You were thinking of Hanlon's Razor: "Do not ascribe to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity."
As far as news today being an improvement over Hearst's time, I think that's a dubious statement. Hearst probably held tighter control over a smaller information pool, but today active censorous control has been replaced by spin, which is more widespread and perhaps more pernicious, as it's less immediately noticeable.
Also, bias doesn't have to be malicious to be bias. It's quite probable that most news reporters are either quite unconscious in their bias or feel they're acting out of perfectly ethical impulses when they spin stories.
I concur. The article smacks of much of what was bad about wired: the ascribing of ultra-hip sensibilities to entities that never had or wanted such. Amazon was and is in business to sell stuff; if Katz didn't howl in agony when they sold movies and music in addition to books, why is the addition of toys & electronics somehow a sign of the Apocalypse?
If the toys and other crap really bugs you, you (here's a hint) don't have to buy 'em, or even enter that area of the store. The book section has been and remains excellent, and the music section has oodles of obscure hard-to-find crap.
Amazon's convenient and reliable. A lot of the time, they're the right price. If fatbrain or B/N has a better price, I'll go with them, but frankly most of the time it's not worth the bother unless the difference is substantial, like 3 bucks or so.
Katz, Amazon never had any moral obligations to remain your idealized utopian retailer, because it never was anything like that. Their main mission now is to sustainably turn profits before their stock becomes poison (and, admittedly, they can coast a long time before that happens).
Excellently written; for more (lots more) along these lines, I recommend The 500 Year Delta: What Happens After What Comes Next, by Jim Taylor, the implausibly named Watts Wacker, and Howard Means. Amazon is choking on the URL for some reason, but just type it in -- you'll find it. Appended below is my amazon.com review:
Well-intentioned, occasionally useful, but... You really have to approach this book with your baloney detectors on 'High.' There's a lot of excellent, insightful analysis on what's going on with the change 'jerk' (where 'jerk' is defined as the rate of change of the rate of change -- the acceleration of acceleration) of recent years, where changes in technology drive societal changes at an expanding pace. There's also a whole lot of unfocused hogwash and one-true-wayism; these kids take themselves quite seriously, in that bedrock way that people who think they *don't* take themselves too seriously sometimes do. You can sift through the bullpuckey to find a good haul of useful nuggetry, but if you swallow this book whole, you'll find that the sharp corners don't go down so easy.
Taylor & Wacker are pretty big on personal loyalty above corporate loyalty -- the corporation has no loyalty to *you*; why the hell should you have any for *it*? and so forth. Low information density, but what's there is pretty high-quality.
I have a four-year degree, no graduate work, and have a great job, even in 'this economy.' And I certainly don't work 24/7 -- if it's not done by 5, brother, it's getting done next business day.
I'm not sure what it's like where you work, but no job is worth my life. I mean, it's just barely acceptable to give away half my waking hours for the next 20 or 30 years so I can enjoy and *live* the other half.
Where the 'new media' kids go wrong is in thinking that their boss is their friend. That's almost never the case. You don't want your boss to be the enemy, certainly, but thinking your boss is your buddy, and giving concessions to your job that you'd give to your friends, is job suicide and a fast ticket to burnout.
Jobs pay you for 40 hours a week of your time -- giving anything more away for free is outright foolish. Money compounds; time doesn't.
I concur. I got lots of social skills in college, as well as education in many Hard Realities that weren't in the course catalog. College worked for me because you get to screw up with a safety net that isn't present in Real Life (most large colleges tend to be little worlds unto themselves). Plus, it's an excellent opportunity to practice what is arguably the single most crucial interviewing and job skill: lying with a straight face.
Mmm...Titan. Haven't played in about a year and a half.
Of course there's such a thing as a degree Kelvin. It's equal to degrees Celsius, only measured from the hypothetical absolute zero instead of the freezing point of water at standard pressure.
Still, you were probably thinking of something specific when you said the above. What was it?
