Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
and then there's zero actual calls for selective breeding of humans
I don't know the organization, so I don't have a qualified opinion on it, but a brief search tells me a lot of people disagree with it, for example a letter signed by more than 60 other groups. They have initiated and are supporting the Autism Genome Project, making it at least seem not too far fetched that the purpose for prenatal diagnosis is selective bre
aeding.
They don't necessarily have to call for it now, once the prenatal test is available the cat will be out of the bag.
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@topspin said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
selective breading
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Just for comparison, I'd be interested in @Mason-Wheeler's opinion on prenatal diagnosis for Down Syndrome. I don't really know any purpose for it other than abortion, which does happen, and I know you already think that destroying a 3 second old single-cell zygote is murder, so you're certainly against that. But what other (realistic) use is there, some head start into researching how to deal with this? If there's good reasons I'm missing, they might transfer to autism.
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@topspin said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
I don't know the organization, so I don't have a qualified opinion on it, but a brief search tells me a lot of people disagree with it, for example a letter signed by more than 60 other groups.
Interesting letter, but it's a bit disingenuous for them to describe the literal truth about autism as "harmful stereotypes." They appear to be trying to present the high-functioning minority as "the true face of autism", but the data says otherwise. People like Ben, who are capable of living relatively normal lives independently in our society while having autism, are quite rare; for the majority of people with it, it's a debilitating disease characterized by severe mental problems (and severe physical problems as well in a large percentage of cases) that very much is in need of a cure!
Having a handful of high-functioning people saying "we don't need no cure because this provides us a cool alternate perspective" positively reeks of "screw you, I got mine," and is an order of magnitude more insensitive and harmful-to-real-people than they're accusing the folks they disagree with of being.
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@topspin said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
Just for comparison, I'd be interested in @Mason-Wheeler's opinion on prenatal diagnosis for Down Syndrome. I don't really know any purpose for it other than abortion, which does happen, and I know you already think that destroying a 3 second old single-cell zygote is murder, so you're certainly against that. But what other (realistic) use is there, some head start into researching how to deal with this? If there's good reasons I'm missing, they might transfer to autism.
As far as I know, the only practical use for a Down Syndrome test is selective abortion. Down Syndrome is a very peculiar condition, caused by a glitch in meiosis producing a cell with both copies of one specific chromosome, so once fertilization occurs, the baby ends up with three of that chromosome instead of the usual two.
As this is essentially random, there's no good way to prevent it, and given the nature of the cause, there's no plausible way to cure it either, short of some sort of advanced retroviral treatment or other therapies that are more the realm of science fiction than medical fact.
Autism, if it does have a genetic origin, (as far as I'm aware we don't know if that's even the case at all, but don't quote me on that,) is not caused by something nearly so blunt and obvious as an extra chromosome sitting around where it doesn't belong. (If it was, we would know unambiguously what the cause is!) So the viability of genetic treatments for it can't really be compared or "transferred" to that of Down Syndrome. It's an apples-and-oranges deal.
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@topspin said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
Just for comparison, I'd be interested in @Mason-Wheeler's opinion on prenatal diagnosis for Down Syndrome. I don't really know any purpose for it other than abortion, which does happen, and I know you already think that destroying a 3 second old single-cell zygote is murder, so you're certainly against that. But what other (realistic) use is there, some head start into researching how to deal with this? If there's good reasons I'm missing, they might transfer to autism.
I tested for all of the possibly genetic anomalies that were more likely due to my age (like Down's Syndrome).
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@Mason_Wheeler Heck, there's wide disagreement about whether autism is like Down's Syndrome at all (ie a single-cause, mostly-single-presentation disorder) or more like cancer (many many causes, many presentations, all linked by a few sets of common characteristics). My money is on the second. There's just too much variation.
