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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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Large mammals, such as polo ponies and police dogs, can be cloned. Not only do these animals not have health problems, but they are able to perform their role very well. It's not difficult to extrapolate from that and conclude that human cloning is technically possible. Wouldn't be surprised to find out that some large, powerful nation-state has a human-cloning black project going...those super-soldier Navy SEALs might be in elementary school now, being raised by their SEAL fathers or CIA agents or something like that.

I'm pretty sure that isn't happening, although I wish it was.

Too expensive? I mean, the Chinese government is pretty goddamn ruthless and if they wanted to they could easily pull this off. Maybe it's more expensive to clone 1,000 Navy SEALs and hope that a hundred of them decide to follow in their fathers' footsteps. You've got 900 guys who are doing something with their lives other than being SEALs. Take David Goggins...there might be 1 David Goggins and 9 fat truck drivers (which Goggins was, more or less, at one point) from your cloning program.

I mean, the Chinese government is pretty goddamn ruthless

What I've always suspected very strongly, but wasn't sure about until the happening on 24th February, is that people tend to be very mistaken about «ruthless» states. It's not ruthlessness a la evil AI picking the most instrumentally useful move in its strategic agenda to dominate the light cone, it's the ruthlessness of an unemployed wife-beater who sometimes shows her an inkling of kindness to keep mooching off. This geopolitical gobbledygook is cope, generated on auto by the pro-regime intelligentsia for the masses with superficial interest in politics; the elites of those regimes don't even notice it for the most part, and are exclusively invested in inner «stability» and individual survival, to the point of undermining the whole system's survival odds, to say nothing of its Grand Civilizational Future. If Putin couldn't be assed to make the army procure some drones or inflatable plyboard fake tanks… scratch that clever-ass stuff, even tyres or med kits – why would Xi invest in creepy, speculative projects like cloning? Does he even believe in genetics in the first place? Why would anyone below him risk checking if he does?

So it goes.

The Chinese government isn't sufficiently based or red-pilled to do that, hence the imprisonment of the scientist who used CRISPR on humans.

To my dismay of course, I think we should absolutely be engaging in that kind of activity, but the Chinese are mostly happy to follow western norms in these matters.

The Chinese government isn't sufficiently based or red-pilled to do that, hence the imprisonment of the scientist who used CRISPR on humans.

If dystopian sci-fi has taught me anything, his "imprisonment" involved working on a similar program at some kind of black site. Show us you can cooperate, and someday you'll be able to go back to your normal life. Or, maybe not.

the Chinese are mostly happy to follow western norms in these matters.

Well, they're happy to do so in Western-public-facing matters. I believe they still have organ theft vans rolling around, yeah?

If dystopian sci-fi has taught me anything, his "imprisonment" involved working on a similar program at some kind of black site. Show us you can cooperate, and someday you'll be able to go back to your normal life. Or, maybe not.

Not limited to fiction.

I don't know about that. There's definitely genetic editing that we probably should be doing: metabolic diseases like Huntington's come to mind. Then there's things where we've got trade-offs...where a little of it can be OK but a lot is straight up crippling, like autism and ADHD. The issue we have with cloning is that maybe a hundred or so different types of human become fashionable and that kind of monoculture is going to fuck us up royally. If it's a few hundred Navy SEALs or something it's all good though.

To my dismay of course,

I hope you recognize the irony of your handle in light of this.

Not in the least Hlynka, but such nuance is lost on poor folk like me who have to translate to "Indian" in their head, with the mental overhead that entails.

Oh, oh, you had drama with Hlynka, and one that sounds like it involved some very stupid things said?! Spill the tea pls!

https://www.themotte.org/post/565/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/116403?context=8#context

You are conflating two vastly different things. Perhapse this is an issue of poor translation between Indian and English but what GPT has is better described as a notion of "consensus" or "correlation".

Yeah.

I was pleased to see that pretty much everyone called him out on his racism, not that I made the accusation myself. I just found it supremely funny that he had the gall to make that claim when I likely speak and write better English than he does!

There is a deep irony in a HBDer complaining about "racism". Do you believe in human bio-diversity or don't you?

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I'm gonna give you a pass on that one, but c'mon, you know better.

Sigh, you're right.

I do genuinely not get what point he's trying to make here though.

I'm trying to make the point that contra pretty much anyone one on this forum, humanity is more permeable than it is rational.