Sure, if you take the analogy out that far. It's not really a load-bearing structure, though. OS zealots (and I like Open Source, mind you) aren't cult-members, just impervious to reason and unwilling to participate in low-temperature discussion.
I'm objecting to the many folk that don't even attempt to give the gist of the matter, with the strong implication that only by studying the Sacred License will the poor heathen^H^H^H^H^H^H^H newbie gain insight. Folk out there might be interested in Open Source/Free Software/Uncle Ben's Converted Source Code/whatever you want to call it this week, but the mantra of 'read the website, read the website,' without attempting to provide any information independently to entice the other party to go look at the farking thing, is off-putting and not the way to get people to take you seriously.
FAQs are excellent reference tools, but in advocacy people need to do better than give pointers to a FAQ -- to convince, you have to actually engage in transmission of (hopefully persuasive) information, because the burden of persuasion is on the persuader, not the prospective persuadee.
Q: "What are you guys all about?" A: "Um, read the website"
Very similar to the cult-line "Read our pamphlet/bible" -- and is indicative of a reliance on faith rather than reason. If folks don't have the understanding of the basic principles required to explain it *in their own words* instead of referring you to some external source of (received) wisdom), it's a pretty good indicator that they lack deep understanding and are basically caught up in the train of a charismatic leader.
Groupies will be groupies, I suppose, but I find all this 'read our website, rah rah rah' reponse to valid questions ever so slightly disturbing. It certainly doesn't lend the FSF any extra cred.
Absolutely -- there's some good work being done in Women's Studies departments, but it's quite rare. Some glimmers of light do appear, however -- witness Christina Hoff Sommers' Who Stole Feminism?
But the bulk of the loud vocal things we hear come from the man-as-enemy camp, hence the stereotypes.
Gatorade is pretty much exactly what you want for serious diarrhea sufferers. The stuff's designed to re-hydrate you & replenish those "essential Saltes" (see Lovecraft), which is the big danger with dysenterics (who get diarrhea in ways that you don't want to read descriptions of, trust me.)
Just bottle the crap into your local Sick Baby (young'uns don't have the fluid reserves bigger folk have, so are at more risk typically), and the survival odds pick up a lot.
I hate G-rade myself (nasty-tasting crap, no matter what the flavor), but there's no denying it's good for you if you're undergoing severe fluid loss, be it from pore or sphincter.
I think we're all entitled to safety, at least in public high school.
Wouldn't be a concern if there were no public high schools. When schools are essentially prisons, people shouldn't be surprised at the occasional prison riot.
You have no 'right' to safety -- you have a responsibility for your own safety. Arm yourself if you think you're in danger. At least until the safety nazis make sure that only the Police have weapons (never ceases to amaze me that the same people who are always going on and on about Police Brutality are the ones that want only Police to be armed -- aren't these contradictory positions?)
So I'm guessing that the US has a perfect human rights record?
The US doesn't have to be perfect in order to not associate with countries that do things we disapprove of. Hypocrisy isn't the Great Sin of our times; Apathy is.
So slave and child labor are just 'cultural differences,' then? Hint: cultural relativism isn't a blanket excuse. Continued MFN for China is a national shame, more so now that BillyJeff has blatantly revealed his habitation in the Chinese pocket.
There's the kind of cheap labor driven by low cost-of-living, where the fellow who makes 5 bucks a day can make that 5 bucks buy housing and food for his family. And that's okay cheap labor. Then there's the kind of cheap labor that involves kids working 16-hour days and dying young due to factory toxins. That's worse than theft.
Research doesn't fall into a range of money any more than it would fall into a range of temperature. "Nanotech research currently in the quarter billion dollar range" makes as much sense as "Nanotech research currently in the three meter range." Research isn't quantifiable; its funding is.
The guy had an honest beef -- sure, we could all parse the sentence, the same way we all know how to pronounce '3l337 d00dz,' but it's not out of line to ask for a higher standard of English in/. postings.
