At 11:27 AM 1/12/98 +0100, Anders wrote:
>> - but by golly what a gift to anyone who wished to instantly
>> dehumanise their labor force/army/fuckfarm etc.
>
>A very expensive way of dehumanise people, and it would take at least
>a decade to do so it is not that instant either. Somehow I think there
>are "better" methods of making dehumanised people.
`Instantly' was shorthand for `facilitate an instantaneous prejudiced
reaction toward'. I assume that cloning humans will not accelerate their
gestation or development, despite the silly way most mass media sf shows
this happening within hours or days. On the other hand, I'm not sure that
there *are* better ways of marking many, many people in a single step as a
despised and dehumanised out-group - except, perhaps, by infecting target
foetuses with a gene for green skin or silver hair.
Nor do I see why this `method' would be all that expensive, once cloning
technology is mature. But that isn't really my point - the issue is
whether cloning industrial quantities of a given genotype is likely to have
injurious psychic and social consequences, and I'm suggesting one that
might afflict these people *if* anyone decides to make that investment.
Damien Broderick
Received on Tue Jan 13 00:18:10 1998
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