Microblog Memes

I love my healthy mutt.

There's personal and systemic eugenics. Systemic eugenics will always be bad.

Personal... Well, you're not obligated to have children you don't want either.

Eugenics is bad because it's based on fundamentally incorrect ideas about how genetics plays into personal development. Galton drew specifically upon the fundamentally incorrect ideas of scientific racism, and wrote about Eugenics as being a means to better improve the superior races. Galton argued that things like poverty and mass suffering could have been solved this way, essentially arguing that it was the personal incompetence of the less fortunate which lead them into misfortune (also fundamentally incorrect).

Even if you drop the baggage of scientific racism, Eugenics is still conceptually ableist, choosing to eliminate those we deem disabled rather than finding solutions to better their lives.

On top of that, we were kind of hinging on sequencing the human genome giving us the insight to how genetic diseases work, the single possible case that eugenic thought might have had a use in. This has since fallen through. Further research into genetics has also demonstrated just how unreadable DNA is right now. We are still nowhere near being able to predict most genetic diseases based on the genetics of a couple.

I also cannot think of a single thing that eugenics implies should be done that isn't absolutely evil. I'd argue that things that only encourage evil actions are themselves evil.

I presume you meant to prepend these citations with your own summation, something along the lines of: "It's a spectrum, not a point", etc al?

Only in very broad strokes.

That's what cats've done, TBF. They even taught themselves to sound like our babies! Not to mention, contracted a bio-parasite to further tilt our civilization to their whims...

Technically garbage rather than trash, if we're being pedantic

Cow: I want my species to thrive in number!

monkey's paw finger curls

Damn... good point.

I was even all set to argue back with like: each individual cow makes their own choice, as in the ones who fight back against the system get killed, whereas those who simply accept it as-is continue to exist, leading us to today where those who are left are those who are genetically predisposed to not fight (but theoretically, they could still fight back?). And that even before we delved into direct genetic manipulation, to increase the meat-to-effort ratio. Maybe one day we'll design cows that just walk directly into our mouths and beg us to chew them?

So humans in essence foundationally altered what a "cow" even is - like imagine a wild boar that humans actually feared, vs. today's mere "pigs". What is left is a shadow of the former glory that the true bovine herbivore ruminant was in its prime heyday. i.e. nobody alive to today has ever seen a true "cow" (unless like boars there is some wild variant somewhere, not descendants of some escapee but a truly untouched species?).

That's all on us. As people elsewhere are saying, we treat cows almost as bad as we treat humans beings.

Perhaps that is why shows like The Matrix are so horrifying - it's what we would do (/ are already doing), if the situation were reversed.