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Notes -
How about a pallet cleanser?
In the other thread a few people brought up surrogacy, and maybe I've spent too much time with TERFs, but am I the only one that overwhelmed with the feeling of Lovecraftian horror whenever it's brought up? The feeling is even more uncanny, because it's like I slept through some great societal debate where everybody decided it's actually a lovely thing that should be celebrated. Although maybe it's not all that bad, there's a certain "how it started, how it's going" quality to the NYT headlines. In any case the casual way it's supporters talk about surrogacy freaks me out even more than militant pro-choicers.
Then there's the whole slippery slope thing:
Love is love, we have a right to get married just the same as you! - Yes I agree!
We also have a right to adopt! - Sure! I mean I have my issues with adoption in practice, but in principle if there are kids without parents, and willing gay couples to adopt them I don't see an issue.
We also have a right to biological children! What? Do you expect us to be ok with not having children?
Wait what? Yes I do! I'm all for tolerance, and living and letting live, but you're not going to make me see this as a lovely family moment, and anyway I don't remember signing on to turning a fundamental human experience into an industry when I supported the gay rights movement. Accept the limits of your biology, and move on.
Which brings me to Dase's idea "postrat «don't mean-spiritedly dunk on a rationalist» challenge (impossible)". Indeed, I can't help myself, and even though I used to be rat/rat-adjacent, I find myself having growing disdain for the entire philosophy. There's a meme that's slowly gathering momentum, that all the trans stuff, and 72 genders is just a foot in the door for transhumanism, and after I heard the idea for the first time, I can't seem to unsee it. This twisted ideology will drive us to throw away our humanity, turn us into a cross-over between Umgah Blobbies and the Borg, or trick us into committing suicide, because there's a subroutine running on some GPU somewhere, that's somewhat similar to the processes in our brains. Given the utter dominance of the trans ideology, the vindication of the slippery slope argument, and the extrapolated trajectory of these ideas, I believe we have no other choice - Transhumanism must be destroyed!
You yourself commented a few months back about doing a 'double-take' when reading some of my recent writing, suggesting (in different language) that I was becoming 'radicalized' on a few topics. One area you've counter-radicalized me is the conversation around falling birthrates in the west, and frankly, I'm coming to align more with the TwoXChromosome worldview that it's just a trojan horse for social control.
Don't get me wrong, I'm more concerned about the birthrate than I was. I'll even grant that surrogacy makes me uncomfortable, though more because I dislike the idea of disempowered people (surrogates in the third world are even more gross) being exploited in yet another way.
However, in the last 24 hours, we've had two comments explicitly shaming people who want to have children, specifically because the way they're trying to have children is aesthetically displeasing to you.
The limits of our biology are changing by the year. Will you make your children accept the limits of their biology and watch them be crippled by polio, or something? As Doglatine put it when seeing the reflexive support amongst locals for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, your position is boiling down to a reactionary rejection of anything the left and/or mainstream like, rather than a prospective, constructive worldview. So with that in mind, I have to ask: If, tomorrow, I invented a way to boost the birthrate comfortably above replacement (or to whatever arbitrary value you want), it's eugenic, it's whatever you want it to be - but it doesn't involve traditional, cis-het men repeatedly sticking their penises inside conventionally attractive cis-het stay-at-home tradwives followed by 9 months of pregnancy discomfort and childbirth - are you going to be joyful that we solved our demographic problem and charted a course towards our brave new future of eugenic John Von Neumanns? Or are you going to be upset that we didn't do it the way you wanted and those nasty degenerates are still having buttsex and dying xir hair blue?
If your answer is the latter (and I suspect for many of the Katja Grace haters it is), then yeah, I have to say TwoX are probably right about you.
Still reactionary. Have you ever laid out a positive vision for what you want the future to be, since you don't like mine? I'm curious to hear what you actually want as opposed to talking about those awful people doing things that you don't like.
You two seem to have an underlying philosophical difference that is causing this confusion. I would hazard a guess that Arjin, whether explicitly or not, has a Natural Law understanding of humanity. Curing children of polio is good, because humans are supposed to be healthy. Giving children tentacles and an extra set of eyes that can see infrared is bad, because humans aren't supposed to have tentacles or infrared eyes. If you give them tentacles and infrared eyes, are they still human?
Those who don't understand things in terms of Natural Law don't see the problem. To them there is no way humans are "supposed to be" so we can do whatever we want and be just as human as ever. Curing polio is the same kind of thing as transforming someone's body shape radically, or whatever. To someone with a Natural Law understanding, it is not at all the same kind of thing. One is fixing something that is wrong with someone, the other is creating things that are wrong with someone, insofar as wrong is deviation from what it means to be a human. Polio is a deviation; transhumanism is a deviation.
Similarly, humans naturally form families where a child has a mother and a father, because both sexes are needed to procreate and humans are the kind of creatures that care about their kids. If you don't care about your kids, then somethings wrong with you. If a kid doesn't have a mother or a father, then something's wrong with that family. Similarly, mothers are supposed to get pregnant, carry their child, and then care for it and raise it and be part of its life. If for some reason she can't (if she died in childbirth, if she's an unfit mother, if she is unwilling to care for the child) then adoption can happen, but adoption is not ideal. It's a deviation from how it should be. So deliberately creating situations where mothers bear children that aren't their own, for the purpose of giving them to someone else, is pretty "un-Natural" in the Natural Law sense.
Your primary disagreement is philosophical, that's where the debate would be most fruitful.
Are they? Assuming Natural Law then Polio existing in its natural state and infecting humans is part of it right? Humans either surviving or not based upon their fitness is what is natural. Interfering with that is unnatural.
Your interpretation only makes sense in a version of Natural Law where humanity is special for some reason. That us not being infected by X is the natural thing and therefore us wiping out X is natural.
The other argument is that our brains are natural, our inventiveness is natural, our ability to transcend what "should" be by using our brains is natural. Outside of a supernatural descriptor (this is how humans should be because God says so) what things should be and what is natural is very hazy.
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