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This is happening to a certain degree and it may just accelerate more. Crazy how on point the movie was. If The Rock becomes President, he is considering running fyi, I am going to store this movie in dvd, blu ray, tape, all formats in a sealed underground bunker as a document. So that when aliens find it they will know what happened to us.
At some point, I am going to have to throw away all my libertarian views and say, we need big government to step it and control everything, including who gets to breed and who doesn't.
I can tell you didn't read the nyu.edu links. Sanger and PP have always had eugenics-based population control goals.
I don't recall if I've read those or not. I've read through her archives, & a couple of books on BC, PP, & Sanger. She wasn't the devil - she just wanted a fair shake for the working class, especially the women who often held families together under terrible conditions. Essentially, she thought that the families & women directly involved should have control over the timing & spacing of pregnancies.
She revolutionized BC in the US, the West & the World, & everything since then in that field is a footnote to her accomplishments.
I think she fell in with the eugenics people, as that was a very popular concern among the people she was trying to recruit support & money & staff from. TMK, she favored positive eugenics - the belief that people who could bring up children well (mainly an income issue) should have more children. I don't recall that she advocated negative eugenics - sterilizing people who were deemed undesirable.
I don't recall if I've read those or not. I've read through her archives, & a couple of books on BC, PP, & Sanger. She wasn't the devil - she just wanted a fair shake for the working class, especially the women who often held families together under terrible conditions. Essentially, she thought that the families & women directly involved should have control over the timing & spacing of pregnancies.
She revolutionized BC in the US, the West & the World, & everything since then in that field is a footnote to her accomplishments.
I think she fell in with the eugenics people, as that was a very popular concern among the people she was trying to recruit support & money & staff from. TMK, she favored positive eugenics - the belief that people who could bring up children well (mainly an income issue) should have more children. I don't recall that she advocated negative eugenics - sterilizing people who were deemed undesirable.
Yes, she did. That's in the first link I posted, which is entitled The Function of Sterilization:
Quote:
Originally Posted by InformedConsent
Even from the very beginning, Margaret Sanger and the PP folks have specifically targeted minorities and others whom they considered to be "undesirables."
"The Question of race betterment is one of immediate concern, and I am glad to say that the United States Government has already taken certain steps to control the equality of our population through the drastic immigration laws.
There is a quota restriction by which only so many people from each country are allowed to enter our shores each month. It is the latest method adopted by our government to solve the population problem. Most people are convinced that this policy is right, and agree that we should slow down on the number as well as the kind of immigrants coming here.
But while we close our gates to the co-called “undesirables†from other countries, we make no attempt to discourage or cut down the rapid multiplication of the unfit and undesirable at home."
It's no secret that minorities other than Asians are disproportionately on public assistance benefits. PP's goal always has been to target such persons to achieve "race betterment," as Sanger puts it.
Throughout most of the United States, an IQ of below 70 is the threshold at which a person is considered mentally incompetent. Persons with an IQ under 70 are held to different legal standards and are not punished at the same level as a person with a higher IQ. In cases of the death penalty, for example, a person with a proven IQ of 70 or lower is usually considered exempt from execution.
This leads to an obvious question: if we have already set the legal standard that people with an IQ of 70 or below are mentally incompetent, should we allow them to have children? If we allow them to have children, aren't we condemning their children to a life of poor parental care, which inevitably leads to multiple issues, not only for the child but also for society? After all, who will raise their children if the parent can't?
If you don't agree with the idea that low IQ people should be prohibited from having children, then explain how allowing them to have children is workable for society.
And for perspective, 2 percent of the US population, 6.5 million people, have an IQ of 70 or below.
Well, watch Idiocracy. Then decide what the answer is.
Europe and North America, Japan, Australia and similar places have pretty much decided that's not the type of society we want live in. Our ideals revolve more around a policy of: we're going to give individuals immense amounts of power, and if we burn down the world, do be it. That'll be our punishment.
This would be introducing something that those societies don't seem to want: the loss of control of individuals over their own lives.
You mentioned financial incentives for people with high I.Q.s procreating and people with low I.Q.s not procreating. I'd have to learn more about how accurate I.Q. tests actually are before deciding whether I think that'd be a good idea or not. Also, I've heard that low I.Q. aren't 100% disadvantageous, but actually improve people's skills at the simpler, more mundane tasks. I'm not sure how accurate that is. I'd have to learn more about I.Q. in general.
