I see things like this, and think: we're not going to be able to get away with this forever. And then I think: Please God, don't let us get away with this forever.
As horrible as rule-by-mullah is, it does not disgust and terrify me more than a world in which enlightened rationalists create human-animal hybrids in a lab. That is a true nightmarish dystopia. These scientists are moral monsters, and the society that allows this to happen is monstrous:
Plans to allow British scientists to create human-animal embryos are expected to be approved tomorrow by the government's fertility regulator. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority published its long-awaited public consultation on the controversial research yesterday, revealing that a majority of people were "at ease" with scientists creating the hybrid embryos.
Seven years ago, Australian scientists created a pig-human hybrid. Joseph Bottum responded thus in the Weekly Standard:
On Thursday, October 5, it was revealed that biotechnology researchers had successfully created a hybrid of a human being and a pig. A man-pig. A pig-man. The reality is so unspeakable, the words themselves don't want to go together.Extracting the nuclei of cells from a human fetus and inserting them into a pig's egg cells, scientists from an Australian company called Stem Cell Sciences and an American company called Biotransplant grew two of the pig-men to 32-cell embryos before destroying them. The embryos would have grown further, the scientists admitted, if they had been implanted in the womb of either a sow or a woman. Either a sow or a woman. A woman or a sow.
[snip]
You can't say we weren't warned. This is the island of Dr. Moreau. This is the brave new world. This is Dr. Frankenstein's chamber. This is Dr. Jekyll's room. This is Satan's Pandemonium, the city of self-destruction the rebel angels wrought in their all-consuming pride.But now that it has actually come-manifest, inescapable, real-there don't seem to be words that can describe its horror sufficiently to halt it. May God have mercy on us, for our modern Dr. Moreaus-our proud biotechnicians, our most advanced genetic scientists-have already announced that they will have no mercy.
It's true that Stem Cell Sciences and Biotransplant have now, under the weight of adverse publicity, decided to withdraw their European patent application and modify their American application. But they made no promise to stop their investigations into the procedure. We simply have to rely upon their sense of what is, as Mountford put it, "ethically immoral"-a sense sufficiently attentuated that they could undertake the design of the pig-man in the first place. The elimination of the human race has loomed into clear sight at last.
It used to be that even the imagination of this sort of thing existed only to underscore a moral in a story. When our ancestors heard of Vlad the Impaler's wife bathing in the blood of slaughtered virgins to keep herself beautiful, they were certain it was a bad thing. When they were told fairy tales of an old crone fattening children to suck the health from them, they knew which side they were supposed to take. When they read of Dorian Gray's purchase of eternal youth, they understood that the price he paid was his soul.
But we live at a moment in which British newspapers can report on 19 families who have created test-tube babies solely for the purpose of serving as tissue donors for their relatives-some brought to birth, some merely harvested as embryos and fetuses. A moment in which Harper's Bazaar can advise women to keep their faces unwrinkled by having themselves injected with fat culled from human cadavers. A moment in which the Australian philosopher Peter Singer can receive a chair at Princeton University for advocating the destruction of infants after birth if their lives are likely to be a burden. A moment in which the brains of late-term aborted babies can be vacuumed out and gleaned for stem cells.
In the midst of all this, the creation of a human-pig arrives like a thing expected. We have reached the logical end, at last. We have become the people that, once upon a time, our ancestors used fairy tales to warn their children against-and we will reap exactly the consequences those tales foretold.
Like J.H. Kunstler likes to say, we are wicked people who deserve to be punished.[Was originally "destroyed," but I misquoted Kunstler -- RD] As he puts it today in another context (the crisis in the financial markets caused by our trying to live beyond our means):
Are we building a society with a future? Does our culture affirm life or yearn for destruction? Are our daily ceremonies and rituals meaningful or empty? Are our hopes and dreams consistent with what reality has to offer? Can we look in the mirror and say that we are upright people?
Human-animal hybrids. "At ease" with them. Christ Almighty.
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Cleveland, have you read the quotes in context?
http://www.bartleby.com/1013/5.html
Women and the New Race, scroll down to the table and the following paragraphs.
This does not complete the case, however, for those who care to go farther into the subject will find that many of those who live for a year die before they reach the age of five. Many, perhaps, will think it idle to go farther in demonstrating the immorality of large families, but since there is still an abundance of proof at hand, it may be offered for the sake of those who find difficulty in adjusting old−fashioned ideas to the facts. The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it. The same factors which create the cterrible infant mortality rate, and which swell the death rate of children between the ages of one and five, operate even more extensively to lower the health rate of the surviving members.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1689/1689.txt
I downloaded the full text of Pivot of Civilization from Gutenberg. It does not contain the phrases "human weeds" or "reckless breeders". It does contain the following paragraph, your "quote" and the following statements bolded by me.
The problem of the dependent, delinquent and defective elements in
modern society, we must repeat, cannot be minimized because of their
alleged small numerical proportion to the rest of the population. The
proportion seems small only because we accustom ourselves to the habit
of looking upon feeble-mindedness as a separate and distinct calamity to the race, as a chance phenomenon unrelated to the sexual and biological customs not only condoned but even encouraged by our so-called civilization. The actual dangers can only be fully realized when we have acquired definite information concerning the financial and cultural cost of these classes to the community, when we become fully cognizant of the burden of the imbecile upon the whole human race; when we see the funds that should be available for human development, for scientific, artistic and philosophic research, being diverted annually, by hundreds of millions of dollars, to the care and segregation of men, women, and children who never should have been born. The advocate of Birth Control realizes as well as all intelligent thinkers the dangers of interfering with personal liberty. Our whole philosophy is, in fact, based upon the fundamental assumption that man is a self-conscious, self-governing creature, that he should not be treated as a domestic animal; that he must be left free, at least within certain wide limits, to follow his own wishes in the matter of mating and in the procreation of children. Nor do we believe that the community could or should send to the lethal chamber the defective progeny resulting from irresponsible and unintelligent breeding.
