John Oliver's Last Week Tonight

It's disappointing that the only rational candidate sounds like he'd be more at home in a college lecture hall than as leader of a major nation. I don't mean to throw shade at Obama, who was well-known for giving speeches that sounded a lot like academic lectures, but at least he had charisma.

edited 25th Jun '18 1:04:37 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I will accept no shade thrown on this adorkable musician!!

I do admit Amlo is...tempting.

Sign on for this After The End Fantasy RP.

An overview of genetic editing technologies, particularly CRISPR.

As an autistic man, I'm very glad they brought up (starting around 14:45) the potential moral issues involving using genetic editing to "treat" disabilities such as deafness and dwarfism, and the viewpoint of many people with these conditions that using gene editing to wipe out these conditions has uncomfortably eugenic undertones.

♭What.

Well, those are disabilities. I don't want to enter into the politics of how society as a whole should regard people who have such conditions, but I'm willing to bet that not everyone who grows up with autism, dwarfism, and so on is happy about them.

This isn't like sexuality or gender identity which don't affect a person's general ability to function absent social prejudice.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 2nd 2018 at 7:29:31 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Yeah, but how long before that’s considered a problem too? If someone told a gay man or woman, a victim of oppression and the like, that we had a magic injection that could make them straight, and let them find a nice opposite sex partner like Mom and Dad always wanted, would they take it?

This is heavy, HEAVY stuff. And if that box is opened, it’s not getting closed again.

Edited by Beatman1 on Jul 2nd 2018 at 7:36:02 AM

I never said it wasn't a big deal. It's a huge deal, one that calls into question our basic concepts of individuality and identity. I'm not in favor of kneejerk responses for or against, though.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 2nd 2018 at 7:35:16 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

@Fighteer:

Of course. If individuals feel like altering their own conditions is preferable, then they should absolutely have that right. But we really should. The idea that just because a condition affects someone's ability to function, that that means people with that kind of condition should be prevented from existing in the future is... not universally accepted.

♭What.

I get it. It’s just that any talk about screwing with nature’s building blocks will need a lot of time to finish.

A genetic condition that affects you from birth... you can't retroactively decide that you would rather not have it. That's not in the cards. However, you might be able to make a choice about passing it on to your children. Is that something we should allow?

Unborn children can't make choices. It is irrational to make any decision on the basis of what those children, grown to maturity, would or would not prefer. We stand up for the right of a mother to abort her pregnancy, don't we, regardless of reason? But we don't allow eugenics: the pre-selection of traits in unborn children.

It's a weird cultural dichotomy. You can choose whether your child lives to be born, but not whether they have autism or epilepsy? It's not like the child chooses either way.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 2nd 2018 at 7:45:24 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Yeah, nobody can honestly tell me that being deaf is NOT a disability, and I have first hand experience with what it means for people if they lose their hearing. One could argue that body size necessarily isn't but, well, I was reminded of a House episode. Basically it turns out that the daughter of a woman with dwarfism actually doesn't inherited her genetic condition but instead has some treatable illness which would allow her to grow up to a normal seize eventually. What stuck to me is a scene in which House asks the mother if he pride is really worth it that he daughter will spend the rest of her live "sniffing other people's ass".

And I mean, that is kind of the point isn't it? It is all well and good to say "I am proud of what I am" if you don't have a choice in the matter. But if you do have the choice or you can at the very least make the choice for your child? Is it really on us to take the choice away from people?

Edited by Swanpride on Jul 2nd 2018 at 4:44:20 AM

As I understand it, the general school of thought is that mothers have a right to an abortion because it's their bodily autonomy being exercised. Would that be a factor with a child born with a disability?

Oh God! Natural light!

We allow mothers to abort pregnancies if the fetus has a genetic defect... or rather, we allow abortions for any reason including the detection of genetic defects. It's not that much of a leap to allow a mother to decide that her child will not be born with a genetic defect if said defect can be treated in utero or even pre-conception.

In terms of burden, caring for a child with a disability can be a life-changing event above and beyond the mere fact of child-rearing, and not everyone is up to the task. Isn't that at least part of the justification for allowing abortion: the fact that unwanted children or children whose parents can't afford to support them will grow up in suffering? Adoption exists but the capacity of the adoption system to handle children with disabilities is vanishingly slim.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 2nd 2018 at 7:48:56 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Not sure about how other countries handle it, but while abortion has been done within a particular time frame in Germany, abortion for medical reasons can be done pretty much anytime...and that includes the child having a serious genetic defect (usually that applies to down syndrome). If we are comfortable with that, shouldn't we be just as comfortable with allowing mothers to give birth to a healthy child instead?

I mean, there is a LOT of room between "let nature decide" and freaking Attica.

Heh, I think you mean Gattaca. And yes, that's sort of the point being made: there's a wide gulf between mandatory government selection for tall white people with blue eyes and curing Down's Syndrome.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Yeah, thanks. (I am really bad with names).

There’s also a big difference between changing people who already exist and changing potential people who may exist. I wouldn’t want someone to ‘cure’ me of being autistic, but I don’t have the same opposition to the idea that my parents could have chosen to have me not be born with it. Nothing is being taken from me if it’s done before there’s a me.