And there's no strong evidence that it's purely inherited-genetic (rather than epigenetic), so pre-natal tests might not even really be able to capture it except in a few cases even with perfect tests. My guess (total WAG) is that the very most severe cases (that manifest basically in infancy with no transition) are purely genetic and could be caught by a prenatal scan, while the majority (including those severe cases that manifest later) wouldn't be caught then at all (since they'd have to be triggered by something else, whether psychological or environmental or even hormonal). I wouldn't be shocked to find that you could test for a genetic risk factor, but the accuracy of that test would be both low and only probabalistic.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
People like Ben, who are capable of living relatively normal lives independently in our society while having autism, are quite rare; for the majority of people with it, it's a debilitating disease characterized by severe mental problems (and severe physical problems as well in a large percentage of cases) that very much is in need of a cure!
Do you have a source for this claim? I would imagine it might have looked like that historically as the most severe cases are the easiest to diagnose, but I'm not aware of any recent research that identifies the relative numbers at different points on the spectrum
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@topspin said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
prenatal diagnosis for Down Syndrome. I don't really know any purpose for it other than abortion
When my (ex-)wife was pregnant, she was considered at risk for having a Down Syndrome baby, due to her age. We had the prenatal diagnosis done. (I think they checked for other genetic anomalies, too, but I don't remember. I know it confirmed genetically the sex that we saw in the ultrasound.) We are both morally opposed to abortion, so that was never even considered; we discussed it very briefly and immediately agreed that it was not something we'd do, even if the result showed an abnormality. (Fortunately, everything was normal for both kids.) We had the test done so that we would be prepared emotionally (and any other ways we might have needed to prepare) for a special-needs child, had that been necessary.
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@Jaloopa said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
People like Ben, who are capable of living relatively normal lives independently in our society while having autism, are quite rare; for the majority of people with it, it's a debilitating disease characterized by severe mental problems (and severe physical problems as well in a large percentage of cases) that very much is in need of a cure!
Do you have a source for this claim? I would imagine it might have looked like that historically as the most severe cases are the easiest to diagnose, but I'm not aware of any recent research that identifies the relative numbers at different points on the spectrum
I don’t really think it matters one way or another.
If they’re looking for a cure, it benefits those that want the cure, whether they’re the majority or minority. (One caveat would be if it creates a stigma for those that choose against it.)
Since they are looking into genetical causes (also whether or not it turns out to actually be genetical), it does matter for the original eugenics claim if that’s for a cure or for selective abortion. Personally I find it hard to believe (but not impossible, I’m no expert) than some gene manipulation would change an already developed person to rid them of autism.
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I don't think humans should do embryo selection on humans. It doesn't cause any suffering, but it allows parents to decide which of their children deserve to live and which don't looking at their DNA, and that's not something I'm comfortable with. And it's not just Autism Speaks that is looking into eugenics, there are plenty of scientists hoping to do embryo selection to increase IQ. And obviously plenty of people will use embryo selection to breed blonde pale and blue-eyed babies.
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@topspin said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
Since they are looking into genetical causes (also whether or not it turns out to actually be genetical), it does matter for the original eugenics claim if that’s for a cure or for selective abortion.
I'm sure there are people out there who would use it for selective abortion, but it's also important to recognize that, (stipulating that there is in fact a genetic cause,) you can't fix the genetic problem until you know where it's located.
Personally I find it hard to believe (but not impossible, I’m no expert) than some gene manipulation would change an already developed person to rid them of autism.
I've seen some research suggesting that that could very well be possible. (Wasn't researching this, but someone mentioned it as part of a larger presentation at a conference I attended.) Apparently there are existing therapies using TMS that can cause an autistic brain to revert to neurotypical thought patterns. They're difficult, complicated, and the effect doesn't last very long, but at the very least it proves that it can be done, that the autistic brain isn't fundamentally "malformed" in some way that makes it incapable of neurotypical functionality. This means it's likely that it could be put back on course permanently if someone could track down and correct a root cause.
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@magnusmaster said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
I don't think humans should do embryo selection on humans. It doesn't cause any suffering, but it allows parents to decide which of their children deserve to live and which don't looking at their DNA, and that's not something I'm comfortable with. And it's not just Autism Speaks that is looking into eugenics, there are plenty of scientists hoping to do embryo selection to increase IQ. And obviously plenty of people will use embryo selection to breed blonde pale and blue-eyed babies.
What about this?