Also, opening with 'announced today, nanotech research...' means the research was announced today -- clearly not the intent of the sentence. Hemos meant (and we all understood) that the budget had been 'announced today,' and that it was twice as big as the old budget, and that it was a budget for nanotech research. But that ain't what the sentence says.
This has been my experience exactly -- once my wife gets a job, we're switching companies. Never had the VM light go on with no messages, but several times there's been an hours-long (once 10-12 hours) gap between VM being left and the VM light/indicator lighting up.
I'd agree that they're caricatures if they weren't essentially accurate. Any English or Women's Studies department is chock full of people who match this description, and the classes contain many larval-form Charlenes. There's some exaggeration of the salient characterstics, and the people are a bit flat, yeah, but not by much as you might think.
I agree that the female characters here are a little few and far between (Mary was pretty clearly a German plant with an ulterior motive -- Bischoff or some other German guy admits as much), but Stephenson has written excellent female characters before (YT from Snow Crash, Sarah Jane Johnston from The Big U, 3 or 4 (including Miss Matheson/YT) in Diamond Age), and the shortage of 'stage time' for females in Cryptonomicon is not perhaps an indicator of N.Stephenson's downward slide into misogyny, the shibboleth of our age.
For high-octane misogyny, check out Cerebus (Not that Dave Sim's misogyny (and to a lesser extent, generalized misanthropy) detracts from the many fine artistic qualities of that series).
Big U Not Worth It? (Re:More Stephenson books)
on
Review:Cryptonomicon
·
· Score: 1
"It's out of print and not worth the effort of tracking [...] down."
Wow; that's a surprising reaction. Prior to Cryptonomicon, it was the best Stephenson's done.
I *am* glad he's finally figured out how to write endings, though.
I recommend TBU to any Stephenson fan; all his good qualities (and all his standard warts) are there, but the absurdity is top-notch.
If you don't *do* those Naughty Things, then reminders and entreaties to not do those Naughty Things can't possibly be directed at you, hence you've no reason to be offended, neh?
Well, this entire thread has certainly put an end to any credible claims of elitism vis-a-vis Linux advocates, anyhow. No escaping Sturgeon's Law here.
gomi remember: there is no shame in being poor...only in dressing poorly! (george hamilton: zorro, the gay blade)
Pretty much. Well, after you cut out the incest, rape, murder, and internal contradictions.
Literal reading of the bible leads to two conclusions:
1) God is a schizophrenic scumbag, in which case I want no truck with him.
2) The bible is a neat collection of Hebrew (and, for the NT, Judeo-Roman) myth, with some pretty decent philosophy mixed in with a truckload of crap. In which case there's no reason to take the damn thing any more seriously than the Q'ran, the Upanishads, or the Popol-Vuh.
DfL, are you wearing cotton/poly anything right now? Are you deep-conditioning those long, luxuriant earlocks? Because if you're shaving the sides of your head, or wearing mixed-fiber fabrics, you're an abomination unto the lord and will burn in the yacketa yacketa. See Leviticus.
Insofar as clones may/may not have shorter lifespans due to telomerase attrition ("shorter DNA"), there are two ways to look at it: 1) Telomerase attrition is a transient problem that will get fixed as the process is better understood. In that case, the question is moot. 2) The problem is fundamentally intractable in some way. In that case, we get (again) two options (well, at least two options -- it seems I'm as prone as any to the either/or fallacy): 2a) Bringing into life a human with a reduced lifespan is Fundamentally Wrong. 2b) Even an abbreviated existence is better than no existence at all.
