The Daily Hate

[inkstersco]

I was passing a newspaper stall yesterday, when I noticed a headline on the front page of the Daily Mail, saying:

" As first British child designed to be cancer-free is born, critics ask: Where will the meddling end? ".

This exemplifies nicely the foulness of the Daily Mail. Cancer has been half-cured, and the first thing the Mail do is find

Comments

[inkstersco]

Why is one hardship, illness, good, and another hardship, overcrowding, bad? You say that there ought to be some suffering, and yet your argument against curing all illness is that it would cause 'worldwide suffering', in the form of overcrowding. Why wouldn't this overcrowing also help heat the diamond?

What does ruffle my feathers is when people romanticise all the worst things in the world.

In a overcrowing scenario, we can either blame health, or blame childbirth. One or the other has to go or be reduced. The way I see it, that's childbirth. It's visceral.

When it comes to goodness and badness, people dying horribly is a bad end in itself. It makes no sense to say it's a useful means to something good.

>I do not equate aging with illness the way you do, but older people do develop frailer bodies, and after 80-90 years I'd be wanting to move on to a new lifetime in a fresher body, anyway.

This is not the relevant scenario, because that increasing frailty is a part of the same package of illness that I condemn. When the symptomes of old age happen prematurely, it gets called 'progeria', and is considered a disease. 'Premature' is based on the medical profession's own idea of what constitutes an ideal lifespan for you, the patient.

--Iain

[shady_heaven]

**Why is one hardship, illness, good, and another hardship, overcrowding, bad? ... Why wouldn't this overcrodwing also help heat the diamond?**

They are both bad. Period. But overcrowding is worse because it ALSO leads to illness and the suffering of millions of OTHER living things as we kill them and destroy their habitats, whereas ( human ) illness DOES NOT also lead to overcrowding and death to non-humans. And yes, overcrowding is one of those issues that help heat the diamond of our souls, it's just the hardship I happen to hate the most, more than any other in the world. So my personal bias is coming into play here as well and I should re-phrase my earlier statement: in my personal opinion, for ME, having lots of maladies to deal with is better than overcrowding.

The latter is my personal opinion, but it'll take a pretty solid argument to convince me the former isn't fact.

I agree with you that people are having too many kids and should slow down. Only in most parts of the world they *haven't* been, and even in the most optimistic scenarios this certainly isn't *helping* humankind or Mother Earth.

**...people dying horribly is a bad end in itself. It makes no sense to say it's a useful means to something good.**

I get the feeling that you are under the impression I think illnesses are a good thing. I don't. I just understand why they're vital to maintaining the balance. As for saying that it "makes no sense" to say it's a useful means to something good, the way I see it it makes perfect sense. I understand and appreciate your point of view, but I don't share it.

I'm not fond of aging any more than you are, I just don't put it in the same compartment as "Illness" in my mind. The reason is because I see illnesses as avoidable and aging as inavoidable.

I don't believe in romanticizing all the worst things in the world either, but things are rarely "pure good" or "pure bad". Because I'm more of a thinker than a feeler, and rely so heavily on analytical logic when attempting to make sense of the world around me, I find that I'm always looking for shadows in the sun and sun in the shadows. Simply put, if we HAVE to have something bad, isn't it better for SOME good to come of it than NO good?

[inkstersco]

But that is all partly a moot point, because perfect worldwide health need not lead to overcrowding anyway. In a world without illness, I believe we'd feel pretty reasonably compelled to restrict childbirth, rather than allow sickness. Furthermore, restrictions on childbirth would not seem very draconian, because in a world without, say, menopause or frailty, people would choose to have children less frequently(deadlines are taken away).

" I get the feeling that you are under the impression I think illnesses are a good thing. I don't. I just understand why they're vital to maintaining the balance. "

But for whose benefit does the balance exist? The balance only matters because beings are alive to benefit from that balance. Slavery maintains a balanced society, but that's besides the point because the only beneficiaries of that balance are the slaveholders and their equals. Slavery may benefit society, but the very fact of slavery is in itself a gross immorality. Likewise, for people to die to make room for people who needn't be conceived in the first place, doesn't make sense to me.

" I see illnesses as avoidable and aging as inavoidable. "

I'd like to call both those claims into question. Beware that social mantras on that topic are very misleading. Let's consider the inherent qualities of both an illness and old age.

We have not, as yet, cured cancer. It would be _somewhat_ reasonable of us to assume that cancer, an illness, is incurable. After all, God knows we've tried hard, with all our might and money, to cure it, and we've only ever made dents in the problem. I'm not saying it is incurable, but at least our experience has given us grounds for pessimism. Then you've got the whole mutation thing going on, that makes cancer almost unmanageable. Cancer is fundamentally very elusive. Curable, maybe, but maybe not.

Now contrast this with aged-ness(as opposed to aging). Ok, you can't cure aging(its too integral), but one can repair aged-ness. It is a very miscellaneous assortment of tissue damages. Like wounds. The problem isn't as _slippery_ as cancer. You've partly unaged an old man when you implant a young man's heart in him. It's not a fundamentally elusive problem. Through miscellaneous acts of repair, one offsets the aging process without specifically trying to. When I think about the prospects of regenerative medicine, and the artificial creation of organs, I predict that the choice between overcrowding and restrictions on childbirth will creep up on us, as we sleepwalk into a scenario in which such repair becomes commonplace.

--Iain