Google Executives to Face Trial in Italy
Four Google Executives, both current and former, have been ordered to stand trial on charges that the company failed to remove a video of a kid with Down syndrome being harassed by other teens.
The prosecutor, Francesco Cajani, ordered the defendants to appear in a Milan court on February 3 to face charges of defamation and failure to exercise control over personal data, the sources told Reuters on condition of anonymity. The order comes after an investigation into a complaint filed by an Italian advocacy group for people with Down syndrome, Vividown, and the boy's father.
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Publish Date: Fri, 07 Nov 2008 17:11:00 CST Read more...
See, this is why practicing a limited form of negative eugenics (in the form of embyro screening and genetic therepy) isn't a bad idea as they'd be no kiddies with Down's and everyone would have a slightly better quality of life.
Oh, I'm not denying they might have a happy life, but compared to what they would have if they didn't have a disability, it won't be the same. Their condition may also adversely affect family members/helpers as well, not to mention the social stigmatism from having the condition. The above practice would allow them to be well (trying not to sound like a complete bastard) ..."normal".
Then again, I've recently been pondering if medical technology and it's use should be monitored more, after all, certain aspects of natural selection are being brushed aside by having the technology to help people and keep them alive.
It leads on to the question of how much is too much help? 20/30 years ago, children born with birth defects wouldn't have survived, now they do, I'm not saying they won't lead a normal life or contribute to society, but in the interests of the human race and that the strongest survive, could our improving medical skills be to our detriment by keeping alive those with "flaws" that shouldn't have survived.
buzzmong wrote:Then again, I've recently been pondering if medical technology and it's use should be monitored more, after all, certain aspects of natural selection are being brushed aside by having the technology to help people and keep them alive.
You may be surprised how many medical professionals have the same thoughts.
There's a summary at the bottom (tee hee) for those that cba to read it all.
People with disabilities can lead full productive and meaningful lives buzz, yes they can also lead a miserable empty existence that drains life from others as well, but homogenising disabled and non-disabled into two groups? You are Hitler aicmfp. And if medicine and it's advancement had been denied to someone such as Hawking, then what would we have missed out on from such a brilliant mind?
At the most basic level - survival of our kind, you are correct. The continued breeding of people with know genetic mutation and problematic gene structure weakens us as a race. But then you move to methods of control and the ugly stains of humanities past emerge once more. Who decides on genetic manipulation? The doctor/state or the parents? If it becomes retroactively viable, do we horse the therapy on people who have disabilities? Or let them decide?
The single greatest measurable threat to humanity is to my mind humans. We can discount super-quakes, meteors and other hee/tee events like naked singularities or accidental ecophagy because we can't control them.
Our scientific and technological advances that save lives that might other wise have perished are one of the things that makes me proud of who we are and what we can do. If we could manipulate the genetics of a growing foetus to remove disease and infirmity we should.
For all those that cry out 'it's playing god' first of all it's not playing at anything, it's Serious Business! And secondly, given we have no proof of gods existence then if he does exist and doesn't like it then he better well manifest and fucking tell us.
As for control, I believe that most parents would most likely jump at the chance of a normal child, they might mutter things like 'we'd love him/her whatever', but who wouldn't want their child to be born with no handicaps if they had the choice? Unfortunately religion stops a lot of people from these decisions even now. So it would have to be voluntary and non-private, or the rich atheists would produce a race of super babies.
Of course, for us to reach a point in time where we possess the ability to manipulate genes to this extent we do need to get on with not killing each other with another one of our great inventions - the nuclear yield weapon.
In short - develop the skills to remove disease and infirmity, give people the choice to use it or not, do not allow private companies to charge for its use. Try and get rid of religion (again). Try and survive any nuclear or major extinction events. Buzz is Hitler.
The short term solution would be to only allow a person to have a life saving operation / treatment for a serious hereditary problem if they agree to be made infertile.
Otherwise, we are weakening the gene pool of the human race. Survival of the weakest.
HereComesPete wrote:In short - develop the skills to remove disease and infirmity, give people the choice to use it or not, do not allow private companies to charge for its use. Try and get rid of religion (again). Try and survive any nuclear or major extinction events. Buzz is Hitler.
Which also in short means you pretty much agree with my points.
And yes I am, I'm just not daft enough to murder millions of people based on their religious choices and creed....chavs on the other hand..............
