Rambling Disconnected Thoughts

Ray Radlein at Science Fiction Blog made a cogent point regarding Diana Schaub. He refers to her use of Star Trek as a springboard to wisdom?

…one may well wonder about the qualifications of Professor Schaub, who is neither an Ethicist nor a Biologist, to sit on the President’s Council on Bioethics. Well, thanks to the Sun, we can now rest easy, secure in the knowledge that she has turned for guidance to two impeccable sources of wisdom: Abraham Lincoln and Star Trek.

She did keep her two influences separate, however, so we don’t have to worry that she was talking about “The Savage Curtain,” at least. Because basing national policy on the results of a battle between Good and Evil staged by a powerful lava creature would just be silly, wouldn’t it? Plus, it’s a third season episode ? one of the very last, in fact ? and we all know what that means.

I know exactly what he means. The rest of the blog is also worth checking out. Just be careful where you click. As he illustrates in this post, some artwork can be mentally scarring.
Just as a for instance, how about this giant robot vagina laser cannon? It may not be work safe, but it certainly does open one up to new cultural perspectives. What would Captain Kirk do?
For a yet more venturesome, um, venture, try this Severus Snape/ Witch-King of Angmar slashfic. Not for the easily offended, it features explicit adult (though still hilarious) content. Actually, hilarity is sometimes hard to gauge, so maybe this won?t be your cuppa. Caveat emptor.

…Yet the ring was quite a lovely thing, beckoning with a
deceptively wholesome golden light, although Severus had no doubt the black stone had the depth hidden within it to contain a stolen soul, and he wondered what the hell he was doing accepting anything from a personage that resembled in any way an unusually charismatic Dementor…And before he knew it, it was on his finger. Had he put it on?…He couldn’t remember… And he looked up at the proud creature that was now glowing with a pale funguslike light–square jawed and skeletal, handsome somehow and yet fell and unclean, cold as bones and yet somehow heating a hidden flicker of monstrous desire within him, and it was smirking, and intent, and unfastening his robes…

While others stand lamenting the decline in the arts, vigorous new forms sprout up amidst the crannies?
Changing course (and not a moment too soon), I must confess to feeling just a smidge of contrition at taking Diana Schaub to task the other day. Further research shows her to be as nice a person as could reasonably be hoped for, with a very endearing love for her dogs?

The 8-year-old Portuguese water dog jumped into a rowboat on Montague Lake, shook the water from her curly coat and soaked her co-owner, Diana Schaub.[Cute picture in article] Instead of scolding Dill, Schaub wrapped her arms around the black dog and cheered.Dill had just earned her “courier water dog excellent” certification at the first Southern Splash Water Trials, hosted by the Movers & Shakers Portuguese Water Dog Club of the Carolinas. Her brother Fennel — who completed the same trial Saturday — also belongs to Schaub and Lauren Weiner, both of Baltimore, Md.

?As well as having friends who have leapt to her defense (nice graphic!), which is also a good sign.
Anyone who champions American Staffordshire Terriers, these days, has at least a little good in them. Alas, her politics as a whole are not so agreeable to me. I think that her ?embryo research equals abortion and slavery? analogy is severely flawed. Flawed, hell, it?s just plain wrongheaded, and will get people killed to boot. And that bothers me.
A friend once asked me, ?Why do you let these people irritate you so much? They don?t have any real power. They?re not going to win.?
Of course I agreed. I had to; my own words were being thrown back at me. Don?t you hate it when that happens? In the long run, I?m confident their agenda will not prevail. In a century or two, people will look back in wonder and shake their heads. But that?s the long run. It?s the short run that worries me. During the next few years, real damage could still be inflicted. That?s why I keep ranting about it.
Say there?s a disease that kills 100,000 people a year. If a therapy can eventually be developed that saves just ten percent of those people, it would be a good thing, right? If someone manages to drag out and delay that development by as little as five years, that?s 50,000 people needlessly dead.
I?m intentionally choosing conservative numbers here. My personal belief is that many more are at risk, and you can find some quite interesting numbers along those lines. Are the people responsible for that five year delay morally responsible for those deaths? Opinions vary, but depending on the exact circumstances I would be inclined to say yes.
It?s not quite as simple as not donating to the tsunami relief fund. I wouldn?t blame anyone for that. What I would blame them for is trying to enact legislation banning the relief fund outright, all over the world, forever, when donors are clamoring to give.
Some say let?s take our time. Let?s think it through in advance. What?s the harm in that? Medicine has always been slow to adopt new techniques. It?s an inevitable part of the process. Just look at poor Semmelweis.
I would reply yes, I know. It?s already far too slow. If anything, that increases the sense of urgency. Do we really want to pile yet another layer of gluey, obstructionist bureaucracy atop the glacially slow mess we already have? Do we really want an ultimately ineffectual moratorium putting the brakes on a promising avenue of research? Well, some of us do and some of us don?t. And we may never talk our way to a compromise. Look at the level of discourse we?d be up against?

Cloning is an evil; and cloning for the purpose of research actually exacerbates the evil by countenancing the willful destruction of nascent human life. Moreover, it proposes doing this on a mass scale, as an institutionalized and routinized undertaking to extract medical benefits for those who have greater power. It is slavery plus abortion…Is it either incorrect or misleading or unhelpful to see the dispute over cloning as of a piece with the slavery crisis and the abortion debate? And further, if the example of Lincoln is pertinent, then does talk of moral complexity and the intertwinedness of good and evil and the intractability of the issues make it harder to identify evil as evil and more likely that we will end up in Brave New World, where despotism masquerades as a conception of the good?