Personally, I tend towards (2b) myself, and the Fundamental Wrongness of (2a) is itself motive-dependent (i.e., what if you had some arbitrarily defined Really Good Reason?); but the entire analysis does presuppose that the clones are being created for the same reason have children, i.e. reproduction/genetic imperative/egostroke. Which is not necessarily the case -- the research/spare parts motivations have been bandied about quite a bit elsewhere on the thread, and (to my knowledge) no-one's mentioned that acephalic mice are being grown right now in labs, implying that acephalic feti are also within the realm of possibility. Just a brainstem for the autonomic functions, some basic infrastructure, and away we go. Gotta watch that muscular atrophy, though -- should be some way to stimulate muscular formation in the 'spare parts bin' to avoid having your leg replaced with a nasty, quasi-functional withered leg.
To return to your original question: Is it 'fair'? Depends on your reasons. Mostly yes, I think, but it's a eugenics question, like "if the gene doctor looks at your and your wife's genemaps and determines your children are 80% likely to be born (blind/legless/Your Horrible Malformation Here), are you going to breed anyway?" Would you repeat the pregnancy/abortion cycle until you get an okay child, or just spin the wheel once and take your 1 in 5 chance? How is that morally/ethically different than repeating the pregnancy/abortion cycle to select gender, or other characteristics?
To hew back to my original take on the issue: some life is better than no life.
The material of life is the soul. Humans can create biological automatons but cannot infuse it with a soul. It would be no different than a clunky robot. There is more to life than flesh.
Coitus is a human act that results in a baby, endowed for the sake of argument with a 'soul.'
Some petri dish/pipette shenanigans, also a human act, results in a baby, not endowed with a 'soul.'
That seems to be the gist of your argument, which (it appears to me) leads quite nicely into the development of a slave race based on origin, i.e., 1850's Virginia.
The 'materials of life' are specialised cells. Soul? That's each individual's problem.
So are the "religious kooks" who think the "materials of life are 'special'" wrong? No, I don't think so. In fact, I have much more respect for them than I do for advocates of the cold "science" of psychiatry/psychanalysis.
Go back to your auditor, Scientologist. You've got some nasty body thetans going on there.
Slashdot Mirror
You were thinking of Hanlon's Razor: "Do not ascribe to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity."
As far as news today being an improvement over Hearst's time, I think that's a dubious statement. Hearst probably held tighter control over a smaller information pool, but today active censorous control has been replaced by spin, which is more widespread and perhaps more pernicious, as it's less immediately noticeable.
Also, bias doesn't have to be malicious to be bias. It's quite probable that most news reporters are either quite unconscious in their bias or feel they're acting out of perfectly ethical impulses when they spin stories.
gomi
I concur. The article smacks of much of what was bad about wired: the ascribing of ultra-hip sensibilities to entities that never had or wanted such. Amazon was and is in business to sell stuff; if Katz didn't howl in agony when they sold movies and music in addition to books, why is the addition of toys & electronics somehow a sign of the Apocalypse?
If the toys and other crap really bugs you, you (here's a hint) don't have to buy 'em, or even enter that area of the store. The book section has been and remains excellent, and the music section has oodles of obscure hard-to-find crap.
Amazon's convenient and reliable. A lot of the time, they're the right price. If fatbrain or B/N has a better price, I'll go with them, but frankly most of the time it's not worth the bother unless the difference is substantial, like 3 bucks or so.
Katz, Amazon never had any moral obligations to remain your idealized utopian retailer, because it never was anything like that. Their main mission now is to sustainably turn profits before their stock becomes poison (and, admittedly, they can coast a long time before that happens).
gomi
Taylor & Wacker are pretty big on personal loyalty above corporate loyalty -- the corporation has no loyalty to *you*; why the hell should you have any for *it*? and so forth. Low information density, but what's there is pretty high-quality.
gomi
I have a four-year degree, no graduate work, and have a great job, even in 'this economy.' And I certainly don't work 24/7 -- if it's not done by 5, brother, it's getting done next business day.
I'm not sure what it's like where you work, but no job is worth my life. I mean, it's just barely acceptable to give away half my waking hours for the next 20 or 30 years so I can enjoy and *live* the other half.
