George’s recent article on sex selection got reviewed by Annalee Newitz of the fantastic io9 blog, and his “must-know terms” piece was linked from a post on transhumanism at the snarky Metafilter blog.

Annalee concludes:

I tend to agree guardedly with Dvorsky about this being an outdated prejudice, simply because I think that we are heading for a world where rich people can design their own babies, and will. Now might be the time to decide what it is and isn’t OK to design into a baby. Maybe, ethically speaking, picking your child’s sex isn’t the same kind of problem as picking her intellectual capacity or her sexual orientation.

Metafilterites? Not so much.

(referring to George’s definition of “radical Luddism”) Exactly these sorts of characterizations were applied to “counterrevolutionaries” and “bourgeois reactionaries” in revolutionary Russia. The existence of these groups (which may be real or imagined) enables the deployment of a vast repressive apparatus, and the description of them as a “fringe” conceals the violence that anchors the system. If Transhumanists ever gain power, this is what it will look like.

But transgenic eggs must be vaporized to make our glorious posthuman future cake comrade!