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[Frumple]

... good gods, could have have chosen a worse named company to manufacture highly intrusive scanners? That's like... I can't see how that's anything but a PR nightmare. One easily shifted syllable...

Anyway, less cancer-inducing voyeur machines in use is a good thing, I guess.

[penguinofhonor]

Is Rapiscan also producing the new machines? Because it'll be awfully convenient if they get paid twice for this.

[Descan]

Wait. What? Rapiscan and TSA? Rape-scan and TnA?

Please tell me Rapiscan is a joke. Please. Pleeeeease. It's like a bad porno movie come to life. :I

[Nadaka]

No, Rape-scan really is the name of the porno viewer used on children in every airport.

But don't worry, if you don't like it they will allow you to choose a full body grope down with minimal cavity penetration.

[penguinofhonor]

A sort of response to the Suzanne Moore deal, only really that notable for being published in the Guardian. I guess that says something about the Guardian's editing, though whether they're realizing they made a mistake, presenting both sides of the issue, or trying to save face, I'm not sure.

[lorb]

By my reading it is quite a fine article. I do think it is very sensitive of her to compare the surgery trans woman undergo to the surgery women with breast cancer sometimes undergo to have breasts again.
qft:

Trans women, like so many women who have had breast cancer, sometimes need the help of surgeons, because it is helpful for one's social body to support and confirm one's biological identity, not contradict it.

That's why it's so awful to talk of trans women as men who have been castrated. Such people are women who have had the biological misfortune to have been born with bodies that are out of kilter with the much more complex biology of their female minds. That too, is why the trans community prefers people not to talk of being biologically or born female as opposed to trans female. Trans people are biologically or born female, but with detail of the flesh that traduces their ability to be physically and socially accepted for what they are.

[penguinofhonor]

Yeah, it's definitely a good article and I enjoyed it. I was mostly just posting it because people were questioning the Guardian's editing quality a couple pages back.

[Owlbread]

I'm sorry for changing the subject here quite radically, but have you gentlemen heard from that American professor who is rather keen on cloning a Neanderthal baby?

http://www.themarysue.com/neanderthal-baby-surrogate/

I'm actually very excited about this, even though he isn't actually working on it just now. It's just "possible". We should definitely take decades to plan it if it can actually be done, but I think we have the opportunity to reinvent mankind. It's just such a shame we don't really have artificial wombs; the woman in question would probably die from a baby with a head that size coming out sideways. It would probably be a guaranteed caesarean.

Problems I've heard being referred to are things like lack of disease resistance, lack of development in the left side of the brain, badly developed larynx, possibly dying after birth and so forth. Maybe we can overcome these.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Interesting but ethically dangerous. We don't know much of anything about Neanderthals compared to Sapiens, socially speaking. The doctor in question's belief in a Neanderthal culture is pretty unlikely. Firstly, we'd have to have thousands of Neanderthal surrogate births to even have an independent group that wouldn't immediately drift apart and breed with the much larger Sapiens population instead. Secondly, an independent culture would take at least a generation to form (almost certainly more), as the first revived Neanderthals would necessarily have to be raised by Sapiens and thus pick up the culture of whomever is raising them.

I don't even want to think about how religious groups would react to this. I can see it all now: "Neanderthals don't have souls, so it's OK to enslave them, they're only animals!"

[FearfulJesuit]

I personally feel like this definitely ventures into the territory of Things Man Was Not Meant to Do.

[Owlbread]

I don't think man is "meant" to do anything beyond procreation, which isn't exactly governed by an external force other than instinct. Morality, ethics, it's all a human construction that is ultimately superficial. That isn't to say however that we should abandon the majority of our current morals; I wouldn't want to live in a society where it was considered "ok" to kill another human being because they have something that you want, or hurt people for fun and so forth.

One "Moral" that I think we should abandon though is the prejudice against playing god. I believe that there is no god; we are the closest things to god, possibly in the universe if there are no other sentient beings. If we don't play god to better ourselves and the world around us, nothing else will and we'll never really reach our full potential. There's no gods, no masters, only imaginary ones that we've created over time because we just don't understand the full extent of our power and are fearful of it; fearful of the mistakes we might make. I say that's nonsense; man, with extreme care and planning, can accomplish truly great things.

[Frumple]

Only thing man was not meant to do is what man can't.  Or possibly what man decides not to do. Only thing dictating mankind's actions is the laws of physics and our own bloody selves.

