etherial: a burning flag (politics)
etherial ([personal profile] etherial) wrote2008-09-16 10:18 am

BWAHAHA!

A while back, I made a post comparing people who solicit for designer donor eggs to Nazis. As always, art and humor can never find ways to be as awful as real life. Lookie what we have here from Sunday.

[identity profile] londo.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 02:29 pm (UTC)(link)
Curses! If not for some chromosome issues, I could get paid five thousand dollars to lose ten pounds.

[identity profile] neuromancerzss.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 03:03 pm (UTC)(link)
So are people who look for those specifications in their love life Nazis as well?

Eugenics may be tainted by its association with Nazism and racial purity, but I don't see anything wrong with voluntarily selecting for desirable traits. When does (non-coercive) eugenics become bad? Selecting out diseases with in-vitro fertilization? For long life? For a fit body? For intelligence? So that the child will appear to be the natural child of the parents? For other aesthetic desires?

I understand that messing with evolution can be dangerous, and I understand that coercive eugenics is a pretty huge violation (though sometime in the future we may question the ethics of parents who do not select out deadly diseases), but condemning the science as "just evil" is failing to improve the quality-of-life of individuals and, potentially with time, society as a whole just because of bad memories that aren't directly related to the practice.

[identity profile] etherial.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 03:06 pm (UTC)(link)
So are people who look for those specifications in their love life Nazis as well?

Yes. It's a free country. If you want to be a Nazi, you can be a Nazi.

[identity profile] contradictacat.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 03:07 pm (UTC)(link)
On the one hand...*twitch*

On the other hand....bah! Only 5k for eggs? I could get 8k! *wiggles Asian genes about* Now if only I didn't have a problem with, you know, seriously disruptive and invasive surgery for money.

[identity profile] etherial.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 03:08 pm (UTC)(link)
Dude, $5000 is the lowest price I've seen for egg donations.

[identity profile] londo.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 03:10 pm (UTC)(link)
Nobody wants my semen. :(

[identity profile] neuromancerzss.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 03:18 pm (UTC)(link)
Ok, you're full of crap and hyperbole. Aesthetics are aesthetics and have nothing to do with exalting one race over another or genocide, y'know, the actually bad things Nazis did.

People are commonly attracted to people with similar general features to themselves and their family members. Whether this is some genetic predisposition to perpetuating your clan or a simple association between your family and comfort, it's not like you're going to tell them "you find this person attractive instead". If some Swedish guy is attracted to women with Nordic features, so what?

[identity profile] dirkcjelli.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 03:24 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh really?

And how exactly do people develop their sense of aesthetics, in your view?

How prevalent is 'blond hair and blue eyes' even amongst Caucasians, and given that, what leads you to believe it is common?

[identity profile] etherial.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 03:25 pm (UTC)(link)
Nazism in a nutshell: My race should stick together. There's nothing sufficiently evil about it in its basis that we need to shoot Nazis on sight. But race war is a natural, logical, and inevitable outcome of Nationalist Socialism. When your race needs to expand and so does your neighbor's, the exclusivity forces you into conflict.

It's perfectly fine to say "I trend this way". But confusing trend lines with natural laws is where I disagree with Homophobes, Racists, Sexists, and Bigots of all stripes.

[identity profile] neuromancerzss.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 03:27 pm (UTC)(link)
Uh didn't I just write the two options I guessed might influence it? Do you read my posts?

And where did the commonality of blond/blue even come into the picture?

[identity profile] neuromancerzss.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 03:39 pm (UTC)(link)
No, that's tribalism. Aryans are far from the only tribalistic group and certainly not an inevitable product of it. Hell, the Jews themselves are exceptionally tribalistic.

I'm not even in favor of tribalism, but when the answer is "you're wrong for following your aesthetic desires" it's stepped too far. If someone trends to find blond haired and blue eyed women attractive, it's hardly a bad idea to put that up in a dating profile. If a couple is blond haired and blue eyed, it's not in any way weird for them to want a child who looks the same, for both shallow and not so shallow reasons.

[identity profile] etherial.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 03:47 pm (UTC)(link)
Yes, Nazism is tribalism as political (as opposed to sociological) theory.

you're wrong for following your aesthetic desires

Did you even look at the ad? They're not following aesthetic desires. They provided a set of hard and fast criteria, many of which have nothing to do with genetics or aesthetics.

-some form of college education -irrelevant to genetics or aesthetics
-BMI of 28 or less -linked more closely to income than either
-20-28 years of age -irrelevant to aesthetics, more relevant to the surgery than reproduction
-height 5'3 or taller
-Blond hair
-Blue eyes
-some form of post HS education -irrelevant to genetics or aesthetics
-Caucasian
-no use of illegal drugs, cigarettes, alcohol abuse or antidepressants -linked more closely to income than either
-active lifestyle -linked more closely to income than either
-attractive -linked more closely to income than either

[identity profile] dirkcjelli.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 03:48 pm (UTC)(link)
"Aesthetics are aesthetics" -- a tautology. Where do aesthetics come from?