This is one of those ideas that whether it's a horrible idea or a great idea depends on the nation in question. You hear these ideas in the news every once in awhile about libertarians wanting to create their own nations in international waters or whatever. If they ever get around to doing that and have financial incentives for smart people procreating and dumb people not, I'd have no problem with that whatsoever. Depending on how it's enforced, I might not have any problem whatsoever with them banning people with low I.Q.s from procreating altogether...but that would be tearing away rights that people have had since the beginning of time in every existing country I can think of, so I don't think that'd be right to legally mandate that people with low I.Q.s can't procreate in existing nations.
What I think we need to do is just wait until we get to the point where parents can choose the I.Q. of their children through genetic engineering, and just step out of the way and let capitalism handle it. If people can't compete in the job market, they'll naturally be motivated to boost their children's I.Q. We may never be able to do that safely though.
That last portion that you wrote is really what we should be thinking about. Most people are not aware of the advances that we have made recently with regards to genetic engineering. CRISPR was created a few years ago and it allows precise genetic manipulation. Scientists are able to remove harmful genes and insert desirable genes at exact points in the DNA strand. This already exists and human gene editing will become a reality.
In China, BGI, the world's largest genomics institute, has been sequencing the genomes of some of the world's brightest people in an attempt to figure out which genes are responsible for high IQ. Many genes have already been discovered, but there are numerous more that they have yet to find. Within the next decade, babies will be designed. Most of these designer babies will be high level geniuses. Western nations have banned the practice, claiming that it's unethical. In China, they are all for it. Rich Westerners will travel to China to have their children designed.
What will this lead to? An elite class of people will form who are smarter, better looking, with longer life spans and better health than most people. Society will become even more stratified than it already is. And this brings us back to the original question of this thread. Low IQ persons will still exist and they will still be able to have children. Gene editing won't change this. Their children's genomes won't be edited because this requires long term planning, which is something that mentally retarded persons aren't capable of. They will continue to have babies the old fashioned way - unintentionally.
But many people think that's just fine or they pretend to think that. They don't want to even consider the long term negative consequences that will cause.
That last portion that you wrote is really what we should be thinking about. Most people are not aware of the advances that we have made recently with regards to genetic engineering. CRISPR was created a few years ago and it allows precise genetic manipulation. Scientists are able to remove harmful genes and insert desirable genes at exact points in the DNA strand. This already exists and human gene editing will become a reality.
In China, BGI, the world's largest genomics institute, has been sequencing the genomes of some of the world's brightest people in an attempt to figure out which genes are responsible for high IQ. Many genes have already been discovered, but there are numerous more that they have yet to find. Within the next decade, babies will be designed. Most of these designer babies will be high level geniuses. Western nations have banned the practice, claiming that it's unethical. In China, they are all for it. Rich Westerners will travel to China to have their children designed.
What will this lead to? An elite class of people will form who are smarter, better looking, with longer life spans and better health than most people. Society will become even more stratified than it already is. And this brings us back to the original question of this thread. Low IQ persons will still exist and they will still be able to have children. Gene editing won't change this. Their children's genomes won't be edited because this requires long term planning, which is something that mentally retarded persons aren't capable of. They will continue to have babies the old fashioned way - unintentionally.
But many people think that's just fine or they pretend to think that. They don't want to even consider the long term negative consequences that will cause.
It seems like people are saying designer babies with raised intelligence would be extremely expensive, and I find that upsetting. I want a way for humans to, kind of, transcend their traditional forms Mother Nature gave them that's cheap. I'm not optimistic about cybernetic implants or drug companies either. I was hoping genetic modification would be cheaper.
If they can make it relatively cheap (I'd consider $20,000 cheap) and safe I'd be %100 in favor of designer babies with higher I.Q.s. It sounds like it's going to be a lot more expensive than that though, at least at first, and I don't have any evidence they'll be cheaper. I saw the number $250,000 and $150,000 in a couple probably unreliable places. That would be too much for the average person. That might not be a bad thing though. Maybe it could give more Einsteins without widening the pay gap too much between high and low income classes.
I have a largely uninformed opinion, but I mostly see long term benefits to designer babies. It's just that I would see it being extremely expensive for a large amount of time in the future as being closer to neutral, whereas I'd see cheap designer babies as resulting in enormous advantages.
I have no problem with nobody except the genetically engineered being able to become astrophysists or mathematicians and similar high-intellect-demanding jobs, just so long as no fewer people are able to find some kind of decent job.