(spoilers: it's about a society where we've discovered how to choose specifically which genes we pass to our offspring, and this creates a genetic underclass of naturally conceived humans that are discriminated against)
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@magnusmaster said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
I don't think humans should do embryo selection on humans. It doesn't cause any suffering, but it allows parents to decide which of their children deserve to live and which don't looking at their DNA, and that's not something I'm comfortable with. And it's not just Autism Speaks that is looking into eugenics, there are plenty of scientists hoping to do embryo selection to increase IQ. And obviously plenty of people will use embryo selection to breed blonde pale and blue-eyed babies.
That said, I think the science should absolutely pursue a way of correcting genetic defects in embryos. This "zero tolerance for eugenics" policy really gets in the way.
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@Gąska said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
@magnusmaster said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
I don't think humans should do embryo selection on humans. It doesn't cause any suffering, but it allows parents to decide which of their children deserve to live and which don't looking at their DNA, and that's not something I'm comfortable with. And it's not just Autism Speaks that is looking into eugenics, there are plenty of scientists hoping to do embryo selection to increase IQ. And obviously plenty of people will use embryo selection to breed blonde pale and blue-eyed babies.
That said, I think the science should absolutely pursue a way of correcting genetic defects in embryos. This "zero tolerance for eugenics" policy really gets in the way.
Agreed. I don't see that as actually being eugenics, but I can see how it's close enough that some people could disagree on that point.
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@Gąska said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
@magnusmaster said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
I don't think humans should do embryo selection on humans. It doesn't cause any suffering, but it allows parents to decide which of their children deserve to live and which don't looking at their DNA, and that's not something I'm comfortable with. And it's not just Autism Speaks that is looking into eugenics, there are plenty of scientists hoping to do embryo selection to increase IQ. And obviously plenty of people will use embryo selection to breed blonde pale and blue-eyed babies.
That said, I think the science should absolutely pursue a way of correcting genetic defects in embryos. This "zero tolerance for eugenics" policy really gets in the way.
When going in for fertility treatment they test for Cystic Fibrosis and do genetic counseling to see if there is anything else to test for. I have 2 half-siblings die soon after birth due to Recessive Polycystic Kidney Disorder, the third half-siblings has adult-onset adrenal hyperplasia.
I was tested for those as well. I am a carrier for both CF and RPKD. Luckily my husband is not a carrier of either but if he were the embryos would have been tested.
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@magnusmaster said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
And obviously plenty of people will use embryo selection to breed blonde pale and blue-eyed babies.
Well, that didn't take long to get to Nazis.
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@Polygeekery it's a eugenics thread. Nazism was never far away
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@Jaloopa how could anyone nazi that coming!
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@Jaloopa fair enough.
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@Gąska Yeah, but then we need to sharply define what actually counts as a defect. Do we draw the line at life-preventing/life-threatening issues? Or maybe at increased risks for cancer / heart defects? Blindness? And if we do blindness, what about near- or farsightedness?
And we'll probably also get someone to argue against early hairloss.
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@Rhywden and I wouldn't mind any of those. I mean, if it's selective
breedingkilling that's the problem, and nobody is killed in the process, it should be fine, no?inb4 disposing embryo isn't killing
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@Gąska Yeah, but there's also the fact that very light-skinned people are rather more at risk to skin cancer. So, do we darken up the Irish?
Kidding aside, the question then would become if we actually want to homogenize humanity that much. I mean, you could argue that everyone having the same blood type would save quite a lot of lives.
Until the next pandemic comes along where this exact blood type is particularly susceptible.
Hence my question of where exactly to draw the line.
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@Rhywden said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
So, do we darken up the Irish?
That doesn’t look good with red hair, so I’ll have to veto this!
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@Rhywden said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
@Gąska Yeah, but there's also the fact that very light-skinned people are rather more at risk to skin cancer. So, do we darken up the Irish?
Why the hell not, if that's what parents want?
Kidding aside, the question then would become if we actually want to homogenize humanity that much. I mean, you could argue that everyone having the same blood type would save quite a lot of lives.
Until the next pandemic comes along where this exact blood type is particularly susceptible.
Hence my question of where exactly to draw the line.
