Selective Breeding

[londondave]

If the streets are becoming anarchic like the papes portrait. How do people feel about selective breeding? ie: only those of a certain level of intelligence allowed to have kids and those on a certain monetary income etc. career criminals being sterilised.

[flashpig]

I intend to selectively breed with the most attractive woman I can in the hopes that my children will be as attractive as they can be and live in a beautiful society. Although I don't believe that people should be forced to breed with gorgeous people. Neither do I think that people should be sterilised for being ugly.

[Dark Angel]

Selective breeding is not a good idea at all.

 It is similar to choosing a baby's hair colour, eye colour, sex etc. Also, similar to cloning animals/humans.

[jno]

whoo, don't shout mystress - if you want  to insult someone, non-bold, non-capital letters is fine... truth is, notions of selective breeding and sterilisation ('eugenics') were held in the first half of the 20th century by many famous leftwingers too - Bernard Shaw among them as I recall. They weren't all Hitlers by any means; but they were wrong. Other contributors have given good reasons why.

[Sasha13]

I can see a little bit about where londondave is coming from, although don't agree with his post in the main. For example, there are some people who survive on benefits as a lifestyle choice; i.e. have never worked and never intend to (rather than happening upon some misfortune and needed to rely on the state until they get back on their feet). In some instances these people choose to have more and more children even though I, as a taxpayer, will be required to support them above and beyond the child benefit payments to which everyone is entitled. I feel strongly that these people should face some sort of penalties rather than being allowed to continually produce more and more children - I'm not sure that you would be able to stop them having children even if you wanted to (how would that be achieved)? But I do believe that we are too lenient in terms of handing out more and more cash. By the way, I don't mean to generalise and I know the vast majority of people who survive on benefits do it as they have no choice, so please do not reply to this post with unlimited vitriol - it's just an opinion! 

[flaming]

I suppose one could always use "stick and carrot", i.e. if people were useless, after one or two chilren who were clearly being neglected, abused, and there could be a jury-type system of other ordinary people, who could determine whether the bad people could be parents again.  Maybe then  ******** (and I'm talking alcoholics, child-beaters, and worse) people would take notice, and a lot of them wouldn't be such useless parents in the first place. There's no doubt there are a lot more useless parents now, just by sheer weight of numbers, and such bad parenting is on a mathematical progression, year on year. Thus there will be that many more stunted, mean human beings ready to inflict all the bad things on their off-spring.  I'm gad I am not a parent trying to do a good job against the rising tide of violence and drugs.

Am too tired to think this through now, but my point is that sooner or later the children of good parents will get engulfed by those from bad homes unless somehow the baddies are made to take responsibility.

[flaming]

That was a perfecty respectable word that was asterisked out!