I look forward to a future of designer babies with curiosity. I hope it becomes cheap. If it does not, that'll be a disappointment, but I still don't think I'd see it as a failure. I definitely want more Einsteins, although I'm pretty uneducated about genetic engineering.
The way I look at it, we're all born afflicted by numerous diseases, aging being one of them and the closer we can get to curing that the better. If we can cure aging through experimenting and learning about this sort of thing and be able to use that knowledge relatively cheaply eventually to change people, that would be an enormous gain. My gut says if we're even going to have a chance to go down that route we need to travel down this expensive, risky route for awhile...but I don't really know much of what I'm talking about.
You make a good argument for why we should pay people with low I.Q.'s not to procreate and pay people with high I.Q.'s to procreate. I don't know how we'd determine who would actually have a low I.Q. though, because they'd purposely fail I.Q. tests, regardless of their intelligence, if they didn't plan on having children. We'd just be paying random people not to have children who don't want to have children, and probably many of the geniuses would purposely fail the test just in case they weren't smart enough to get the cash for being brilliant. We could end up removing more geniuses from the gene pool than people with low I.Q.'s...and then if they need a high I.Q. for a future job they'll just take the test later, after they've gotten their money.
It's not the heart of the idea I'm critical of so much as the implementation.
Someone else brought up paying everyone $10,000 to be sterilized. $10,000 times, say, a third of the people in the U.S. (about 100,000,000 people) would result in a cost to the government of $1,000,000,000,000 (a trillion dollars) according to the hopefully accurate Wikipedia, that would be about a third of the U.S. annual tax revenue:
I'm not sure how effective that could be at preventing people with low I.Q.'s from breeding, but it could definitely motivate people with income problems not to breed, as well as people who don't want children but might accidentally have them.
I read somewhere or other that male sterilization can cost up to as $4,000 and female sterilization can cost up to $6,000. We can probably just round the number up to 2 trillion because of the employees and bureaucracy necessary to implant the programs responsible for this, so maybe 2/3 of a year's tax revenue would be needed to get a third of the country to not procreate, thereby dramatically reducing children born to people who aren't sure they want children and people who have income problems. That would be a good thing, but it'd be a hefty chunk of cash too.
A more affordable solution, though perhaps a less effective one, would be propaganda. I don't know what it would look like, but it would probably encourage a kind of nationalism where people look beyond themselves and their families and it would encourage smart people to procreate and dumb people not to. It would also discourage people from families with numerous genetic disorders from procreating. They'd have to be careful not to annoy or offend people though.
A less controversial method would just be to spread propaganda that makes surgical sterilization less of a taboo topic and more like a normal procedure some people just partake in because of their totally ordinary life choices. If people with lower I.Q.'s are more likely than people with higher I.Q.'s to follow along with culture, (and I've heard that somewhere or other) the key is to change culture from one which advocates childbirth to one which says "it's perfectly fine and normal to never have children." That would have advantages to society in general as well, I think. We also seem to be beginning to veer down that route anyway naturally.
Maybe the government should pay for sterilizations too.
I don't have much of a problem with the formation of an elite caste of ultra-wealthy super humans who monopolize all the jobs that require intense, difficult thought though. As long as they produce more Einsteins and don't greatly harm society, I'll be content.
It seems like people are saying designer babies with raised intelligence would be extremely expensive, and I find that upsetting. I want a way for humans to, kind of, transcend their traditional forms Mother Nature gave them that's cheap. I'm not optimistic about cybernetic implants or drug companies either. I was hoping genetic modification would be cheaper.
If they can make it relatively cheap (I'd consider $20,000 cheap) and safe I'd be %100 in favor of designer babies with higher I.Q.s. It sounds like it's going to be a lot more expensive than that though, at least at first, and I don't have any evidence they'll be cheaper. I saw the number $250,000 and $150,000 in a couple probably unreliable places. That would be too much for the average person. That might not be a bad thing though. Maybe it could give more Einsteins without widening the pay gap too much between high and low income classes.
I have a largely uninformed opinion, but I mostly see long term benefits to designer babies. It's just that I would see it being extremely expensive for a large amount of time in the future as being closer to neutral, whereas I'd see cheap designer babies as resulting in enormous advantages.
I have no problem with nobody except the genetically engineered being able to become astrophysists or mathematicians and similar high-intellect-demanding jobs, just so long as no fewer people are able to find some kind of decent job.
