle Cell, which helps protect against malaria. It is also the reason CF is so much more common in Caucasian populations of European descent: Having only one of the genes doesn't give you a deadly condition and protects against an infection that rampantly killed people in Europe historically.
So it is entirely possible that after designer babies become a thing and we remove too many "bad" genes from the gene pool, someday this will come back to bite us for some reason.
Resources are arguably a proxy for genetic fitness, in that those resources must have been acquired somehow, and discounting luck that would indicate success in the acquisition of resources - on its own a useful trait to pass on to your offspring. Apart from that, it's perfectly possible for women to marry the ugly old geezer and be promiscuous with attractive young men, and this is backed up by statistics on the number of children unknowingly raised by men that are not the biological father.
I never said that Eugenics is desirable or that I support it. All I said is that I think there is a discrepancy - if we took the same approach to personal attraction as we do at a societal level towards Eugenics we would forbid attraction based on physical factors, which would be a very different world from what we have now.
The problem is that no one has been able to scale it up to a modern industrialized nation-state and get it to work out well there. Every time they've tried, it's been a disaster.
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/07/us/clue-to-why-cystic-fib...
Tuberculosis
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10013-cystic-fibrosis...
Anecdotally:
Winter Vomiting
>So it is entirely possible that after designer babies become a thing and we remove too many "bad" genes from the gene pool, someday this will come back to bite us for some reason.
Maybe, but unlikely. Those infections were a problem back then because we lived in huts and didn't have antibiotics or anything resembling modern medicine. A comment below says that this gene helps protect against cholera, for instance. Well cholera isn't a problem in places with proper sanitation, so this gene isn't really a help for people living in rich, industrialized nations. Sickle cell protecting against malaria might be useful to people living in malaria-prone areas still, but we do have immunizations against malaria these days, and in the future it's really not going to be a problem at all.
Finally, with "designer babies", presumably we'll be at the point where we'll just be able to genetically engineer ourselves to deal with any remaining environmental problems/diseases directly, instead of relying on some accidental mutation that gives us a little better resistance at a huge cost.
When antibiotics were discovered, the world announced the end of disease. Today, there are endless articles about the rise of antibiotic resistant infections, plus dystopian fiction about a post antibiotics world.
I'm not 100 percent convinced we are as clever as we imagine ourselves to be.
Antibiotics aren't going away, they're just having to get better to cope with the evolution of bacteria.
If you aren't, you probably make a lot of poor decisions or never lived/worked around ghetto areas. You can be inherently biased and still give people benefit of the doubt though.
Advertising and marketing are tools, not inherently good or bad.
Being cookied online for the purpose of tracking advertising effectiveness doesn't hurt the end user.
It's so unlikely for obese people to permanently lose weight without extreme surgical or therapeutic intervention that its unethical for doctors to recommend diet and exercise alone as if that recommendation is efficacious.
That should do it.
Also for point 4, do you think it's unethical for doctors to have faith that a patient can persevere through a completely conquerable challenge? Is it kind of like underprescribing for someone who is in pain? I guess in that way I can kind of see what you're getting at.
The "hate evil Monsanto for destroying nature" bandwagon ignores that:
1) 99% of anti-gmo stuff is anti-science fear mongering. There are very few good general anti-GMO arguments.
2) Farmers love roundup because it increases crop productivity per acre sustainably.
3) Using roundup greatly decreases the amount of pesticide needed per acre of crops, since it can be targeted so much more precisely. So it makes the world's water supplies and crops cleaner overall.
4) Because round-up seeds are so great, farmers sometimes try to grow it without paying licensing fees (because why would you if you can get away with it?).
5) Monsanto is very legally aggressive defending its seed patents, since why would anyone pay to license their seeds if you can just steal it? Monsanto spent a lot of money developing the science for roundup seeds.
6) Monsanto has never sued someone for accidentally having round-up seeds (cross contamination). They have an amazing win rates on their lawsuits specifically because they only target cut and dry cases.
7) But the bandwagon is against the evil Monsanto, so people are overly credulous on the farmer side.
