Unfortunately the 'proles' of the press (main-stream-media) bellow in 'newspeak', which so muddies the communications water that no-one knows what is true or what is false and the 'playing field' has not only ceased to be level, it has turned itself on its head.
What is good has become 'bad' and what is bad has become 'good'.
We have recently witnessed 'philosopher/scientists' arguing for the murder of perfectly formed and functioning babies on the basis of financial affordability and/or the selectively selfish whims of the 'mother'. This one is the latest in a long string of further abominations:
The threat of global climate change has prompted us to redesign many of our technologies to be more energy-efficient. From lightweight hybrid cars to long-lasting LED's, engineers have made well-known products smaller and less wasteful. But tinkering with our tools will only get us so far, because however smart our technologies become, the human body has its own ecological footprint, and there are more of them than ever before. So, some scholars are asking, what if we could engineer human beings to be more energy efficient? A new paper to be published in Ethics, Policy & Environment proposes a series of biomedical modifications that could help humans, themselves, consume less....beware fatties and people of a 'larger' disposition:
Your paper also discusses the use of human engineering to make humans smaller. Why would this be a powerful technique in the fight against climate change?
Liao: Well one of the things that we noticed is that human ecological footprints are partly correlated with size. Each kilogram of body mass requires a certain amount of food and nutrients and so, other things being equal, the larger person is the more food and energy they are going to soak up over the course of a lifetime. There are also other, less obvious ways in which larger people consume more energy than smaller people---for example a car uses more fuel per mile to carry a heavier person, more fabric is needed to clothe larger people, and heavier people wear out shoes, carpets and furniture at a quicker rate than lighter people, and so on.
And so size reduction could be one way to reduce a person's ecological footprint. For instance if you reduce the average U.S. height by just 15cm, you could reduce body mass by 21% for men and 25% for women, with a corresponding reduction in metabolic rates by some 15% to 18%, because less tissue means lower energy and nutrient needs....and now to introduce the Huxlian; Brave New World component of 'Soma':
In the paper you also discuss the pharmacological enhancement of empathy and altruism, because empathy and altruism tend to be highly correlated with positive attitudes toward the environment. To me this one seems like it might be the most troubling. Isn't it more problematic to do biological tinkering to produce a belief, rather than simply engineering humans so that they are better equipped to implement their beliefs?
Liao: Yes. It's certainly ethically problematic to insert beliefs into people, and so we want to be clear that's not something we're proposing. What we have in mind has more to do with weakness of will. For example, I might know that I ought to send a check to Oxfam, but because of a weakness of will I might never write that check. But if we increase my empathetic capacities with drugs, then maybe I might overcome my weakness of will and write that check.Make no error, the global warming scam has never been about environmentalism but always about totalitarian power and who wields it. The above is a rebirth of the Nazi eugenics program...controlling spirits never die they just switch hosts.
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