As for the cloning... be neat if it works. Doubtful it'll go anywhere or if there's any general benefit from having the lesser sophant around again (for either group, because if there's anything our innate xenophobia wants to have around it's an actual other species ), but hey, one way to find out! The eternal experimental endeavor: Poke it with a stick and see what happens.

[RedKing]

I'd repost the Caveman Science-Fiction comic, but that would be strangely meta in this case.

I'm not real comfortable with the idea either. As MSH said, because this would in fact be a different species from us, I think there would be a lot of impetus to see them as "sub-human" (literally) and thus not given the rights of humans.

One potential ethical quandry: medical testing. "Hey, these guys are 99.99% a genetic match for us! They'll be an even better subject for modelling experiments than pigs or lab rats or even chimps!"

[Owlbread]

Only thing man was not meant to do is what man can't.  Or possibly what man decides not to do. Only thing dictating mankind's actions is the laws of physics and our own bloody selves.

As for the cloning... be neat if it works. Doubtful it'll go anywhere or if there's any general benefit from having the lesser sophant around again (for either group, because if there's anything our innate xenophobia wants to have around it's an actual other species ), but hey, one way to find out! The eternal experimental endeavor: Poke it with a stick and see what happens.

Man can do almost anything with science. We just need to find out how.

I also think if this is handled correctly our innate xenophobia wouldn't be a problem. Maybe I'm optimistic, but I foresee a world with a minority that consider the neanderthals monsters and a majority who accept them warmly. The real test will be to see how sentient they are; if they're walking, talking creatures (which may not be the case) then I think it will dispel a lot of the "monster" accusations. I wouldn't recommend making a lot of them anyway, preferably create them in a lab somewhere out in a military base in an extremely secret location, but heavily televised to ensure the military don't make them into super soldiers or something, and the world can keep track of how they're doing - and more importantly what the respective government is doing. Perhaps don't even tell the neanderthals we're watching them; just give them a degree of privacy so they don't get embarassed when they find out.

I'd repost the Caveman Science-Fiction comic, but that would be strangely meta in this case.

I'm not real comfortable with the idea either. As MSH said, because this would in fact be a different species from us, I think there would be a lot of impetus to see them as "sub-human" (literally) and thus not given the rights of humans.

One potential ethical quandry: medical testing. "Hey, these guys are 99.99% a genetic match for us! They'll be an even better subject for modelling experiments than pigs or lab rats or even chimps!"

I believe that could be solved if we could create mindless bags of flesh that could be subjected to experiments as an alternative. It would be unspeakably expensive (presumably) to grow loads and loads of neanderthals for medical research anyway, or breed them. This wouldn't be a problem if we kept the number very low - i.e. about 10.

The sub human problem could be solved through public information campaigns, amendments to various documents at the UN to make sure that neanderthals are considered members of humanity for all intents and purposes (crimes against neanderthals are crimes against humanity). I have faith in the new, tolerant (when compared with 100 years ago) developed world that we would not be the bane of their existence.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I don't think man is "meant" to do anything beyond procreation, which isn't exactly governed by an external force other than instinct. Morality, ethics, it's all a human construction that is ultimately superficial. That isn't to say however that we should abandon the majority of our current morals; I wouldn't want to live in a society where it was considered "ok" to kill another human being because they have something that you want, or hurt people for fun and so forth.

Some ideas of what are moral are social constructions, but not all. Evolution instills certain moral values as a matter of course. A species that kills its own members under too wide of circumstances will collapse in population and not survive. A social species where theft is acceptable will fail to develop even the most basic barter economy.

The real test will be to see how sentient they are; if they're walking, talking creatures (which may not be the case) then I think it will dispel a lot of the "monster" accusations.

We don't know quite everything about Neanderthals, but I assure you that we know they had thought and language. At the end of the day, we just ended up being the more adaptable species. They can't be all that different from us, because remnants Neanderthal DNA is found all throughout Sapiens DNA, and there's no cognitive difference between those with and those without. Plus, species capable of fertile interbreeding must by definition be very similar.

I wouldn't recommend making a lot of them anyway, preferably create them in a lab somewhere out in a military base in an extremely secret location, but heavily televised to ensure the military don't make them into super soldiers or something, and the world can keep track of how they're doing. Perhaps don't even tell them we're watching them.

You're talking about not discriminating against them, and then saying we should keep them locked up?