The vast majority of things Monsanto is criticized for play out just like the above.
As a separate example, check out this Quora answer for, "Is Monsanto evil?": https://www.quora.com/Is-Monsanto-evil. And let me know which side seems more reasonable to you.
Documentaries are an awful way to disseminate accurate knowledge. It's 90% emotion driven, and almost always has a narrative to tell that they're not going to want pesky facts to get in the way of.
You can choose a better literature. It is all over the internet.
Taleb, echos some of this in Antifragile.
I also generally disapprove of the idea of nation-states in general, don't believe in borders, and think that private organizations (which could include non-profits, worker owned co-ops, etc.) can (and should) fill most of the roles which are currently filled by "government".
Basically, being a Market Anarchist / Voluntaryist puts me at odds which a lot of people.
I completely agree - I'm all for (for example) healthcare that's free at the point of provision and looking after the vulnerable, and think our economies throw off more than enough surplus for us to fund this type of programme without disincentivising ambition - but I don't think a vast monolithic bureaucracy is necessarily the best way to do it. The tragic thing is that in the example of the NHS here in the UK, the left have made the organisation so bloody untouchable that even potentially beneficial reform is blocked - for example I think if we had a nominal charge (£15?) for a GP visit it would go a huge way towards discouraging e.g. the worried well and pensioners visiting their GP for a weekly chat..
I also fail to see how charging people for nothing will help solve the problem of the NHS being expensive and not very effective.
Considering we have had a conservative government for the past 8 years I fail to see how this is Labours fault, the only reform conservatives suggest is to sell the NHS to their mate for a fiver, I fail to see how this could be potentially beneficial.
I don't want anyone making huge sums out of healthcare either, though lets be honest, Labour didn't exactly do a good job in controlling doctors' salaries, did they?
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Jesus said "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's." IIRC, this was in reply to someone wanting to use his teachings as justification to not pay their taxes.
I'm kind of a hippy tree hugger type. I'm also a former military wife, so I'm a pro military, pro government hippy tree hugger.
The world needs hippy tree huggers. But they are more beneficent when they take the position "I'm not part of the government, so I'm free to live this way in part because we have functioning government." rather than acting like government needs to go.
It is not lost upon me that hippy types only ever exist in secure spaces. You don't find them wandering around in active war zones trying to give people a hug who are pointing a gun in their direction.
There is some story about "Don't remove this wall in the middle of the street unless you understand its exact purpose and are sure it is no longer needed. Do not remove it based on not seeing its use. If you don't see its use, assume that is a blind spot in you, not proof that the wall is doing nothing."
Not to say there isn't room to improve on what we currently have, but I think the "anarchist"/free spirit types are their most helpful when they recognize that freedom is bought with the blood of patriots and disrespecting that fact is inherently problematic.
Answer: Justification is an act of God’s free grace unto sinners, in which he pardons all their sins, accepts and accounts their persons righteous in his sight; not for any thing wrought in them, or done by them, but only for the perfect obedience and full satisfaction of Christ, by God imputed to them, and received by faith alone.
That's quite absolutist - I can see why you see it as an unpopular idea. For me, the context where a tool is used is key.
XML is good if you have document-oriented data or want to use XML's namespacing.
I personally prefer JSON to XML in most other circumstances - which are most of them.
I happen to agree with you about YAML, but I don't think that's as controversal.
1. That populism and extremism was basically inevitable, and without a major shake up, future equivalents of Trump and Brexit and what not are going to get more and more common (and extreme).
2. That the focus on identity politics over economic inequality came from the left's shift in focus away from the working class to the middle/upper one. Easier to blame a new scapegoat than look in the mirror at the source of your own lifestyle.
3. As well as that transhumanism and tech are the solution to issues like global warming, not changing lifestyles. The latter just won't happen without a planetary dictatorship of some kind, whereas the former may fix or reduce the effects enough to be manageable.
Seems to me that of you are viewing the world through a Fascism vs. Libertarianism lens and trying to apply that to US party political the current Republicans take the social side of Fascism and also the fiscal side of Fascism.