Skip to main content

I'm Not Worried About Designer babies

It's in the news again, but I haven't taken the time to even think about the implications of "designer babies." The only class able to afford such a procedure if it was to become common, the professional and managerial class, is in the grips of a moral panic not seen since Reagan era "satanic panic" and/or the "repressed memories" scam. (The "repressed memories" thing is less well known, but for a time it became cryptically fashionable for people, usually upper middle class, to explain away how they managed to squeeze the fun out of vices, become drunk bores for example, by saying some poor babysitter buggered them years ago and it was so traumatic they unconsciously hid the memory. A lucrative cottage industry arose digging those memories out, or rather creating them altogether.) 

Anyway, I'm not at all worried because this class has been regularly confusing identity conjuring and oppression seeking with political resistance and a fetus with a "condition" is a prime opportunity to grab hold of a sympathetic identity. ("We don't use the word 'disease' in our household.") Do you really think people are going to use gene editing to cure MS and miss a perfect opportunity to re-brand themselves? Fat chance. This is a ticket to the frontlines of "the resistance." Think of how many twitter followers one could have after the NYT Op-Ed comes out! Regular articles in the HuffingtonPost, maybe a column at  Buzzfeed!! 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

  I voted for Joe Biden and hope he wins. I’m also alarmed at the increasingly transparent alliance between the Democratic Party and influential sectors of corporate America, namely media conglomerates and the technology industry. (Their relationship reminds me of the Republican Party and the energy industry.) It’s true there are conservative media outlets that are not friendly to Democrats, but it’s far less certain how objective the “paper of record” and other “serious” media would be to a post-Trump and post-COVID Biden administration that is politically and ascetically their peer. (I would say we are at a point of competing Pravdas, but that would be a slander against the Soviet newspaper’s pre-Stalinist period when it was a battleground of ideas.) Perhaps even more damning is the Democratic Party’s relationship to the technology industry, particularly when companies like Twitter and Facebook have shown they are prepared to unilaterally decide what’s true and what’s false. Not many
2 comments
Read more
I’m somewhat familiar with the story, but haven’t seen the tv series “the plot against America.” Is it any good? I’ll admit I have doubts that will be difficult to overcome. My guess is it’s a well stylized but historically simplified attempt to frame international liberalism, particularly the US dominated post war order, as something deeper than what it has become- a value championed almost exclusively by the cosmopolitan elite and global corporations. I also predict that the entire post WW1 context (three months involvement and almost 120,000 Americans dead, split evenly between fighting and the flu pandemic) is lost to Lindbergh and his anti-Semitism. Is this accurate? “The man in the high castle,” another alternative history book made into a tv series that I actually did watch, missed an opportunity to dig into American militarism by not really explaining why so many high level American military members joined the Nazis. (We were supposed to believe it’s just because the Germans wo
4 comments
Read more

Leftism is Just Exclamation Point Liberalism

  The February issue of Harper’s Magazine poses the question “Is Liberalism Worth Saving?” on its cover. The panel of four, who more or less cover the mainstream of the ideological spectrum, for the most part give familiar praise and criticism. One panelist, however, gives a forceful and fundamental critique of liberalism. That person is not the representative of the left. To be sure, the left representative makes all the standard criticisms of classical liberalism (imperialism, racism, inequality) but these issues have all been confronted, for decades, within forms of political liberalism like social democracy and even neoliberalism. The real underlying critique of liberalism, the one that challenges its foundational tenets, is coming from the post-liberal right.  This is relatively new.  Because being marginalized and uninfluential are baked into the ethos of the radical left, something I definitely internalized while attempting to organize first as an anarchist and then a Trotskyis
Post a Comment
Read more