I'm hoping that the procedure will be complicated and expensive enough that we'll be sufficiently constrained by technical factors long before moral ponderings become relevant. And as of now, the line is drawn at "no changes whatsoever" and I find it problematic. I have a cousin who's totally fucked up by Down's syndrome and several other disorders. He can't even digest food properly. His parents' life is logistical and financial hell. I'd like to live in a world where this happens virtually never.
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@topspin said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
@Rhywden said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
So, do we darken up the Irish?
That doesn’t look good with red hair, so I’ll have to veto this!
Plenty of people seem to disagree:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DarkSkinnedRedhead
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@Gąska said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
I'm hoping that the procedure will be complicated and expensive enough that we'll be sufficiently constrained by technical factors long before moral ponderings become relevant. And as of now, the line is drawn at "no changes whatsoever" and I find it problematic. I have a cousin who's totally fucked up by Down's syndrome and several other disorders. He can't even digest food properly. His parents' life is logistical and financial hell. I'd like to live in a world where this happens virtually never.
Yeah. So much of this discussion is from the people who don't have to live in that hell. Even the autistic people at issue in the prompting case are near the upper boundaries of functionality. I'm sure if you asked those with severe issues...wait. You can't. They can't take care of themselves, and taking care of them is expensive, difficult, and heart-breaking.
Things like Gattica are so improbable from what we know of genetics--there's no nice interface that we can poke the right values into the specified places and get clean results. Every time we've tried for anything non-trivial, it's caused lots of issues. And that's even for things where we know that one specific gene controls the result. Which only accounts for a tiny fraction of issues.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
Things like Gattica
Gattaca. Every letter is one of [A, C, G, T], the symbols for the 4 DNA bases.
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@Gąska But if it's that expensive and complicated quite a number of people will simply go the cheaper route.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
@Gąska said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
I'm hoping that the procedure will be complicated and expensive enough that we'll be sufficiently constrained by technical factors long before moral ponderings become relevant. And as of now, the line is drawn at "no changes whatsoever" and I find it problematic. I have a cousin who's totally fucked up by Down's syndrome and several other disorders. He can't even digest food properly. His parents' life is logistical and financial hell. I'd like to live in a world where this happens virtually never.
Yeah. So much of this discussion is from the people who don't have to live in that hell. Even the autistic people at issue in the prompting case are near the upper boundaries of functionality.
And yet (at least as I read) the organization at issue refuses to have any actual autistic people have any say in the matters.
I'm sure if you asked those with severe issues...wait. You can't. They can't take care of themselves, and taking care of them is expensive, difficult, and heart-breaking.
Things like Gattica are so improbable from what we know of genetics--there's no nice interface that we can poke the right values into the specified places and get clean results. Every time we've tried for anything non-trivial, it's caused lots of issues. And that's even for things where we know that one specific gene controls the result. Which only accounts for a tiny fraction of issues.
But that was exactly my point earlier. Down Syndrome is comparatively simple because we've long known the genome defect that causes it. It's clean and easy to define, and yet we're nowhere near that helping with a cure. Compare to something which we're not even sure it's genetic and how/where to locate it, is it really that likely it'll be genetically cured instead of selectively aborted? Let's hope the answer is yes.
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@Rhywden you mean abortion? It's already being done all the time and widely cheered upon by people who think eugenics is the worst thing ever.
And it will likely be expensive to research but (relatively) cheap to administer, like most other medical procedures - so it would be widely accessible but only for select few diseases.
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@Rhywden said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
But if it's that expensive and complicated
...it won't be for long.
The Human Genome Project, to sequence the full genome of one human being, cost nearly $3 billion ($5B in today's dollars) and took 13 years. Today, you can get it done in a few days for around $1000. A few years down the road, it'll likely be $100-200 and a couple hours.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
@Rhywden said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
But if it's that expensive and complicated
...it won't be for long.
The Human Genome Project, to sequence the full genome of one human being, cost nearly $3 billion ($5B in today's dollars) and took 13 years. Today, you can get it done in a few days for around $1000. A few years down the road, it'll likely be $100-200 and a couple hours.
