At 11:24 AM 10/28/98 +1100, Jason Soon wrote:
>I too find this argument laughable and don't see how Damien could object
>to Max characterising it as such.
Let me beat this dead horse completely to death. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I didn't pick up the idea of government coercion in Max's original report. The reason I suggested an element of double-think in his report was straightforward, but in error (due, I suspect, to the brevity of Max's report). This list often enthuses over prospects of massive interventions and improvements in the genome, yet Max *appeared* to be saying that drastic genomic engineering, per se, was a laughable notion - when posited by an ideological opponent.
I agree that pseudo-fears such as the farming of clones to serve as spares or organ banks is preposterous, given the current climate of opinion, and I said so in no uncertain terms in a scathing review (in the New York Review of Science Fiction) of Michael Marshall Smith's scare-mongering best-seller horror novel SPARES.
Damien Broderick