p>Even those that are superficially predisposed to agree with him on cloning/genetic engineering of people, as I was, quickly lose it over his human rights to conceive and other weird notions and are eventually reduced to: “WTF??!!”
This called to mind something that Hannah Arendt wrote in 1958, after Sputnik.
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For some time now, a great many scientific endeavors have been directed toward making life also “artificial,” toward cutting the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature. It is the same desire to escape from imprisonment to the earth that is manifest in the attempt to create life in the test tube, in the desire to mix “frozen germ plasm from people of demonstrated ability under the microscope to produce superior human beings” and “to alter [their] size, shape and function”; and the wish to escape the human condition, I suspect, also underlies the hope to extend man’s life-span far beyond the hundred-year limit.
This future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself. There is no reason to doubt our abilities to accomplish such an exchange, just as there is no reason to doubt our present ability to destroy all organic life on earth. The question is only whether we wish to use our new scientific and technical knowledge in this direction, and this question cannot be decided by scientific means; it is a political question of the first order and therefore can hardly be left to the decision of professional scientists or professsional politicians.
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p>My own view, which I think will be shared by folks both on the left and on the right, is that we should not tinker in these ways with basic human nature. Pride comes before the fall.
Just think of all the exhibitionists that will flock to city hall to get legally married now that JH has told them that it perfectly legal for Married couples to have sex in public!
But here is his take at Red Mass Group.
for the long back-and-forths that John Howard used to generate here should check out that RMG thread. Best free entertainment on the internet!
That was funny.
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p>Even those that are superficially predisposed to agree with him on cloning/genetic engineering of people, as I was, quickly lose it over his human rights to conceive and other weird notions and are eventually reduced to: “WTF??!!”
I’d forgotten, for one thing, how entertaining he was at first, and for another, how incredibly tiresome he got eventually.
at pam’s house blend. he was banned from there too, but keeps lying about his identity and opening new accounts to force his way in.
This called to mind something that Hannah Arendt wrote in 1958, after Sputnik.
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p>My own view, which I think will be shared by folks both on the left and on the right, is that we should not tinker in these ways with basic human nature. Pride comes before the fall.
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p>TedF
Mr. Lynne and I immediately thought of JH when we saw this on the BBC the other day.
Just think of all the exhibitionists that will flock to city hall to get legally married now that JH has told them that it perfectly legal for Married couples to have sex in public!