From this, I should infer that aesthetics, the appreciation of beauty, comes from either a genetic predisposition to in-clan breeding or psychological association with in-clan features?

That is where appreciation of beauty comes from?

Now... we've no knowledge that this family is Sweedish. Indeed, if they were Scandinavian, they may well have specified something like "Scandinavian herritage preferred"-- but they didn't.

Presumably they're Caucasian, however. The relative scarcity of blond hair and blue eyes is thus quite relevant, given the arguments you're advancing-- most members of "their clan" don't have (natural) blond hair or blue eyes!

[identity profile] dirkcjelli.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 03:49 pm (UTC)(link)
Mutts make the best dogs.

[identity profile] dirkcjelli.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 03:52 pm (UTC)(link)
Actually, I'm not sure that compensation isn't comparable-- sperm donors are paid over a course of 6 months to 2 years, but aren't required to undergo invasive surgery and they can continue to donate whilst they remain suitably healthy, and can continue to donate over a longer period of time.

(You find the strangest shit on wikipedia.)

[identity profile] etherial.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 03:53 pm (UTC)(link)
I don't know if you noticed, but I stole the icon for this comment from the website of a Boston Sperm Bank. I use it for money, sex, silly, and weird topics.

[identity profile] dirkcjelli.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 03:55 pm (UTC)(link)
You may not want to cede "aesthetics" or "these folk constitute a 'race'."

[identity profile] dirkcjelli.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 03:56 pm (UTC)(link)
*blink blink*

Um... that explains why the $ is "fuzzy."

[identity profile] etherial.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 03:58 pm (UTC)(link)
I don't have to play every position. I'm playing pitcher here. You can have shortstop.

[identity profile] neuromancerzss.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 04:14 pm (UTC)(link)
Yes, my guess would be that appreciation of beauty comes from one (or a mixture of) those two some mixture of those two sources.

My assumption here is that most people do not identify specific ethnic tribes in their aesthetics. Some people may have conscious tribal desires and would search out someone who has specifically Nordic ancestry, but most people will only be operating on a subconscious level where the primary physical characteristics have the most impact.

If you're assuming the parents are not blond haired and blue eyed, why are you even assuming they're Caucasian? My assumption here is that they're trying to match the mother's appearance in order to have a child that would be as close to what would be their natural child as possible.

[identity profile] etherial.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 04:22 pm (UTC)(link)
They want a Caucasian egg, so it's natural to assume they're Caucasian. They want a blond-haired, blue-eyed egg, so it's natural to assume they're not Caucasian because Caucasians usually don't. The only people who think Caucasians are supposed to have blond hair and blue eyes are the NSDAP.

[identity profile] neuromancerzss.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 04:32 pm (UTC)(link)
I agree that many of these traits do not necessarily indicate a good set of genetics, but they might. Maybe their college educated egg maker got there because her parents were rich, but it's a filter that is likely going to slightly predispose your chances toward intelligence. Rich dumb people and smart poor people may fall on the "wrong" side, but in the middle there's going to be some selection group where the smart kids decide to go on to college and the dumb kids decide they don't want to go to school anymore.

So you've basically got three goals here, selecting for positive genetic traits (however inaccurately), selecting to match the mother in gross physical characteristics, and selecting for current health (separate from larger genetic traits). The only one that doesn't seem to make much sense to me is the current health, but that more seems irrelevant than offensive in any way.

[identity profile] neuromancerzss.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 04:45 pm (UTC)(link)
But why do you assume only the skin color request matches the parents physical traits? The only people who think Caucasians as a whole are supposed to have blond hair and blue eyes are Nazis, but every blond haired and blue eyed mother out there expects their own baby to have a relatively reasonable chance of having blond hair and blue eyes (much more so if the father has the same).

You're assuming secret Nazis when the much more reasonable assumption is you've got a blond haired blue eyed mother who wants to have a child that looks like its her own. In the same way it's unnatural for a black couple to have a white child, it's also unnatural for a couple with brown hair and eyes to have a little blond blue eyed baby.

[identity profile] dirkcjelli.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 05:06 pm (UTC)(link)
I'm pleased to know that people want to have sex with landscapes, especially the Italian countryside. Similarly, I'll hereto after assume the reason people find buildings built according to the golden ratio to be pleasing has something to do with proper breasts being rectilinear.

I'll never picture bowls of fruit the same way again, that is for sure...

Here's a rhetorical question for you before I get up to increasing someone's stakeholder value... How many ads have blondes in them, as compared to the general population?

[identity profile] dirkcjelli.livejournal.com 2008-09-16 05:10 pm (UTC)(link)
He's assuming blond-hair-and-blue-eyes-ism is correlated with nazism.

He's right.

Why aren't people specifying that they want babies with roman noses, or detached earlobes? Why are these specific identifiers the ones which are called out? Why not height?

You're engaging in a naturalistic fallacy, and your notion of race is similarly fallacious. "Whites" and "Blacks" are not a race (unless you ask a Nazi.)

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