>> ^KnivesOut:

Taken at face value, you sound like a pretty awful person.
Care to elaborate? Forgot sarcasm checkbox?

Humanity is intellect.

This is a video of essentially stillborn babies leading sham-lives with the help of delusional puppeteers, at a real cost to society.

This is the voice of compassion. We're ill-enough-equipped to deal with the existing problems of living, intellectually active humans without supporting the anthropomorphizational fantasies of grieving parents.

As gwiz will be pleased to hear, ~90% of downs foetuses are aborted in civilised countries. We need to improve that towards 100%, while implementing other controls on low-value births. Eugenics is not the enemy; it's a necessary step in the advancement of our species. This ad, emotionally satisfying as it may be, pulls us in exactly the wrong direction.

Taken at face value, you sound like a pretty awful person.

Care to elaborate? Forgot sarcasm checkbox?>> ^gorillaman:

These are not human beings in anything but the broadest and least meaningful sense. Their consciousness will never rise above the animal; few enough normal births achieve that. Treating retards like real people is nothing but sentimentality and self-delusion; and in an over-populated, impoverished world, it's harmful and criminal.

>> ^charliem:

.....way to take sarcasm and run with it.

My comment, not a reaction to your comment. What are you, retarded or something?

That wasn't out of context at all, in fact if you actually use your ears and listen to what he is saying, it reinforces my point twice as much and makes what he said even worse. What they are talking about is how because of the belief that we are in the image of God, that there is a natural barrier regarding moral questions (such as infanticide)..but that this barrier is actually artificial (because they believe in evolution, that we are the same as animals) and so we shouldn't worry so much about traversing it (because they don't believe human life is in any wise sacred or special)..

dawkins says that he at least worries a bit about breaking this barrier and falling onto a slippery slope..(ie, eugenics)..so after he gets through endorsing infanticide..he graciously says he would be willing to give consideration to someone who asked the question "where does it end?"

then Peter says "yes i can see there is a problem with (killing) small children, because we're bonded to them very closely in a way..though we're not really bonded to the same extent to the fetus or even to the newborn (its easier to kill them)..but i think when people make slippery slope arguments in this area (that if we allow infanticide for "compassionate" grounds, why not kill babies with downs syndrome too?)..you have to appreciate that it does go the other way, precisely because we draw this boundary between us and animals (that we're being held back as a race because of moral constraints imposed by the idea of the sacredness of human life(ie, that infanticide and other "compassionate" murder is a good thing, and we should be doing more of it)

This is social darwinisim, and it is monstrous..and this is just the beginning, if people like this get their way. Thank you for proving my point.

>> ^luxury_pie:
How about some context: http://videosift.com/video/Peter-Singer-Uncut-Darwin-Interview-with-Richard-Dawkins
Minute 24.
Nice try though.

Two wheelchair bound down syndrome kids would do better than these two.

@alien_concept

It was the way he was telling the story, as if somehow this kid had somehow intentionally inconvenienced him by having Down Syndrome, that caused me to almost downvote. He clearly had a lot of preconceptions about people with Down Syndrome and the upvote came because he realized at the end that everyone else on the train was ignoring the kid because they had those same preconceptions. He also realized he had probably made the kid's day by being nice to him, and clearly he got as much out of it as the kid did.

Sure, I get people may not be in the mood to engage with lonely elderly folks or kids with special needs. But I also don't think it's really fair to treat someone poorly just because you're in a bad mood. He did the right thing, here, and that's why the vid gets the upvote.

>> ^solecist:

it's down syndrome, not down's syndrome.


In the UK we call it Down's.

it's down syndrome, not down's syndrome.

>> ^SDGundamX:

As someone who has a relative with Down Syndrome, I almost downvoted this after listening to the first few minutes, but he pulled it back together by the end.


As someone who has worked with a few teenagers with Down's, I felt his pain from the start! Just like when an old person starts nattering away at you when you're really not in the mood, but you don't want to be horrible. With someone with disabilities, they can be even more annoying because often they can't take obvious social cues. I'm not being mean, just realistic, we can't always be in the mood.