Thing is we run into the basic issue of how we define disability, there are strong arguments being made that certain mental disabilities (ADHD, ASD, ect...) are also advantages in some areas and as such should be considered an alternative way of being instead of an illness, much the same way homosexuality moved from being considered an illness to an equal and alternative way of being.

"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran

Even with autism, there's a wide spectrum of disability, from people who are entirely functional if a bit "odd" to folks like, well, a certain recurring vandal, who are completely incapable of functioning in society.

I highly doubt you'd be as comfortable with your status if your only ability to interact with people was by making inarticulate noises and banging your head on walls. Again, I do not mean any ill towards such people; I'm just saying that I don't think they'd choose to be that way.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 2nd 2018 at 10:27:31 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Exactly. Even on the spectrum of autism, there's a lot of variation. For simplicity's sake, we'll just say 'high functioning' and 'low functioning'. People that are high functioning might only know because of a doctor's visit and their social life might know only via them mentioning it in conversation. Thus the actual affect of the autism on a person's life might be minimal.

But then there are low functioning cases like one of my cousins. He's in his thirties, cannot communicate except in loud groans and screams and even then very little of it is genuine communication, watches Thomas the Tank Engine over and over and over again, he's massive with a lot of muscle, and he cannot live at home with his parents and his parents pay for an apartment with special nurses to care for him 24/7. And even THAT hasn't worked out because he's repeatedly destroyed apartments and even held or restrained his nurses (resulting in them obviously quitting). Its a really tough situation and there are no good answers to the problem.

Not to mention the conversation has come up that his parents are getting older and might one day be unable to oversee his care let alone be around to, well, actually hire, pay for, and ensure care is being administered. What happens to him then?

Based on my experience of watching that side of my family have these conversations and try to care for him... Is this really a way of living? And I'm speaking from the more human experience idea of living. Is someone who has to live like this actually living? Is preventing someone from not being born like this really worth it in the long run? Even if it is a small percent of the population who are like this?

I am high-functioning Autistic, and above-average intelligent. I have no idea how much of one affects the other, but I fear that getting rid of the former would adversely affect the latter. In fact, many Autistic people, whether high or low functioning, have secret genius talents just because their brains are wired differently. Like that one guy who can't communicate verbally, but he can effortlessly remember and replicate on a piano any music tune he hears.

It's also worth noting that many non-verbal autistics are capable of communicating via computers and have made it clear that they oppose so-called cures for their autism.

And on top of the many many ethics questions, there's also the practical question of accidentally deleting desirable traits that are connected to undesirables. Many people with autism have strong skills in other areas; if they weren't autistic, would they still have those skills? Some genetic diseases like weak bone diseases are linked to resistance to other, worse diseases. So on and so on.

The point I'm trying to make is that the human genome is millions of years of incompetent bug testing, and I think we should probably study it a bit more before we just start ripping out bits of code. Hell, our own website's recent problems show what happens when you jump the gun on reprogramming something.

The severity of Autism is to my knowledge something that is not detectable in the womb. And if we were to ever get to the point where we actually could essentially have a blueprint of how someone would develop, AND be able to safely and accurately change certain traits without inadvertently messing something, how far fetched is it that people could undergo gene therapy as if it were plastic surgery latter in life?

Don't catch you slippin' now.

Eh...is autism even detectable? I mean, we aren't even able to diagnose it in many cases, and as far as I know nobody really knows what causes it either (or if there is even a connection between autism and high intelligence...I have read that there is a lot of doubt regarding that question, too, because by far not everyone who is autistic is also particular intelligent).

Plus, shouldn't we start with the more obvious disabilities, like deafness or down syndrome and countless of other genetic illnesses, a number of which don't have a cure and will lead to an early dead, before we get to more complicated questions like "should we be able to design our children".

It's interesting, an episode of Star Trek: Voyager tackled the issue nearly 20 years ago. It was about Half-Human Hybrid Belanna Torres being pregnant and the doctor correcting a mild genetic birth defect in the womb, implying this was common practice with existing technology, and progressed to Torres looking to essentially erase her daughter's latent Klingon traits (as she would be 1/4 Klingon and still have forehead ridges). This, of course, came from her own history where her human father left the family in part because Belanna was too Klingon. A number of other Star Trek episodes have touched on similar topics.

I knew a family where they had a child with Downs Syndrome, and were well familiar with all the issues because the mother already worked in special needs. They told me that they actually put their child on a specialized diet, as some research indicated it would help her progress to a higher maturity level than was typical. I can't recall all the specifics, I think low-dairy was part of it, but it's only been in recent years I've understood how a particular diet can impact growth, body chemistry and behavior.

Gene editing in general will probably follow a similar path as with vaccines. The full scope of "what is the end result" will be debated endlessly, but standardized, successful applications will become the norm.

"standardized, successful applications will become the norm."

Exactly. Designer gene editing will probably remain something available only to the very wealthy into the foreseeable future, but we'll probably have standardized kits for treating a lot of crippling diseases.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"