Sequencing is only the first step. And the easiest step. Figuring out what they mean (if anything) is harder. Figuring out how to affect it (even in utero, when systems are way simpler) is exponentially harder.
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@Mason_Wheeler I'm not talking about the sequencing. I'm talking about the procedure which will need to be a variant of IVF.
IVF is neither easy, cheap nor reliable and quite hard on the womens' psyche as well. This is a biological system with many moving parts and not a car where you can simply swap a tire.
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@topspin said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
And yet (at least as I read) the organization at issue refuses to have any actual autistic people have any say in the matters.
Can you blame them, when the ones who really need help the most are literally incapable of having a say in the matter, and so many of the ones articulate enough to claim to speak for them are actively working against their interests? In this particular case, it kind of makes sense!
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@Rhywden Sure, but I'm saying that if the procedure, whatever it may be, starts out extremely difficult and expensive, a few years of iterating on it will very likely make improve on that by orders of magnitude. The progress curve on genomics is even sharper than Moore's Law.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
@Rhywden Sure, but I'm saying that if the procedure, whatever it may be, starts out extremely difficult and expensive, a few years of iterating on it will very likely make improve on that by orders of magnitude. The progress curve on genomics is even sharper than Moore's Law.
I'm not talking about the genome. I'm talking about the procedure. You're mixing up two things here.
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@Rhywden I really don't think I am. We're living in a pretty glorious time of revolutionary advancements in medicine, and genetic science is one component of that. But they're also making massive advances in surgical procedures. Things that used to involve literally cutting people wide open and sewing them back together, leaving permanent marks on them, can now be handled with newly-developed "minimally invasive" procedures assisted by computers and robotics. I see no good reason why that shouldn't come to apply to IVF procedures too, with a bit of dedicated work on the subject.
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@Mason_Wheeler Yeah, that's a lot of wishful thinking. You realize that genetic manipulation is not a surgical procedure?
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@Gąska said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
@Jaloopa how could anyone nazi that coming!
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@HardwareGeek said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
@Gąska said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
@Jaloopa how could anyone nazi that coming!
I was going to make that joke, but refrained.
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@Benjamin-Hall I figured that someone would post that eventually, and it could as well be me.
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@Rhywden said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
@Mason_Wheeler Yeah, that's a lot of wishful thinking. You realize that genetic manipulation is not a surgical procedure?
No! I totally didn't realize that at all! I certainly didn't realize it enough to point out that we have also, in addition to our progress on genetic science, had order-of-magnitude improvements in our surgical technology or anything like that, no siree!
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@Gąska said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
@Benjamin-Hall I figured that someone would post that eventually, and it could as well be me.
And props to you for doing so. It needed to be done.
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@topspin said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
And yet (at least as I read) the organization at issue refuses to have any actual autistic people have any say in the matters.
That is entirely untrue. They have had multiple members of their board and high level employees that are autistic. This takes seconds to debunk. FFS, Google "autism speaks board members" and get back to us.
You're only reading and believing the propaganda that leads people to believe that mentioning their name is a death threat. Do your own research.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
@Rhywden said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
@Mason_Wheeler Yeah, that's a lot of wishful thinking. You realize that genetic manipulation is not a surgical procedure?
No! I totally didn't realize that at all! I certainly didn't realize it enough to point out that we have also, in addition to our progress on genetic science, had order-of-magnitude improvements in our surgical technology or anything like that, no siree!
You have this weird thing where you equivocate everything. Just because we have X advances in field Y is no guarantee that we will have equivalent advances in field Z.
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@Gąska said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
His parents' life is logistical and financial hell.
This was our concern, especially since we had 4 other kids.
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@Polygeekery said in Selective Breeding? [Re: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations]:
leads people to believe that mentioning their name is a death threat
Stop acting the victim, it doesn't suit you. The "death threat" was you saying you were rethinking your stance against eugenics
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@Jaloopa that's not a death threat. At all. In no way with the words used up to that point could it ever be a death threat.
Words mean things.
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@Polygeekery no, that's why I put it in scare quotes. But trying to claim that it was the mention of autism speaks is disingenuous