Another school shooting
- Thread starter Ghost Dance
- Start date
I feel what ThaG is saying. I couldnt do it personally. I couldnt stomach it. But in the perspective of saving the earth we are basically forced to think way outside the box. And it will not never happen. The changes we would need to implement will not occur. No force is strong enough to bring about collective, global, and salient changes to our lifestyle, technology, and thinking patterns.
Thus, essentially within a few hundred years we have to face the idea of mass extinction and what it portends to and the real possibility of it.
Thus, essentially within a few hundred years we have to face the idea of mass extinction and what it portends to and the real possibility of it.
Props:
2-0-Sixx
MERIDEN, Connecticut (Reuters) - A $100 million claim on behalf of a 6-year-old survivor is the first legal action to come out of the Connecticut school shooting that left 26 children and adults dead two weeks ago.
The unidentified client, referred to as Jill Doe, heard "cursing, screaming, and shooting" over the school intercom when the gunman, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, opened fire, according to the claim filed by New Haven-based attorney Irv Pinsky.
"As a consequence, the ... child has sustained emotional and psychological trauma and injury, the nature and extent of which are yet to be determined," the claim said.
Pinsky said he filed a claim on Thursday with state Claims Commissioner J. Paul Vance Jr., whose office must give permission before a lawsuit can be filed against the state.
"We all know its going to happen again," Pinsky said on Friday. "Society has to take action."
Twenty children and six adults were shot dead on December 14 at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The children were all 6 and 7 years old.
Pinsky's claim said that the state Board of Education, Department of Education and Education Commissioner had failed to take appropriate steps to protect children from "foreseeable harm."
It said they had failed to provide a "safe school setting" or design "an effective student safety emergency response plan and protocol."
Pinsky said he was approached by the child's parents within a week of the shooting.
The shooting, which also left the gunman dead, has prompted extensive debate about gun control and the suggestion by the National Rifle Association that schools be patrolled by armed guards. Police have said the gunman killed his mother at their home in Newtown before going to the school.
The unidentified client, referred to as Jill Doe, heard "cursing, screaming, and shooting" over the school intercom when the gunman, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, opened fire, according to the claim filed by New Haven-based attorney Irv Pinsky.
"As a consequence, the ... child has sustained emotional and psychological trauma and injury, the nature and extent of which are yet to be determined," the claim said.
Pinsky said he filed a claim on Thursday with state Claims Commissioner J. Paul Vance Jr., whose office must give permission before a lawsuit can be filed against the state.
"We all know its going to happen again," Pinsky said on Friday. "Society has to take action."
Twenty children and six adults were shot dead on December 14 at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The children were all 6 and 7 years old.
Pinsky's claim said that the state Board of Education, Department of Education and Education Commissioner had failed to take appropriate steps to protect children from "foreseeable harm."
It said they had failed to provide a "safe school setting" or design "an effective student safety emergency response plan and protocol."
Pinsky said he was approached by the child's parents within a week of the shooting.
The shooting, which also left the gunman dead, has prompted extensive debate about gun control and the suggestion by the National Rifle Association that schools be patrolled by armed guards. Police have said the gunman killed his mother at their home in Newtown before going to the school.
A lot of intelligent people have very radical ideas & opinions that don't sit well with most people. Doesn't make them dumb at all. However we can of course disagree and debate those opinions all we want.
I recall several interviews I've watched with Christopher Langan, who reportedly has the highest IQ in America. He is pro-eugenics and would like to see society basically breed out dumb people and other imperfections. Some of his interviews can be bit tough to stomach for a lot of people. Is he dumb if the vast majority of people disagree with him and/or find his opinions highly offensive? Of course not.
I recall several interviews I've watched with Christopher Langan, who reportedly has the highest IQ in America. He is pro-eugenics and would like to see society basically breed out dumb people and other imperfections. Some of his interviews can be bit tough to stomach for a lot of people. Is he dumb if the vast majority of people disagree with him and/or find his opinions highly offensive? Of course not.
Props:
Mac Jesus and ThaG
Morality only exists in the sense that it is society in which that defines it. It is not universal, it is not something that stays the same forever. Morality is ever changing and differs from society to society.
Killing newborns is not something new. In fact, I'm sure there are siccness members whose not too distant relatives lived in societies where killing infants was completely acceptable. The Aztecs, for example, literally killed thousands of newborns every year for the sole purpose of the survival of their people. As barbaric as it may sound, it was completely logical and morally accepted. The purpose of course was to make sacrifices to the gods so that they could continue to have favorable weather which in return would allow their crops to grow and their societies to survive.