If various parties deliberately attempt to shut down embryonic stem cell research, those parties should at least be willing to acknowledge the possible human cost. Mostly, they don?t. Instead, they paint rosy pictures of adult stem cell research picking up the slack. That?s all we really need, they say, that embryonic stuff is just mad scientists running a con game. Not so fast, please.
Various reputable scientists have repeatedly, publicly (and truthfully) said that we need to study both kinds of stem cells. Both kinds. The research paths are mutually reinforcing and illuminating. To say that one or the other is unnecessary is something we simply don?t know at this point. We simply don?t know.
My personal preference is that we do whatever it takes (ethically, of course) to speed things along. If you have a particular problem with the sanctity of first month embryos there is very little I can do to ease your conscience. I don?t feel that way myself, nor do many other Americans. We just don?t see the problem. If I order a sturgeon fillet and my waiter brings me a shot glass full of caviar, have I been well served? No. That is not a sturgeon fillet on my plate. If I contested the matter with my waiter, I don?t think he could simply pour a jigger of milt in, and say ?Now it is!?
“A seed is not a tree.”
Of course, less controversial techniques will eventually come along. But it?s hard to predict when. At a wild guess?later than we would like. We should be using what tools we have now, all of them, to the best of our abilities. But we aren?t. As Reason, over at ?Fight Aging!? has pointed out time and again, there is a chilling effect on investment at work here. Private companies don?t want to spend dumpsters full of cash and then have their work declared illegal. It?s only prudence on their part to hang back a bit, waiting for a more settled legal situation. And as I?ve already said, a delay finding cures will end up costing lives.
It aggravates me that so many people profess to find death ennobling. It’s how we cope with death that’s ennobling, not the death itself. The fear that people would do nothing worthwhile without that constant spur of mortality urging them on strikes me as foolish gloomy hearsay. There are plenty of other spurs to get people up and moving. Love and lust. Poverty and peer pressure. Curiosity. Showing off. Mercy. We might find people building more cathedrals, not fewer, if they had a chance to see their projects all the way through.
For a fact, I have known many old people still in good health to be resistant to new endeavors. They tell me that they don?t have enough time left to make it worth their while. It?s sad. Then too, many younger people stick it out with a dead end job, or even a lucrative trade that they hate, because they feel that they have ?come too far to turn back?. They have commitments, and can?t afford the time and money it would take to re-skill. Or so I hear. How conducive to creativity and human flourishing is that? I would change all that, if I could. Others are more conservative.
Daniel Moore wants to defend our humanity, to keep us human, surely a laudable goal. But on closer inspection, how exactly does one go about such a thing? What real world actions do you have to take to ?keep man man?? If all you are talking about is ?friendly persuasion,? then we really don?t need a government program. We already have the first amendment. Talk away, and good luck to you! But what if you actually wanted to be effective? You would need to take steps.
A more muscular policy might look a lot like arresting or heavily fining scientists and doctors for illicit research (as defined by legislators and advocated by some bioethicists). You would also want to maintain a comprehensive real-time database of who is doing what in the research community. Government monitors might need no-knock warrants on request, along with wiretaps and computer surveillance.
Since customers would be willingly complicit in such activities, to be truly effective, penalties would probably need to extend down to the end-user level. So defending our humanity would also look a lot like arresting people for trying to purchase life-extending therapies for themselves or their families. Suppressing enhancement technologies might require much the same tactics. The end result of these policies would be to force such people to use offshore providers.
Interestingly, our farsighted congress is way ahead of such miscreants. If memory serves, Sam Brownback has been trying to pass a law forbidding American citizens from using embryonic stem cell therapy abroad. Uncle Sam takes an interest in his citizen?s doings wherever they may be. I can?t imagine that this is what Daniel has in mind, but if he is serious about getting the job done, I don?t see anything less being effective.
If you?re not willing to accept a police state, you should probably be more accepting of change. Incarceration is even more aggravating than a ?national conversation?.
Do we really need this ?national conversation?? What?s the point, anyway? Schaub and Kass can make up stories about how bad things will be. Someone like me can make up stories about how good things will be. In the worst case, they could tell each other such stories for years on end, talking past each other, never achieving anything solid or meaningful.
People could, I suppose, continue to live their short diseased lives, dying young, waiting for a consensus that never arrives, and for what? At the end of that time we would still have reached no firm conclusions. We would have no facts. Just opinions. Great bales of opinions, neatly typed and attractively bound. The only way to be sure, to really know, is to run the experiment.

…the perception of endless time or of time without bound in fact has the possibility of undermining the degree to which we take time seriously and make it count…And so the question would be…is there some connection between the limits that we face and the desire for greatness that comes from recognition that we are only here for a short time?…If you push those limits back, if those limits become out of sight, we are not inclined to build cathedrals or write the B Minor Mass, or write Shakespeare’s sonnets and things of that sort…

So we make the leap from “has the possibility” and “is there some connection?” to “we are not inclined to” within a couple of brief paragraphs. Certitude on the half-shell, rising like Aphrodite from the foam of airy disquisition. Saltation indeed.
So we’ll stop building cathedrals? Stop writing great music, great poetry? What if the simple act of living longer does in fact rob us of something ineffable and precious?
Here’s a fair question. What if it doesn’t?