Where the 'new media' kids go wrong is in thinking that their boss is their friend. That's almost never the case. You don't want your boss to be the enemy, certainly, but thinking your boss is your buddy, and giving concessions to your job that you'd give to your friends, is job suicide and a fast ticket to burnout.
Jobs pay you for 40 hours a week of your time -- giving anything more away for free is outright foolish. Money compounds; time doesn't.
Leave at 5, kids, and enjoy life.
gomi
I concur. I got lots of social skills in college, as well as education in many Hard Realities that weren't in the course catalog. College worked for me because you get to screw up with a safety net that isn't present in Real Life (most large colleges tend to be little worlds unto themselves). Plus, it's an excellent opportunity to practice what is arguably the single most crucial interviewing and job skill: lying with a straight face.
Mmm...Titan. Haven't played in about a year and a half.
gomi
Of course there's such a thing as a degree Kelvin. It's equal to degrees Celsius, only measured from the hypothetical absolute zero instead of the freezing point of water at standard pressure.
Still, you were probably thinking of something specific when you said the above. What was it?
gomi
incomplete statements cause such trouble
Sure, if you take the analogy out that far. It's not really a load-bearing structure, though. OS zealots (and I like Open Source, mind you) aren't cult-members, just impervious to reason and unwilling to participate in low-temperature discussion.
I'm objecting to the many folk that don't even
attempt to give the gist of the matter, with the strong implication that only by studying the Sacred License will the poor heathen^H^H^H^H^H^H^H newbie gain insight. Folk out there might be interested in Open Source/Free Software/Uncle Ben's Converted Source Code/whatever you want to call it this week, but the mantra of 'read the website, read the website,' without attempting to provide any information independently to entice the other party to go look at the farking thing, is off-putting and not the way to get people to take you seriously.
FAQs are excellent reference tools, but in advocacy people need to do better than give pointers to a FAQ -- to convince, you have to actually engage in transmission of (hopefully persuasive) information, because the burden of persuasion is on the persuader, not the prospective persuadee.
Dig?
gomi
Another interesting point of analogy:
Q: "What are you guys all about?"
A: "Um, read the website"
Very similar to the cult-line "Read our pamphlet/bible" -- and is indicative of a reliance on faith rather than reason. If folks don't have the understanding of the basic principles required to explain it *in their own words* instead of referring you to some external source of (received) wisdom), it's a pretty good indicator that they lack deep understanding and are basically caught up in the train of a charismatic leader.
Groupies will be groupies, I suppose, but I find all this 'read our website, rah rah rah' reponse to valid questions ever so slightly disturbing. It certainly doesn't lend the FSF any extra cred.
gomi
Random tangent: The Founding Daddies did seriously consider switching to German, to make the separation from England more complete.
Cooler heads, thankfully, prevailed. I'm sure German's a fine language, but those compound words...my, they can go on for a while.
gomi
obergruppendanskengruvensteinmeister
The second time, anyway.
Absolutely -- there's some good work being done in Women's Studies departments, but it's quite rare. Some glimmers of light do appear, however -- witness Christina Hoff Sommers' Who Stole Feminism?
But the bulk of the loud vocal things we hear come from the man-as-enemy camp, hence the stereotypes.
Gatorade is pretty much exactly what you want for serious diarrhea sufferers. The stuff's designed to re-hydrate you & replenish those "essential Saltes" (see Lovecraft), which is the big danger with dysenterics (who get diarrhea in ways that you don't want to read descriptions of, trust me.)
Just bottle the crap into your local Sick Baby (young'uns don't have the fluid reserves bigger folk have, so are at more risk typically), and the survival odds pick up a lot.
I hate G-rade myself (nasty-tasting crap, no matter what the flavor), but there's no denying it's good for you if you're undergoing severe fluid loss, be it from pore or sphincter.
gomi
I think we're all entitled to safety, at least in public high school.