Morally, who is to say ThaG is wrong? Society. Which is why it could never happen. Not now, anyways, not here. But the logic of it, for population purposes, is sound (as fucked up as it may be). When discussing population control, there is no answer that is morally accepted. China for example and their One-child policy is highly criticized but is it necessarily a bad thing? Or should we be thankful?
Personally, I have a different perspective. Human engineering is the way of the future and will be the next big jump in human evolution. As the technology advances and it becomes accepted by society, we will be able to prevent imperfections such as cancer and other diseases. It's also not far fetched to believe that at some point we could engineer female's to literally only be able to produce, say one or two children, then the reproductive organs will cease to function, thus giving a cap on the amount of children a woman can have, without mandatory abortions or killing infants! There are literally no limitations to the possibilities of genetic engineering. Whether or not these things are moral are completely irrelevant as it is the future and inevitable.
Killing newborns is not something new. In fact, I'm sure there are siccness members whose not too distant relatives lived in societies where killing infants was completely acceptable. The Aztecs, for example, literally killed thousands of newborns every year for the sole purpose of the survival of their people. As barbaric as it may sound, it was completely logical and morally accepted. The purpose of course was to make sacrifices to the gods so that they could continue to have favorable weather which in return would allow their crops to grow and their societies to survive.
Morally, who is to say ThaG is wrong? Society. Which is why it could never happen. Not now, anyways, not here. But the logic of it, for population purposes, is sound (as fucked up as it may be). When discussing population control, there is no answer that is morally accepted. China for example and their One-child policy is highly criticized but is it necessarily a bad thing? Or should we be thankful?
Personally, I have a different perspective. Human engineering is the way of the future and will be the next big jump in human evolution. As the technology advances and it becomes accepted by society, we will be able to prevent imperfections such as cancer and other diseases. It's also not far fetched to believe that at some point we could engineer female's to literally only be able to produce, say one or two children, then the reproductive organs will cease to function, thus giving a cap on the amount of children a woman can have, without mandatory abortions or killing infants! There are literally no limitations to the possibilities of genetic engineering. Whether or not these things are moral are completely irrelevant as it is the future and inevitable.
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Props:
Mac Jesus and ThaG
The reason eugenics has such a bad name is that it got in the wrong people's hands back in the days.
But there is absolutely nothing wrong (and nothing immoral) with the general concept.
In 2006-2008, high-throughput resequencing of whole genomes became feasible, now the cost is down to a few thousands and it can be done on fetal DNA. There are tons of debilitating Mendelian diseases that are known to be caused by mutations readily identifiable from personal genomics data. The only sane thing, and one can argue, the only moral thing (my views on morality are well known, but I am just saying it for the sake of the argument) is to do this on all pregnancies - it costs only a few thousand dollars now, which is a lot less than many routinely done things - and to abort such children before they're born. This saves society the much larger cost of having to care for them, it cleans up the gene pool from those alleles (so in the future we won't have to even abort them as the only alleles left in the population will be those arising de novo which will be very rare), and it saves the individuals themselves the pain and suffering of having to live with such a condition, and it does so long before terminating their life would do any real harm to them.
Again, that's a perfectly sane thing to do. At the other end of the life cycle, it is also a perfectly sane thing for people who are of every old age and/or are becoming permanently disabled with no hope of improvement to commit suicide instead of spend years in vegetative condition and both suffering themselves and causing a lot of suffering to others around them. This is, BTW, an area in which people with radical idea, have lead by example:
Garrett Hardin: The Alternatives Facing Mankind
Once these views are the social norm, nobody will see anything wrong with them. But they can not become the social norm without having a wide and open conversation on these issues, and when they very word "eugenics" is considered toxic, it's hard to see that happening any time soon.
Again, it's very unfortunate the concept got such a bad name by the people it was associated with in the past
But there is absolutely nothing wrong (and nothing immoral) with the general concept.
In 2006-2008, high-throughput resequencing of whole genomes became feasible, now the cost is down to a few thousands and it can be done on fetal DNA. There are tons of debilitating Mendelian diseases that are known to be caused by mutations readily identifiable from personal genomics data. The only sane thing, and one can argue, the only moral thing (my views on morality are well known, but I am just saying it for the sake of the argument) is to do this on all pregnancies - it costs only a few thousand dollars now, which is a lot less than many routinely done things - and to abort such children before they're born. This saves society the much larger cost of having to care for them, it cleans up the gene pool from those alleles (so in the future we won't have to even abort them as the only alleles left in the population will be those arising de novo which will be very rare), and it saves the individuals themselves the pain and suffering of having to live with such a condition, and it does so long before terminating their life would do any real harm to them.