I look forward to a future of designer babies with curiosity. I hope it becomes cheap. If it does not, that'll be a disappointment, but I still don't think I'd see it as a failure. I definitely want more Einsteins, although I'm pretty uneducated about genetic engineering.
The way I look at it, we're all born afflicted by numerous diseases, aging being one of them and the closer we can get to curing that the better. If we can cure aging through experimenting and learning about this sort of thing and be able to use that knowledge relatively cheaply eventually to change people, that would be an enormous gain. My gut says if we're even going to have a chance to go down that route we need to travel down this expensive, risky route for awhile...but I don't really know much of what I'm talking about.
You make a good argument for why we should pay people with low I.Q.'s not to procreate and pay people with high I.Q.'s to procreate. I don't know how we'd determine who would actually have a low I.Q. though, because they'd purposely fail I.Q. tests, regardless of their intelligence, if they didn't plan on having children. We'd just be paying random people not to have children who don't want to have children, and probably many of the geniuses would purposely fail the test just in case they weren't smart enough to get the cash for being brilliant. We could end up removing more geniuses from the gene pool than people with low I.Q.'s...and then if they need a high I.Q. for a future job they'll just take the test later, after they've gotten their money.
It's not the heart of the idea I'm critical of so much as the implementation.
Someone else brought up paying everyone $10,000 to be sterilized. $10,000 times, say, a third of the people in the U.S. (about 100,000,000 people) would result in a cost to the government of $1,000,000,000,000 (a trillion dollars) according to the hopefully accurate Wikipedia, that would be about a third of the U.S. annual tax revenue:
I'm not sure how effective that could be at preventing people with low I.Q.'s from breeding, but it could definitely motivate people with income problems not to breed, as well as people who don't want children but might accidentally have them.
I read somewhere or other that male sterilization can cost up to as $4,000 and female sterilization can cost up to $6,000. We can probably just round the number up to 2 trillion because of the employees and bureaucracy necessary to implant the programs responsible for this, so maybe 2/3 of a year's tax revenue would be needed to get a third of the country to not procreate, thereby dramatically reducing children born to people who aren't sure they want children and people who have income problems. That would be a good thing, but it'd be a hefty chunk of cash too.
A more affordable solution, though perhaps a less effective one, would be propaganda. I don't know what it would look like, but it would probably encourage a kind of nationalism where people look beyond themselves and their families and it would encourage smart people to procreate and dumb people not to. It would also discourage people from families with numerous genetic disorders from procreating. They'd have to be careful not to annoy or offend people though.
A less controversial method would just be to spread propaganda that makes surgical sterilization less of a taboo topic and more like a normal procedure some people just partake in because of their totally ordinary life choices. If people with lower I.Q.'s are more likely than people with higher I.Q.'s to follow along with culture, (and I've heard that somewhere or other) the key is to change culture from one which advocates childbirth to one which says "it's perfectly fine and normal to never have children." That would have advantages to society in general as well, I think. We also seem to be beginning to veer down that route anyway naturally.
Maybe the government should pay for sterilizations too.
I don't have much of a problem with the formation of an elite caste of ultra-wealthy super humans who monopolize all the jobs that require intense, difficult thought though. As long as they produce more Einsteins and don't greatly harm society, I'll be content.
Why don't we just do it the Spartan way and discard the weak,dis-formed and mutated to conform to your false sense of a free society.Who made you God?
Throughout most of the United States, an IQ of below 70 is the threshold at which a person is considered mentally incompetent. Persons with an IQ under 70 are held to different legal standards and are not punished at the same level as a person with a higher IQ. In cases of the death penalty, for example, a person with a proven IQ of 70 or lower is usually considered exempt from execution.
This leads to an obvious question: if we have already set the legal standard that people with an IQ of 70 or below are mentally incompetent, should we allow them to have children? If we allow them to have children, aren't we condemning their children to a life of poor parental care, which inevitably leads to multiple issues, not only for the child but also for society? After all, who will raise their children if the parent can't?
If you don't agree with the idea that low IQ people should be prohibited from having children, then explain how allowing them to have children is workable for society.
And for perspective, 2 percent of the US population, 6.5 million people, have an IQ of 70 or below.
People without a shred of God given common sense are allowed to post here.
Have you tried China, they kill children born out of plan. You might like it.
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Becoming a legend
Sanger and PP have always had eugenics-based population control goals.