As someone who has a relative with Down Syndrome, I almost downvoted this after listening to the first few minutes, but he pulled it back together by the end.

you can't assign evolution feelings, opinions, emotions. you can't personify it like that. to do so is at best- a misstatement, and at worst - an intentionally manipulative scare tactic. every successful adaptation is a mutation. mutations happen constantly. some are more attractive than others. but someones "less attractive" mutated genes don't deem them useless. i'm short, have bad teeth and i run slow. i still bred. but evolution has 0 opinions on the matter because it does not have a personality. i am valuable only because of my ability to mean something to someone and find meaning in someone else. "survival of the fittest" does not describe which adaptations are "better" and therefore not "useless", it was a term coined by a social darwinist to justify gross poverty and legitimize human suffering.

anyone that has the ability to love and be loved is intrinsically valuable. if love and morality have an evolutionary basis, which they do, then i see no need for god. your attempt to demonize evolution with callous and offensive personifications is weak. and gives a bit of insight into your own morality and how you view people. evolution didn't deem kids with syndromes or other disabilities as worthless, you did. god didn't generously bestow upon them the ability to "behave nobly", they're human beings .. they did that on their own. this self righteous, pompous ass interpretation of the "miracle" of admirable behavior being displayed by someone you obviously view as "less than" can fuck right off. >> ^shinyblurry:

Is this called argument from offense? Do you have a point here? In any case, whether you like or not, that's what they are according to evolution..genetic abberations. ie, useless people.
>> ^peggedbea:
you don't know what i do for a living, so i'll skip the part where i yell at you passionately kids with downs/people with disabilities/kids with syndromes.
furthermore, survival of the fittest was not a phrase coined by darwin. and did not originally apply to the evolution of organisms. applying it to people with genetic disorders further offends me. >> ^shinyblurry:
Surely, you can invent value, which has meaning to yourself..but there is no intrinsic value to anything created by mere chance. It is only the arbitrary value that we assign that makes something meaningful. I valued people when I didn't believe in God, loved them very dearly, yet there wasn't a logical reason to do so.
Consider, what is the value of someone born with a severe disability, like downs syndrome. They are a burden to society and they themselves cannot enjoy life as a normal human being. They are pretty much genetic baggage as far as evolution is concerned, a disturbing abberation to be eliminated. In the survival of the fittest, they should be culled from the gene pool. Yet, even they are capable of noble behavior, something your science cannot explain. Can evolution explain this one: http://teachingsofjon.com/ ?
>> ^peggedbea:
again, statements like this make me feel like the world must look terrifying.
your intrinsic value to me is not dependent on whether or not a creator meant for you to exist.
>> ^shinyblurry:
If the Universe was created by chance, life has no intrinsic value or meaning. You can believe it does, but then you could get hit by a bus. It truly doesn't matter what you believe, because you are at the mercy of a random fate. Not that you could even trust your own mind, being that you are just a biological machine whose thoughts are just chemical reactions.
No matter how noble human beings become, a meteor doesn't know anything about that..humankind could come close to utopia, but wandering black holes are not impressed. Nothing that anyone accomplishes will have any lasting impact on a Univese that will fall into heat death and fade away. To say life is absurd and futile under these circumstances is a kindness.

Yes, but we can choose..and we do choose..our will is over the evolutionary process in this artificial reality we've constructed. Soon we'll be able to select whatever we want. So this really does come down to what we value, and how we value it..because I guarantee you when we start programming our own DNA, downs syndrome will be written out. Humans will never value that, because no one wants their kid to be born like that.

Ultimately the only goal of a species is to survive, it doesn't matter what it evolves into..evolution is dumb and blind..there is no blue print for success. Just keep having sex and it'll all be alright. So eventually we will become the designer..and then the future of the species will be dependent on our values, or lack there of. I think that should scare any rational person.

So, what is the value of a functionally useless person who is a burden to society and can't experience a normal human life? God says that person is the same as you. Evolution says hes only good if he can get laid. Eugenics will say zero.


>> ^Ryjkyj:
I'm not kidding around when I say that evolution doesn't work that way Shiny. I really do mean that evolution doesn't work that way.
Whatever reproduces determines the course of evolution by whatever means necessary. It's not up to you or me or any scientist to determine the most appropriate configuration. That's why the whole "survival of the fittest" thing is always misinterpreted. "Fittest" doesn't mean "best", it means whatever happens to survive or "fit" that particular situation. You can't determine the best fit. You can guess, but you can't tell the future. And science is certainly not up to the task of accounting for all the variables, yet. Thus far, eugenics has had incredibly poor results.
One of the things that people most commonly don't understand about evolution is that each being includes some mutation, so you're not an exact 50/50 copy of your parents. So a person with a disability isn't necessarily going to pass it on to their offspring. And even if they do, if they survived to reproduce then they did something right.
Perpetuating aberration seems irrational to us. But actually, that's the way that evolution works.
Of course, I won't fault you for saying that it's so beautifully simplistic that it might just allude to some sort of a designer. <IMG class=smiley src="http://cdn.videosift.com/cdm/emoticon/smile.gif">

Is this called argument from offense? Do you have a point here? In any case, whether you like or not, that's what they are according to evolution..genetic abberations. ie, useless people.

