The racist arguments for slavery didn't begin the process, they were grasped at when the moral hideousness of the practice became too obvious. First was the desire to keep slaves, the hunger for it, then came the rationale, the excuse, that these were not "people". They were lesser beings, and fit to only to serve or run wild. But first was the desire.
That's a key point. The argument is being made because the desire is there, and it is not the desire to "save lives". That's a by-product, that's a selling point, that's the pay-off. And it's a good one. Like the economy in a slaveholder's plea. When it's his own profit and ease he really argues to preserve.
Anyone who has a family member whose life would be bettered or sustained by this kind of research will find it easy to make the logical transition the "scientists" offer. Just as with any immediate benefit, logic gets hazy, things jumble up, it's simpler to go along with the powerful and seemingly inevitable.
But the course of this "progress" is profane, it benefits what is now an ascendant minority, it began there, and its rationale originates there. The "human race" is not a constant thing. It's as mutable as any other large group, what it is depends on what its parts are; the things we do now determine who will be "human" tomorrow. Those changes are broad and slow, and impossible to see from within a human lifetime. So the illusion that they don't take place at all is an easy one to create. But they do happen, they are happening.
An obvious example would be the trivial difference between myopic and acute vision, here, now, the way we live today. But for most of our history that difference was crucial, and the dim-sighted were inferior, dangerously so.
Better minds than mine have gone over this, made it clearer, but at its base it's about a choice, to blindly accept that prosthetic life, to remain uneasy with it, or to reject it entirely. This choice is anathema to the nameless thing behind the smarmy "life-saving" arguments for what are inhuman and anti-life practices.
Just as we now accept the handicap of weak vision as unimportant we will surely be told to accept the consumption of human lives, especially the lives of the "inferior", as "necessary" and life-saving sacrifices, and those that do accept it will raise generations of children to whom it's just the way the world is. Stop it now.
The clash is not between two opponents of equal stature. It's between animals that adapted to the world as it is, with all its change and diverse flux, and creatures who could not survive - that's crucial - they cannot survive, without completely controlling their environment, and bending it to their own need.
Thus we have the world on fire, the landscape emptying of life and filling with poison, and the true carriers of the truly human, the world's indigenous people, harried into the complex hives of industry, their cultures broken and travestied as amusements.
Not because it's the inevitable "progress" of mankind, but because it's the only way a certain type of human can survive.
Vampires, cannibals, all the monsters of story and myth, but fat with success and served by earnest and well-intentioned deputies. And it happens in the daytime, instead of in the dark.
That's a key point. The argument is being made because the desire is there, and it is not the desire to "save lives". That's a by-product, that's a selling point, that's the pay-off. And it's a good one. Like the economy in a slaveholder's plea. When it's his own profit and ease he really argues to preserve.
Anyone who has a family member whose life would be bettered or sustained by this kind of research will find it easy to make the logical transition the "scientists" offer. Just as with any immediate benefit, logic gets hazy, things jumble up, it's simpler to go along with the powerful and seemingly inevitable.
But the course of this "progress" is profane, it benefits what is now an ascendant minority, it began there, and its rationale originates there. The "human race" is not a constant thing. It's as mutable as any other large group, what it is depends on what its parts are; the things we do now determine who will be "human" tomorrow. Those changes are broad and slow, and impossible to see from within a human lifetime. So the illusion that they don't take place at all is an easy one to create. But they do happen, they are happening.
An obvious example would be the trivial difference between myopic and acute vision, here, now, the way we live today. But for most of our history that difference was crucial, and the dim-sighted were inferior, dangerously so.
Better minds than mine have gone over this, made it clearer, but at its base it's about a choice, to blindly accept that prosthetic life, to remain uneasy with it, or to reject it entirely. This choice is anathema to the nameless thing behind the smarmy "life-saving" arguments for what are inhuman and anti-life practices.
Just as we now accept the handicap of weak vision as unimportant we will surely be told to accept the consumption of human lives, especially the lives of the "inferior", as "necessary" and life-saving sacrifices, and those that do accept it will raise generations of children to whom it's just the way the world is. Stop it now.
The clash is not between two opponents of equal stature. It's between animals that adapted to the world as it is, with all its change and diverse flux, and creatures who could not survive - that's crucial - they cannot survive, without completely controlling their environment, and bending it to their own need.
Thus we have the world on fire, the landscape emptying of life and filling with poison, and the true carriers of the truly human, the world's indigenous people, harried into the complex hives of industry, their cultures broken and travestied as amusements.
Not because it's the inevitable "progress" of mankind, but because it's the only way a certain type of human can survive.
Vampires, cannibals, all the monsters of story and myth, but fat with success and served by earnest and well-intentioned deputies. And it happens in the daytime, instead of in the dark.
New Scientist Jul.22.04:
Fertility regulators in the UK have ruled that families can pre-select embryos which could potentially save ill siblings.
To date, applications to pick genetically matched embryos for implantation for this purpose in the UK have been mired in legal opposition. The new ruling clears the way for families to proceed unhindered.
"In terms of officially sanctioning this, we're the first in the world," said a spokeswoman for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), which regulates all in-vitro fertilisation procedures and experiments on embryos in the UK.
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...it has been attacked by pro-life and other opposition groups who say it turns babies into commodities."It's wrong to create a child simply as a means to an end, however good that end might be," says David King of the London-based lobby group, Human Genetics Alert.
But the authority is adamant that its ruling is practical, ethical and humane. "This treatment can benefit the whole family," said Suzi Leather, chair of the HFEA in a statement on Wednesday.
Leather says that although the ethical issues are important, the primary focus of the authority has been whether the screening procedure itself - which involves removal of cells - harms embryos and babies.
