[extropy-chat] Famous author self destructs in public! Filmateleven.

[Charlie Stross]

On 5 Jun 2005, at 01:06, Brett Paatsch wrote:

Charlie Stross wrote:

Can we maybe agree, as extropians one and all, that in an ideal
world involuntary and/or unwanted conception wouldn’t occur,

I can’t agree with that.
First, not everyone that posts to the ExI chat list is an extropian.
Arguably no one is.

Well, if you want to split hairs that way ...

Two, “figuring out how to make conception a process under
voluntary control” was achieved ages ago. Don’t have sex - unless
your willing get pregnant

Tell that to a rape victim.

I repeat: conception is *not* under voluntary control. Celibacy is a  
condition which may be terminated involuntarily. (Moreover, it’s not an  
easily maintained condition for the majority of people.)

The subtext I see behind all this rhetoric about celibacy and the evils  
of abortion is a total phobia of icky females enjoying sex, with a  
side-order of the kind of deep unease about the flesh that --  
ironically -- the more technophobic commentators tend to attribute to  
extropians.

To get gene-line engineering working as a solution as you suggest
it doesn’t just have to be technologically practical it has to be  
politically practical. Guess what the catholics and others who prefer
their solution to the one you propose would vote against your solution
in large numbers even if you could get a political party to put it on  
the
agenda.

Heh. “Politically practical.” We now have the sub-text out in the open.  
I should like to note that, along with the US state department, the  
other forces trying to scupper the UN WHO proposal that access to  
contraception and abortion should be basic rights available to women  
world-wide were the most barking batshit reactionary islamic  
fundamentalists on the planet -- notably the governments of Saudi  
Arabia and Iran. These are the same chittering dark-ages ass-hats who  
think that vaccinating girls against HPV is an incitement to  
promiscuity, because the mere concept that they could be infected by  
their husbands doesn’t occur to them.

The sub-text of the entire “human life begins at 10^6 cells/^10^3/1  
cell” debate is that a *potential* life is worth as much, if not more,  
than the *actual* life of the woman who is expected by the  
anti-abortion lobby to go through a somewhat hazardous medical  
condition (which, in the wild, has a 5-10% fatality rate) and then --  
this is implicit in the whole mess -- spend the next twenty years of  
life surrendering their potential for self-actualization to that other  
formerly potential person. Who then gets to do the whole same thing (if  
they’re female) or benefit from all that hard work (if they’re not).

As a non-American who lives in a country where at the last poll just  
short of 90% of the population approved of abortion being available on  
demand, let me say that I think this discussion would be ludicrous if  
it wasn’t evil. And it *is* evil when we get to the real loonies who  
are trying to convince the god-botherers that condoms don’t work, that  
hormonal contraceptives are abortifacients, and that the only  
acceptable place for a woman is barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.

There are, incidentally, reasons why this highly damaging meme achieves  
traction in modern religious communities. (Here’s a fairly acute blog  
entry which puts it fairly concisely:
http://hot_needle_of_inquiry.blogspot.com/2005/04/stable-strategy-set- 
defectors.html)

Three, when humanity cuts in, as you put it, is not a trivial question.
Its an important one. And discussions about it that develop the
thinking of people involved in them are discussions worth having.
When Galileo looked through a telescope and saw Jupiter and its
moons he was seeing what was there. If the Pope had been willing
to look through the telescope the Pope too would have seen what
was there. Perhaps the Pope would have questioned whether he
could trust this new fangled piece of technology or not but at least
his taking a look would have progressed his thinking a long a bit.
Perhaps he could have had another telescope built. Perhaps his
eminence could have gotten the telescope deconstructed and
reassembled.

Urban legends don’t aid the debate. Galileo was to a very large extent  
*protected* by the then Pope, who was a friend of his; what got him  
into trouble was court politics, aggravated by his inability to keep  
his mouth shut at the right time. You will note that Galileo was *not*  
burned at the stake despite this being a fairly common outcome for  
heretics at the time ... and that the reason for the draconian response  
to heresy was that it had political implications: religious doctrine  
was then the accepted way of understanding how the world works, and  
questioning its veracity raised implications for the way state policy  
was formed. That’s *never* a safe or easy thing to do; we can see it  
today in the way the Bush administration treats science funding in  
areas that don’t appear to support their preconceptions.




-- Charlie