Reclaim Byzantium!

@Timcast, the civility you seek doesn’t appear on the ballot; no choice on it will reverse the trend.

Actions have consequences:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SA0R

Women stating "pay me or I'll say you raped me" are practicing extortion - a crime in many places. Men would do well to get it recorded or documented and go to the police immediately to file a report.

Who in their right mind would debate that?

Debate what?

So far as the numbers of founded vs. unfounded reports, that we will never know. Unfounded reports include intentionally filed false reports as well as ones which turned out not to have occurred but the victim may have had reason to believe it did. Examples of this is if you are drunk, have sex and black out recalling nothing. You can't know if you had drunk sex in which you were a willing participant or if you were taken advantage of while passed out. Both things do occur. In other cases it might be for example if you had parked your vehicle and return to discover it missing. The presumption made is that someone stole it but it also could have been towed, repossessed or relocated due to an event.

Then we also can't know how many reports are founded when it comes to this. The nature of the crime means there will seldom be video or audio. Any outside interaction may not be representative of what occurred behind closed doors. Through further interaction fences can be mended and bridges burned.

Further any evidence gained doesn't immediately indicate a crime as regular sexual intercourse can cause the very same things, tenderness, soreness, tearing and so on. Some men and women also enjoy things a bit risqué which people might think were criminal. It ends up being she said and he said. So some reports may indeed be marked unfounded not because a crime didn't occur but because we lack evidence to say one did. Visa versa, circumstances could indicate one occurred when one in fact didn't.

You end up with a situation where few are proven one way or another while the vast majority linger due to insufficient information. Then those in either side could very well be wrongly placed merely due to circumstance. It's not something we'll ever have truly accurate numbers for. The best way to handle the situation though is to continue investigating claims as crimes until we have more information but record them differently. Instead of recording them as these crimes occurred record them as this many allegations have been levied. Then break it down further by how many were convicted and how many reports are marked unfounded.

A topic came up in general chat, thought the question would be better put here.

Why do people think eugenics is evil?

It's a critical part of almost all our biological infrastructure.

Yeah it is a better space for it. I'm not exactly *for* it but I know its a possibility again.

Memes will eventually be our main source of communication by 2050

Or sooner

Isn't abortion a form of eugenics?

I suppose it could be considered a facet of.

Abortion is indiscriminate, unless used purposefully to avoid things like downs

Generally my understanding is most of the work is done before that's come about.

But thats exactly it, eugenics won't be an idea that comes up from the libertarians or conservatives, as people think. it'll actually be the left.

You don't shoot unfit cows, you carefully breed ones with the qualities you want.

Right. So people don't have issues with the concept, they're just concerned that it would be misused?

it'll be the ones who dont mind abortions and while they say they love disabled people, will understand they can't uphold the economy unless a few fall on the sword

At this point we are just better off waiting for gene therapy rather than developing legal eugenics for the present day.

If you carefully breed cows you tend to shoot the weak ones less because there are less weak ones.

well yeah, gene expression is a cute way of enacting eugenics

I think the only moral and ethical way to handle gene therapy is to be indiscriminate in its application to health and capabilities.

I don't want a GATTACA society that has a society stratified based on genes.

I'd say as long as it weeds out diseases and disabilities I'm all for it. If people suck after birth for reasons of their own doing i'm cool with that.

I mean, if genes influence our performance, then any meritocratic society is at least going to be partly stratified based on genes.

But you cant' really have a laissez faire society and yet have such strict foundations.

Playing with eugenics would be perhaps the most dangerous power we could ever acquire.

a teifling has rights too!

We cannot give over are own genes over to capitalism and consumerism.

Any gene-therapy we do should be as available as a vaccine.

I'd agree, but it would come from a government level wouldn't it? At least thats what science fiction would propose. I'm usually very pro market, even when it comes to health care, but genetics is something everyone should have an equal foot on just as nature intended.

Imagine the conspiracy theories that people will come up with then...

About all the things they do to our genes. Like making us drones and genetically subservient beings.

Romansh should become the new lingua franca.

Change my mind.

Eugenics was very popular in 1900s America and really worldwide. It was closely tied to the popularity of Darwinism at the time.

A number of the early abortionists were actually very, very big on eugenics (most well known being Margaret Sanger--founder of Planned Parenthood--were very much in favor of performing eugenics to wipe out classes of people.

Eugenics, along with a number of related concepts like Social Darwinism, were extremely popular for awhile (at least among the upper classes) until the Holocaust left a bad taste in everyone's mouth and it all fell out of favor.

If you go around certain places (like universities) and pose as the right people and ask the right questions, you can still find a number of eugenicists (primarily on the left in my experience, but considering this is academia there's a bit of a sampling bias). Typically they arrive at population control as an environmental necessity and approach it from that angle (there's just not much need to preserve all those hill billy rednecks, ya'know?)