It doesn't weaken the gene pool - it diversifies it. Look at pedigree breeds - they're all basically fucked, especially when a disease comes along that targets that group specifically and none of the fuckers have any immunity to it because, dum dum dum, their gene pool has been narrowed down to a limited selection.
As for natural selection/survival of the fittest, that's really just a pile of arse in this case. Evolution only comes into effect when there's a struggle or competition to survive - and given that the fecund human race numbers in the billions and has populated practically every single corner of the globe, we're clearly not struggling to keep going.
You could take the argument to the next step which is to say that we shouldn't give to charity or offer aid to poor and starving nations - after all, if life can't be sustained naturally in those places, why don't we let events take their course and let them all starve to death? I mean we're really just prolonging their suffering aren't we?
So sure we could cut out all the weak and unappealing characteristics of our race, but after doing so could we still really call ourselves human?
8yo male with a genetic heart defect.
He has an operation to fix this.
Aged 25 he has 3 children, all have the genetic heart defect.
Go to top.
If we'd have let the male die when he was 10yo, he would have never been able to reproduce and pass on his defect. This is exactly survival of the fittest. Now we are allowing an inferior human variation to compete artificially with far superior variations. Eventually, a large portion of the human race has this fatal flaw and are weaker for it.
Evolution is not all about confrontation with other species, it's about internal design too. A fish born without gills is fundamentally broken, but you are suggesting we should treat the fish to give it's life, and allow it to have lots of children all whom need operating on, who have lots of children whom all... Why?
Sorry Roman, whilst technically you are diversifying the gene pool, you are not doing this in a good way. Not all diversification is good. Nature has a very effective way of filtering the gene pool. You are installing a felcher-bypass.
Last edited by Fear on November 8th, 2008, 19:14, edited 1 time in total.
Roman Totale wrote:So sure we could cut out all the weak and unappealing characteristics of our race, but after doing so could we still really call ourselves human?
Also I think it should be pointed out that "survival of the fittest" doesn't mean literally what it says. It means survival of the best suited to the environment or perhaps in the case of humans survival of the richest, the most popular, with the most power and so on. This evolutionary axiom pretty much breaks with humans as Roman has said. Our society is just too complex for a simple idea like that.
What if the genetic code that brings about a hereditary defect is beneficial to our race later in the future?
Fear wrote:8yo male with a genetic heart defect.
He has an operation to fix this.
He marries a beautiful woman.
Aged 25 he has 3 children, all have the genetic heart defect.
Bring up a great family, bring happiness to the people around them.
Kids have kids who don't have the heart defect.
Go to top.
We had a cat on the farm when I was little. It had a litter of kittens. One of the kittens was born with two heads (joined twins, sharing the body I assume). The mother killed it.
It's a fine line and difficult line to draw, but there needs to be one, else we'll become more and more dependant on care/medicine and unable to simply survive.
Maybe Berk, but my example was a dominant genetic problem. If you want it to be recessive then you are weakening the gene pool by stealth, which is possibly worse still (in the long run)
I'm not saying we should allow 8yo boys to die. Definitely not. I picked the 8yo boy as it is perhaps the hardest age to even consider let someone die. I'm just saying there perhaps needs to be limits on passing the problem and the suffering on. (Nothing wrong with fixing the living)
Dear god I've never seen so much arse talked on 5punk before.
Who decides what is "good diversification" and "bad diversification". What if Mr. Heart Defect had a rare immunity to a previously unheard of disease that couldn't be countered by medical science? And so what of he dies at 25 anyway? The life expectancy in ancient Rome and Greece was only around 25-30, and they managed to achieve quite a number things with their meager lifespan.
Once you get started down that route, where do you stop? Heart defect - kill 'em. Brittle bones - kill 'em. Asthma - kill 'em. Overbite - kill 'em. Ginger hair - kill 'em.
Before too long every fucker on the planet would be the same with no variety, no diversity and seriously limited options with regards to racial traits. I don't know if you're aware but after the last major ice age there was a severe drop in the human population. A lot of inbreeding occurred which in turn led to mutations of the genes - some of these were good, some were bad. Either way it led to the human race being able to survive. Good job they weren't picky fuckers.
It's bound to be a touchy subject and one that people probably can't agree on. Why don't we talk about how shite TV is instead, we all seem in agreement on that.
Google Executives to Face Trial in Italy