>> ^peggedbea:
you don't know what i do for a living, so i'll skip the part where i yell at you passionately kids with downs/people with disabilities/kids with syndromes.
furthermore, survival of the fittest was not a phrase coined by darwin. and did not originally apply to the evolution of organisms. applying it to people with genetic disorders further offends me. >> ^shinyblurry:
Surely, you can invent value, which has meaning to yourself..but there is no intrinsic value to anything created by mere chance. It is only the arbitrary value that we assign that makes something meaningful. I valued people when I didn't believe in God, loved them very dearly, yet there wasn't a logical reason to do so.
Consider, what is the value of someone born with a severe disability, like downs syndrome. They are a burden to society and they themselves cannot enjoy life as a normal human being. They are pretty much genetic baggage as far as evolution is concerned, a disturbing abberation to be eliminated. In the survival of the fittest, they should be culled from the gene pool. Yet, even they are capable of noble behavior, something your science cannot explain. Can evolution explain this one: http://teachingsofjon.com/ ?
>> ^peggedbea:
again, statements like this make me feel like the world must look terrifying.
your intrinsic value to me is not dependent on whether or not a creator meant for you to exist.
>> ^shinyblurry:
If the Universe was created by chance, life has no intrinsic value or meaning. You can believe it does, but then you could get hit by a bus. It truly doesn't matter what you believe, because you are at the mercy of a random fate. Not that you could even trust your own mind, being that you are just a biological machine whose thoughts are just chemical reactions.
No matter how noble human beings become, a meteor doesn't know anything about that..humankind could come close to utopia, but wandering black holes are not impressed. Nothing that anyone accomplishes will have any lasting impact on a Univese that will fall into heat death and fade away. To say life is absurd and futile under these circumstances is a kindness.

you don't know what i do for a living, so i'll skip the part where i yell at you passionately kids with downs/people with disabilities/kids with syndromes.
furthermore, survival of the fittest was not a phrase coined by darwin. and did not originally apply to the evolution of organisms. applying it to people with genetic disorders further offends me. >> ^shinyblurry:

Surely, you can invent value, which has meaning to yourself..but there is no intrinsic value to anything created by mere chance. It is only the arbitrary value that we assign that makes something meaningful. I valued people when I didn't believe in God, loved them very dearly, yet there wasn't a logical reason to do so.
Consider, what is the value of someone born with a severe disability, like downs syndrome. They are a burden to society and they themselves cannot enjoy life as a normal human being. They are pretty much genetic baggage as far as evolution is concerned, a disturbing abberation to be eliminated. In the survival of the fittest, they should be culled from the gene pool. Yet, even they are capable of noble behavior, something your science cannot explain. Can evolution explain this one: http://teachingsofjon.com/ ?
>> ^peggedbea:
again, statements like this make me feel like the world must look terrifying.
your intrinsic value to me is not dependent on whether or not a creator meant for you to exist.
>> ^shinyblurry:
If the Universe was created by chance, life has no intrinsic value or meaning. You can believe it does, but then you could get hit by a bus. It truly doesn't matter what you believe, because you are at the mercy of a random fate. Not that you could even trust your own mind, being that you are just a biological machine whose thoughts are just chemical reactions.
No matter how noble human beings become, a meteor doesn't know anything about that..humankind could come close to utopia, but wandering black holes are not impressed. Nothing that anyone accomplishes will have any lasting impact on a Univese that will fall into heat death and fade away. To say life is absurd and futile under these circumstances is a kindness.

Surely, you can invent value, which has meaning to yourself..but there is no intrinsic value to anything created by mere chance. It is only the arbitrary value that we assign that makes something meaningful. I valued people when I didn't believe in God, loved them very dearly, yet there wasn't a logical reason to do so.

Consider, what is the value of someone born with a severe disability, like downs syndrome. They are a burden to society and they themselves cannot enjoy life as a normal human being. They are pretty much genetic baggage as far as evolution is concerned, a disturbing abberation to be eliminated. In the survival of the fittest, they should be culled from the gene pool. Yet, even they are capable of noble behavior, something your science cannot explain. Can evolution explain this one: http://teachingsofjon.com/ ?

>> ^peggedbea:
again, statements like this make me feel like the world must look terrifying.
your intrinsic value to me is not dependent on whether or not a creator meant for you to exist.
>> ^shinyblurry:
If the Universe was created by chance, life has no intrinsic value or meaning. You can believe it does, but then you could get hit by a bus. It truly doesn't matter what you believe, because you are at the mercy of a random fate. Not that you could even trust your own mind, being that you are just a biological machine whose thoughts are just chemical reactions.
No matter how noble human beings become, a meteor doesn't know anything about that..humankind could come close to utopia, but wandering black holes are not impressed. Nothing that anyone accomplishes will have any lasting impact on a Univese that will fall into heat death and fade away. To say life is absurd and futile under these circumstances is a kindness.