Slavery

Phrenology: the study of the skull in association with personality traits. It's straight-up pseudoscience. But it's amazing what people will tell themselves to justify their own cruelty.

Django has an amazing scene where Leonardo DiCaprio's character pulls out the skull of a former slave. "Why don't they kill us?" he says. "The science of phrenology is crucial to understanding the separation of our two species." He goes on to assume that all Africans have dimples on their skull that makes them submissive.

Africans are not a different species from Europeans. Europeans just happened to have technology that evolved a bit faster. It's amazing what hardship can do to people. Winter can be a harsh kind of hardship.

Stealing people from their families and forcing them into servitude is a dark chapter of human history. It must have been really hard for caramel colored babies to be caught between two worlds like that; not quite chocolate and not quite vanilla.

Understanding history is understanding the history of racism, sexism, and religious oppression. Most educated people today know that racism and sexism are wrong. But we're facing a special kind of religious oppression that's unique to our day and age: the religion of the conservative.

Conservatives are slightly retarded. All they can ever do is smile and pretend like life is perfect. They use public opinion to express hate. They love to say "no." They hold back progress because they fear change.

Rather than focus on taking care of poor children, some conservatives like to pretend a cluster of cells should have the same rights as a child. Supposedly we have the technology to 3D print an organ with a person's exact DNA, but this technology is being held back because of restrictions on stem cell research.

When does life begin is a discussion that could go on forever. I believe it starts with a person's first breath. Maybe it's not a point but a process that starts a while after conception. I doubt it begins at conception.

Some conservatives prefer to fight for fetuses than for children. I really don't get it.

Human rights aside, what's the status for animal stem cell research? I mean, if there is a god, she wants us to respectfully play god because all it could ever really be is play. It's a sick conservative that pretends we offend god by trying to be like her.

Humans have caused species to become extinct, through selfishness and carelessness. I wonder now, on the edge of the anthropomorphic age, when we will start to create species.

The simple way would be to splice animal and human DNA. But then humanitarians get involved, as they should. But what could a humanitarian argue if all a scientist did was just use different sequences of the same animal DNA to try and create different attributes?

I don't know if or when we would have the technology for it, but I do think it would be an interesting world if people could create subhumans from apes that really were designed to be simple; designed not to reproduce; designed for servitude. They'd have to be grown in tube and born without the drive or ability to reproduce. Passing on traits naturally would seem a bit too human for a species born only if they fit criteria of desired traits.

Hypothetically, it would be a species that found joy in service because service would be fulfillment of purpose.

Taking away a person's freewill is a disgusting crime. But would it really be a crime to create humanoids that were designed to have a different kind of will?

What kind of species could we create from our primate cousins with common ancestors? What kind of rights should that species have?

Taking away a person's will is a crime. Taking away an animal's will is not exactly a crime but not exactly moral. Training an animal to fulfill a purpose is not a crime if the training is humane.