Prejudice in science fiction
quote:
Originally posted by Mayaxiong:
Those who don’t or can’t have something, often try to destroy it for others out of jealousy. [img]images/smiles/icon_sad.gif[/img]
I’m not jealous at all. I have never pursued a sexual relationship because I’ve always known that it would be wrong. I have never been sexually attracted to anyone. I have no interest in sex.
I have been in love with someone, but my feelings for her were entirely emotional and intellectual, not at all sexual.
quote:
Originally posted by FX:
by the way, lack of libido is frequently a sign of depression, at least in this reality…
I don’t suffer from chronic depression or anything. Occasionally, when really bad things happen in my life, I just get mildly depressed, nothing serious. Loss of will to live, self-loathing, the feeling that my existence is directionless futility. Y’know, the usual.
quote:
Originally posted by Flamegrape:
After careful review of a number of videotapes of a popular British television show and in light of the preponderance of evidence found in the SadGeezer bulletin board message-posts about your sexual hang-ups, I have no choice but to conclude that you are indeed a smeghead.
I happen to be incredibly intelligent.
quote:
Originally posted by FX:
your idea of sex drive dying down is not entirely unfeasible…
Of course it’s feasible. I strive to create science fiction that is completely scientifically accurate (no faster than light travel, no humanoid aliens, no made-up particles, etc.).
Now, today my psychology lecturer stated [i]specifically[/i] that there is no evidence that a feeling manifests itself in another way after being eliminated (what Aleck said). That is just part of the Freudian dogma and has been discredited by serious studies. And it is certainly not the case with me. I have no personality glitches that could possibly attributed to such a thing.
Aleck is trying to convince me and others that I’m a bad person and that I have these sick urges and am lying when I say I don’t. I find this quite offensive.
Most of the negative views toward cloning stem from ignorance. There are a lot of serious misconceptions about cloning. People think it’s creating a duplicate or minds, or that clones would be lacking something from the donor. Somebody in my rhetoric class said something like “Every time you clone a cell it cuts off 10% of the D.N.A., and then when it is cloned it cuts off 10% of that, so the more clones we make the less human they’ll be” which is pseudoscientific nonsense. And my speech coach last year didn’t recognize that genetic engineering was anything other than trying to clone animals. And people fail to realize the way cloning experiments would progress. Competent scientists would [i]not[/i] attempt to clone humans until the process was fine-tuned. Once they would work all the bugs out of it and can clone, say, chimpanzees with a near total success rate [i]then[/i] human clones would be attempted. Plus cloning would not be a means of immortality. Even if the brain (or the part of the brain containing memories and/or personality) of a dying individual were placed in a healthy young clone, the brain tissue would eventually die. Neurons don’t divide and a healthy cellular environment won’t rejuvenate them. And there’s the mindless drone myth, and the slave race myth, and…the ignorance just goes on and on. Our populus is largely scientifically illiterate, and we don’t exactly have Einstein running our country, either. Plus, in addition to the simply misinformed there are religious fanatics (the kind of people that are trying to ban the teaching of evolution in schools) who will say [i]any[/i] new biotechnology is bad. Ignorance and dogma, that’s why those bans were placed on stem cell research and cloning.
Science fiction isn’t helping the problem, my main point in this thread. Clones are usually evil or at least embodying significant negative traits, and the organization that produced them is almost invariably evil. Plus we have perpetuation of the myth of duplicated memory and personality (at least [i]Alien: Resurrection[/i] said the clone [i]shouldn’t[/i] have memories, even though she did; most movies don’t even acknowledge that much). On [i]Exposure[/i] (yes, I actually watch that show) the maker of a short film in which clones are used to explore space said (to the best of my memory): “What cloning is is, essentially, taking a snapshot of someone’s mind at a certain point in their life.” This is quite untrue. It is copying someone’s [i]genes[/i], which are the same throughout all of their life (unless the donor were to receive some sort of gene therapy, or are subjected to some process that does not exist at this time). The personality would not be the same, besides the traits that are genetic, like whether or not they have schizophrenia, or [i]possibly[/i] their range of intelligence (we’re still only beginning to know what about us is nature and what is nurture, and cloning could actually help us learn more in this area). Science fiction has placed an unnecessary taint on an already inevitably controversial subject.
[ 15-11-2001: Message edited by: DalekTek790 ]