Again, that's a perfectly sane thing to do. At the other end of the life cycle, it is also a perfectly sane thing for people who are of every old age and/or are becoming permanently disabled with no hope of improvement to commit suicide instead of spend years in vegetative condition and both suffering themselves and causing a lot of suffering to others around them. This is, BTW, an area in which people with radical idea, have lead by example:
Garrett Hardin: The Alternatives Facing Mankind
Once these views are the social norm, nobody will see anything wrong with them. But they can not become the social norm without having a wide and open conversation on these issues, and when they very word "eugenics" is considered toxic, it's hard to see that happening any time soon.
Again, it's very unfortunate the concept got such a bad name by the people it was associated with in the past
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I work in that field in I am much less optimistic about the potentials of human engineering. Do not believe the hype - given where things are right now, that's much more of a Ray Kurzweil-type of fantasy than reality.
There have been quantum leaps forward in genome editing tools in the last few years:
FLASH assembly of TALENs for high-throughput ... [Nat Biotechnol. 2012] - PubMed - NCBI
PNAS Plus: Cas9
And it looks like editing the genomes of live cells will be a routine thing to do in the next few years. However, the path from there to being able to engineer human biology and behavior is far from clear.
First, there is the technical hurdle of actually altering the human genome in live people. Part of this is simply due to not enough research having been done due to various stupid restrictions, but the fact is that human cloning has yet to be successfully done and that human embryonic stem cells are very finicky to work with - you can do pretty much whatever you want with mouse ESCs, but it seems like the human ESCs are simply not as pluripotent as mouse ESCs because they're in fact not really ESCs:
Human embryonic stem cells with bio... [Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2010] - PubMed - NCBI
Pluripotency and cellular reprogramming: facts, hypothe... [Cell. 2010] - PubMed - NCBI
Again, more research without stupid regulatory restrictions, may solve that problem
But the more serious problem is that the genotype-to-phenotype relation is very very far from understood except for the cases of simple Mendelian cases. The nightmare scenario for biology, which is only slightly worse than its equivalent in high-energy physics (Article for Il Manifesto | Not Even Wrong) but is almost as clearly becoming a reality, is that phenotype is such a complex function of a very large number of genes plus environmental influences that it will be impossible to track that relationship down in complex non-model organisms for any meaningful practical purposes.
The even more scary scenario, of course, is that the time scale of these advances in science is much longer than the timescale of civilizational collapse, i.e. we self-destruct long before we can actually make those discoveries. We're living that scenario IMO
There have been quantum leaps forward in genome editing tools in the last few years:
FLASH assembly of TALENs for high-throughput ... [Nat Biotechnol. 2012] - PubMed - NCBI
PNAS Plus: Cas9
And it looks like editing the genomes of live cells will be a routine thing to do in the next few years. However, the path from there to being able to engineer human biology and behavior is far from clear.
First, there is the technical hurdle of actually altering the human genome in live people. Part of this is simply due to not enough research having been done due to various stupid restrictions, but the fact is that human cloning has yet to be successfully done and that human embryonic stem cells are very finicky to work with - you can do pretty much whatever you want with mouse ESCs, but it seems like the human ESCs are simply not as pluripotent as mouse ESCs because they're in fact not really ESCs:
Human embryonic stem cells with bio... [Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2010] - PubMed - NCBI
Pluripotency and cellular reprogramming: facts, hypothe... [Cell. 2010] - PubMed - NCBI
Again, more research without stupid regulatory restrictions, may solve that problem
But the more serious problem is that the genotype-to-phenotype relation is very very far from understood except for the cases of simple Mendelian cases. The nightmare scenario for biology, which is only slightly worse than its equivalent in high-energy physics (Article for Il Manifesto | Not Even Wrong) but is almost as clearly becoming a reality, is that phenotype is such a complex function of a very large number of genes plus environmental influences that it will be impossible to track that relationship down in complex non-model organisms for any meaningful practical purposes.
The even more scary scenario, of course, is that the time scale of these advances in science is much longer than the timescale of civilizational collapse, i.e. we self-destruct long before we can actually make those discoveries. We're living that scenario IMO
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