Yea that would probably never happen. Only because the autonomy over ones own body is something people actively fight for. Also partly why Planned Parenthood thrived outside of the views of Margaret Sanger and her biases in eugenics. People had a choice based on their own desires on whether or not they wanted the child, she wasn't going around forcing people to not have children she just encouraged it. A choice made under propaganda is still a choice in many eyes.
Honestly Curious: By done Ethically I'm assuming you mean not like that Nazis and mass genocide of whole populations of peoples. But would you go as far as Margaret Sanger who set up Planned Parenthood with ideas of helping to keep the "unfit" from having babies, namely in her time that was the poor black population? Because to a certain affect I agree, while I am more a proponent of population growth control.
Agreed. It's no one's place to tell another human being how to think, act, dress. As long as they are not harming others you have no say in their lives no matter who you are or what you personally believe. To me that's not up for debate.
Well that's stupid. I love knowing how old my actors/actresses are.
This was a crazy read, and I agreed with about 98% of it, the last 2% I just don't think I understand.
See to me John Metta used reason and logic to make his argument, but then says how it's racist? to talk about facts the way a white man wants to and he losses me. Now don't get me wrong it was an interesting read I learned a lot but it's a weird argument to make when he uses so little emotion to make the point. He walked you through a history, one whites would understand, explained how that history still affects us today, and then ended by saying how this pertains to the black community in western societies today.
Maybe it's just me but that was a mostly factual argument and not very emotional in the same way, for the basis of his whole argument was grounded in a historical fact and then he uses common day examples to prove his overall thesis. That's what confuses me, while he does this he then talks about how he doesn't want to talk in mostly factual language and instead wants to talk emotionally. Sure there's emotion in this speech but that is kinda drowned out by the factual base that his argument was placed on.
Maybe that's just all on me though and how I view things. Maybe I just have a lack of understanding on what is considered factual and what is considered emotional in a discussion.
Consciousness has always been an interesting topic to me. What is consciousness, where does it come from, what happens to it after we die. I feel because we are so intimately connected to our consciousness it’s hard for anyone to think about not having it thus we ask questions about it and what it means.
At one point I thought of consciousness as something larger than thou. When I was religious and was thinking of how you can possible go to heaven or hell, not necessarily as a body but as a soul, I felt that the mere mention that one had a soul was where the conscious being resided. For if your soul was the thing being rewarded or punished, and it was through your own consciousness that you are able to do anything, then your soul must either hold your consciousness or actually be consciousness itself.
But that was when I was religious and I actually believed in a place like Heaven or Hell. Later in life I left such places behind as fantasy because the more I understood them the more terrifying a prospect such places became to me. To be alive for eternity either being tortured for actions you actually have no real way to rectify or be rewarded by honoring a God you don’t think you deserves it, the mere idea is preposterous to me.
Even still I believed in souls and consciousness so I came up with a new fantasy of what happens after death. It went something like, the soul would be released from the body able to travel the universe unbound by the earthly body you were born with. Which as I learned about the man brain became a preposterous notion to me. Then I started to believe that you necessarily are not conscious yourself and instead what we were all experiencing was the consciousness of the Universe, which is starting to leave my sensibilities as well but it was an interesting thought.
Recently I have been exploring the ideas on weather or not humans have free will, I’m leaning towards we don’t. This has restarted my ideas on what consciousness is and what it means. I enjoy Sam Harris’s ideas on consciousness and the idea that we actually have no free will to make decisions in our lives makes sense to me to a certain extent. I do believe day to day you don’ have a say in what happens to you, the people around you, from one aspect of your day to the next you don’t really have control over it. Thus to a large extent no, you don’t have the freedom to impose your will on the world that is outside of the norm of what could be and will be allowed. That being said I think you also have the ability to drastically change you’re own life and thus change the lives of others around you, which in part it a semblance of free will. But this also takes a strong willed person, who wants to go against the grind of everyone else and wants to drastically change their course in life.
Now to me consciousness comes into the picture because it is the monologue that you give your self to make sense of what it going on around you. On some level you can understand that you are not acting on the world but the world is acting on you, you don’t really have a say in what happens to you from point A to point B, but you are a selfish being and you need a consciousness to help you think that you are acting on the world. To me being selfish is far from a negative. It’s what keeps you alive, and in this your consciousness it the thing telling you that eating is a good thing because you like pizza so you want pizza and thus you order pizza, its a conscious decision.
But it’s not. Not really. You like pizza because your taste buds have a preference to pizza, your taste buds have a preference because of all the options available to you pizza fulfills something that your body desires. It’s based on where you live, your family, your friends, and every action taken upon you that makes you even like pizza. Then on no particular day you get hungry, that’s not something you can necessarily control. Thus on this particular day, your hungry, you have the $ for pizza, you live somewhere you can buy pizza, you like pizza, you don’t see anything wrong with pizza, thus you order and eat pizza. You don’t think all this in the moment you order pizza, but a part of you does and to simplify the process of explaining why you want pizza your consciousness decrees. “I want pizza.”
And that’s in the best way I can explain is what I think consciousness is. It’s not something magical, it’s not something out of this world, it’s not separate from you. Its a skill your body has developed, its you reasoning skills simplified in a way that you can easily understand.



The Unpopular/Popular OpinionI think that Eugenics might actually be a good idea, if done ethically.Oct 08, 2016 at 3:52 PM

