3 ms·

It's not about murdering people. The problem is, if you support policies that disadvantage people based on their genetics, you can gradually dehumanize those pe

• mikeash 11y ago
  OK, but the gulf between that and "there is some genetic differences between the sexes" is still so large that you'd need a powerful telescope to see from one to the other.
  • Retra 11y ago
    And people with sexist and racist tendencies have those telescopes glued to their face.
  • zo1 11y ago
    As much as I disagree with your overall viewpoints, I'll agree on this one you have here. For a lot of individuals, the gap that you mention is huge such as to not have an immediate, explicit effect, and for one particular reason: Something as simple as validating and completely "accepting" the notion that "there is[sic] some genetic differences between the sexes" requires individuals to throw out entire swathes of subsequent ideas/notions/etc, if we were to be logical about things. I.e. You now have "Men and women are equal but ..." or "Men and women are equal except when...", instead of the pure and logically consistent "Men and women are equal". If you ask me, the entire thing (sex-differences topic) is starting to smell full of tiny errors and corner-cases. Perhaps we're on the verge of a paradigm shift happening once people clarify their ideas, without exceptions and acceptable-errors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift
    • mikeash 11y ago
      Equality isn't about people being literally identical. Nobody actually believes that. There are troubling facts like how men as a rule have a really hard time becoming pregnant that nobody denies. Equality is about equal treatment. It's about judging the individual on their own merits, not some group they happen to belong to. "Men and women are equal" doesn't mean women are equally muscular and men can have babies. It means that when writing a law, selecting an employee, or counting a vote, you don't change your approach based on whether the person is a man or a woman. There is nothing wrong with saying, for example, most of our warehouse workers are men because more men are able to do the heavy lifting required. There's nothing unequal about that. What equality demands is that you never say, I will not consider you for a warehouse job, regardless of your actual strength, because you are a woman and all women are too weak for it. It's not actually that complicated IMO.
• douche 11y ago
  But if you are disadvantaging people that have objectively inferior genetics? Do you actually lose anything? Otherwise, are those people taking advantage of medical advances that prevent their deficiencies from being fatal?
  • mikeash 11y ago
    What does "objectively inferior" mean?
    • douche 11y ago
      Celiacs, for instance, seem to be a group that in previous generations succumbed to their condition, if not directly than indirectly because of general unfitness. To be honest, as a survivor of childhood lymphoma, I ought to be dead, had I been born even 25 years earlier. I question whether my genetics have enough offsetting benefits to counter that predisposition to life-threatening cancer for any of my offspring.
      • mikeash 11y ago
        Advanced medical care is part of the environment in a first-world country now. I'm sure a fish would think us genetically inferior for our dependence on air to live, but we don't see it that way. A dependence on advanced medical care is ultimately no different. Assuming civilization doesn't collapse, I'd expect various dependencies on medical treatment to gradually arise in the population, but there's nothing objectively wrong with that.