I think I’m at the point now where my digust and hatred of Bush make it literally impossible for me to be objective and rational about anything. Fortunately, there are many sensible people in the world who can apparently sit on the rage and still produce cogent analyses. For example, Charlie Stross posts about the science stuff in the State Of The Union address in a very articulate and intelligent manner, and only refers to Bush as a chimp twice and a Nazi once, which is much better than I could do:
Y’see, human-animal hybrids make most people think of “The Island of Dr Moreau”, ape-men and leopard-men and stock phrases recycled by Devo. But in reality, human-animal hybrids have been around for well over a decade in one form or another, and indeed there’s a strong case for arguing that they form the backbone of modern medical research. Human-animal hybrids mean things like pigs that express human immune-system signalling proteins (goodbye, cheap xenotransplant organs with no histocompatability issues). Mice with human-derived prion diseases (goodbye, research model for Alhzeimer’s and CJD). At the extreme interpretation of the law (and you know how goddamn extreme the American criminal judicial prosecution system can get) you can say goodbye to human insulin (an e. coli that contains the gene for human insulin is, of course, an animal-human hybrid). Just pick up the last year of Scientific American and go through it with a red marker pen while muttering “human-animal hybrid” to yourself, and at the end you’ll discover that you’ve put a red line through half of the most promising medical research strategies in general, and about 90% of the strategies for tackling the most serious degenerative diseases we suffer from.
Doubtless the Chimpenfuhrer thought he was protecting the dignity of human life. In reality, though, he’s just sentenced hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of his fellow Americans to suffer slow, lingering, horrific, and avoidable, premature deaths.