Wouldn't be a concern if there were no public high schools. When schools are essentially prisons, people shouldn't be surprised at the occasional prison riot.
You have no 'right' to safety -- you have a responsibility for your own safety. Arm yourself if you think you're in danger. At least until the safety nazis make sure that only the Police have weapons (never ceases to amaze me that the same people who are always going on and on about Police Brutality are the ones that want only Police to be armed -- aren't these contradictory positions?)
So I'm guessing that the US has a perfect human rights record?
The US doesn't have to be perfect in order to not associate with countries that do things we disapprove of. Hypocrisy isn't the Great Sin of our times; Apathy is.
So slave and child labor are just 'cultural differences,' then? Hint: cultural relativism isn't a blanket excuse. Continued MFN for China is a national shame, more so now that BillyJeff has blatantly revealed his habitation in the Chinese pocket.
There's the kind of cheap labor driven by low cost-of-living, where the fellow who makes 5 bucks a day can make that 5 bucks buy housing and food for his family. And that's okay cheap labor. Then there's the kind of cheap labor that involves kids working 16-hour days and dying young due to factory toxins. That's worse than theft.
gomi
Research doesn't fall into a range of money any more than it would fall into a range of temperature. "Nanotech research currently in the quarter billion dollar range" makes as much sense as "Nanotech research currently in the three meter range." Research isn't quantifiable; its funding is.
/. postings.
The guy had an honest beef -- sure, we could all parse the sentence, the same way we all know how to pronounce '3l337 d00dz,' but it's not out of line to ask for a higher standard of English in
Also, opening with 'announced today, nanotech research...' means the research was announced today -- clearly not the intent of the sentence. Hemos meant (and we all understood) that the budget had been 'announced today,' and that it was twice as big as the old budget, and that it was a budget for nanotech research. But that ain't what the sentence says.
gomi
This has been my experience exactly -- once my wife gets a job, we're switching companies. Never had the VM light go on with no messages, but several times there's been an hours-long (once 10-12 hours) gap between VM being left and the VM light/indicator lighting up.
Also use in the Bay Area, FWIW.
re: Charlene, emasculated academic types.
I'd agree that they're caricatures if they weren't essentially accurate. Any English or Women's Studies department is chock full of people who match this description, and the classes contain many larval-form Charlenes. There's some exaggeration of the salient characterstics, and the people are a bit flat, yeah, but not by much as you might think.
I agree that the female characters here are a little few and far between (Mary was pretty clearly a German plant with an ulterior motive -- Bischoff or some other German guy admits as much), but Stephenson has written excellent female characters before (YT from Snow Crash, Sarah Jane Johnston from The Big U, 3 or 4 (including Miss Matheson/YT) in Diamond Age), and the shortage of 'stage time' for females in Cryptonomicon is not perhaps an indicator of N.Stephenson's downward slide into misogyny, the shibboleth of our age.
For high-octane misogyny, check out Cerebus (Not that Dave Sim's misogyny (and to a lesser extent, generalized misanthropy) detracts from the many fine artistic qualities of that series).
"It's out of print and not worth the effort of tracking [...] down."
Wow; that's a surprising reaction. Prior to Cryptonomicon, it was the best Stephenson's done.
I *am* glad he's finally figured out how to write endings, though.
I recommend TBU to any Stephenson fan; all his good qualities (and all his standard warts) are there, but the absurdity is top-notch.
O Best Beloved:
If you don't *do* those Naughty Things, then reminders and entreaties to not do those Naughty Things can't possibly be directed at you, hence you've no reason to be offended, neh?
Well, this entire thread has certainly put an end to any credible claims of elitism vis-a-vis Linux advocates, anyhow. No escaping Sturgeon's Law here.
gomi
remember: there is no shame in being poor...only in dressing poorly! (george hamilton: zorro, the gay blade)
The official NASA scoop on TIV launches is 22 successes, 1 'shanked'. The shank-causing problem has allegedly been patched.