I'm a reasonably intelligent person. In general, I am not given to over the top reactions (unless I intend it). Just these two examples would cause any reasonable person to view the websites you used with suspicion, if not reach the conclusion that they quote-mined and intentionally changed Sanger's intent in writing the quoted words.
Let me ask you: do you find the following quote on any of the websites you used?
Our whole philosophy is, in fact, based upon the fundamental assumption that man is a self-conscious, self-governing creature, that he should not be treated as a domestic animal; that he must be left free, at least within certain wide limits, to follow his own wishes in the matter of mating and in the procreation of children.
If I take that one out of context, I can paint Sanger as a pro-lifer.
I find it particularly disingenuous to apply the usages and colloquialisms of nearly 100 years ago to a modern context. In any event, I am not charging you with intellectual dishonesty; I am making that charge to at least the websites from which you took the quotes whose context I restore above.
Franklin, did you think I would take your word for her alleged respect for individual freedoms? Chew on these words from your heroine, same source, Chapter IV, and try not to get sick:
"But modern society, which has respected the personal liberty of the individual only in regard to the unrestricted and irresponsible bringing into the world of filth and poverty an overcrowding procession of infants foredoomed to death or hereditable disease, is now confronted with the problem of protecting itself and its future generations against the inevitable consequences of this long-practised policy of LAISSER-FAIRE. [SO MUCH FOR YOUR QUOTE OF HER PHILOSOPHY OF LAISSER-FAIR]
"The emergency problem of segregation and sterilization must be faced immediately. Every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive period. Otherwise, she is almost certain to bear imbecile children, who in turn are just as certain to breed other defectives. The male defectives are no less dangerous. Segregation carried out for one or two generations would give us only partial control of the problem. Moreover, when we realize that each feeble-minded person is a potential source of an endless progeny of defect, we prefer the policy of immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble-minded.
"This, I say, is an emergency measure. But how are we to prevent the repetition in the future of a new harvest of imbecility, the recurrence of new generations of morons and defectives, as the logical and inevitable consequence of the universal application of the traditional and widely approved command to increase and multiply?
"At the present moment, we are offered three distinct and more or less mutually exclusive policies by which civilization may hope to protect itself and the generations of the future from the allied dangers of imbecility, defect and delinquency. No one can understand the necessity for Birth control education without a complete comprehension of the dangers, the inadequacies, or the limitations of the present attempts at control, or the proposed programs for social reconstruction and racial regeneration. It is, therefore, necessary to interpret and criticize the three programs offered to meet our emergency. These may be briefly summarized as follows:
(1) Philanthropy and Charity: This is the present and traditional method of meeting the problems of human defect and dependence, of poverty and delinquency. It is emotional, altruistic, at best ameliorative, aiming to meet the individual situation as it arises and presents itself. Its effect in practise is seldom, if ever, truly preventive. Concerned with symptoms, with the allaying of acute and catastrophic miseries, it cannot, if it would, strike at the radical causes of social misery. At its worst, it is sentimental and paternalistic. [DO YOU LIKE THAT, FRANKLIN?]
(2) Marxian Socialism: This may be considered typical of many widely varying schemes of more or less revolutionary social reconstruction, emphasizing the primary importance of environment, education, equal opportunity, and health, in the elimination of the conditions (i. e. capitalistic control of industry) which have resulted in biological chaos and human waste. I shall attempt to show that the Marxian doctrine is both TOO LIMITED, too superficial and too fragmentary in its basic analysis of human nature and in its program of revolutionary reconstruction. [NOT ENOUGH, FRANKLIN. CONTINUE READING ABOUT YOUR AND SIG'S HEROINE, PLEASE]
(3) Eugenics: Eugenics seems to me to be valuable in its critical and diagnostic aspects, in emphasizing the danger of irresponsible and uncontrolled fertility of the "unfit" and the feeble-minded establishing a progressive unbalance in human society and lowering the birth-rate among the "fit." But in its so-called "constructive" aspect, in seeking to reestablish the dominance of healthy strain over the unhealthy, by urging an increased birth-rate among the fit, the Eugenists really offer nothing more farsighted than a "cradle competition" between the fit and the unfit. They suggest in very truth, that all intelligent and respectable parents should take as their example in this grave matter of child-bearing the most irresponsible elements in the community. [EVEN EUGENICS IS NOT ENOUGH]"
Franklin, I don't want to read or talk about the founding mother-monster any more. I just get irritable and un-Christian. Sanger is all yours to defend and uphold as an example of your beloved secularism. Enjoy.
Cleveland, I do sympathize with your emotional reaction here. I'm feeling some regret over it.
The point I want to make is simple: your latest post is the only one that presents a cogent, undiluted and unspinnable argument for your position against Sanger. The quote-mining you resorted to earlier is completely inadequate on several counts, primarily in that it insists on a partial and unbalanced view of Sanger's writings.
The rest is secondary commentary, and I feel no onus and certainly would like to avoid even the appearance of badgering you. I hope you enjoy your weekend. Wish me luck with mine, it promises to be busier than any three work days. :-)
"I hope you enjoy your weekend. Wish me luck with mine, it promises to be busier than any three work days. :-)" Franklin
Is everything OK?
I've always found it difficult to be in three places at the same time.
I should stop being cryptic and mention that only one part in three is a chore. The rest should be enjoyable at least.
Thanks for asking. :-)
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