But yeah, grav-well issues are a problem with all the "nuke waste away from earth" solutions. Sweet if you can do it, but it's a big hurdle.
What is the Bible, then? A bag of neat ideas?
Pretty much. Well, after you cut out the incest, rape, murder, and internal contradictions.
Literal reading of the bible leads to two conclusions:
1) God is a schizophrenic scumbag, in which case I want no truck with him.
2) The bible is a neat collection of Hebrew (and, for the NT, Judeo-Roman) myth, with some pretty decent philosophy mixed in with a truckload of crap. In which case there's no reason to take the damn thing any more seriously than the Q'ran, the Upanishads, or the Popol-Vuh.
DfL, are you wearing cotton/poly anything right now? Are you deep-conditioning those long, luxuriant earlocks? Because if you're shaving the sides of your head, or wearing mixed-fiber fabrics, you're an abomination unto the lord and will burn in the yacketa yacketa. See Leviticus.
Or is that part metaphor?
gomi
Insofar as clones may/may not have shorter lifespans due to telomerase attrition ("shorter DNA"), there are two ways to look at it:
1) Telomerase attrition is a transient problem that will get fixed as the process is better understood. In that case, the question is moot.
2) The problem is fundamentally intractable in some way. In that case, we get (again) two options (well, at least two options -- it seems I'm as prone as any to the either/or fallacy):
2a) Bringing into life a human with a reduced lifespan is Fundamentally Wrong.
2b) Even an abbreviated existence is better than no existence at all.
Personally, I tend towards (2b) myself, and the Fundamental Wrongness of (2a) is itself motive-dependent (i.e., what if you had some arbitrarily defined Really Good Reason?); but the entire analysis does presuppose that the clones are being created for the same reason have children, i.e. reproduction/genetic imperative/egostroke.
Which is not necessarily the case -- the research/spare parts motivations have been bandied about quite a bit elsewhere on the thread, and (to my knowledge) no-one's mentioned that acephalic mice are being grown right now in labs, implying that acephalic feti are also within the realm of possibility. Just a brainstem for the autonomic functions, some basic infrastructure, and away we go. Gotta watch that muscular atrophy, though -- should be some way to stimulate muscular formation in the 'spare parts bin' to avoid having your leg replaced with a nasty, quasi-functional withered leg.
To return to your original question: Is it 'fair'? Depends on your reasons. Mostly yes, I think, but it's a eugenics question, like "if the gene doctor looks at your and your wife's genemaps and determines your children are 80% likely to be born (blind/legless/Your Horrible Malformation Here), are you going to breed anyway?"
Would you repeat the pregnancy/abortion cycle until you get an okay child, or just spin the wheel once and take your 1 in 5 chance? How is that morally/ethically different than repeating the pregnancy/abortion cycle to select gender, or other characteristics?
To hew back to my original take on the issue: some life is better than no life.
gomi
Okay, so according to your message:
The material of life is the soul. Humans can create biological automatons but cannot infuse it with a soul. It would be no different than a clunky robot. There is
more to life than flesh.
Coitus is a human act that results in a baby, endowed for the sake of argument with a 'soul.'
Some petri dish/pipette shenanigans, also a human act, results in a baby, not endowed with a 'soul.'
That seems to be the gist of your argument, which (it appears to me) leads quite nicely into the development of a slave race based on origin, i.e., 1850's Virginia.
The 'materials of life' are specialised cells. Soul? That's each individual's problem.
gomi
gets his soul on the eponymous train
So are the "religious kooks" who think the "materials of life are 'special'" wrong? No, I don't think so. In fact, I have much more respect for them than I do for
advocates of the cold "science" of psychiatry/psychanalysis.
Go back to your auditor, Scientologist. You've got some nasty body thetans going on there.
gomi
xenu xenu xenu!