Based Camp: How Leftist Media became Psychologically Blind to Reality

Join Malcolm, Diana, and Simone in a stimulating conversation addressing some of the intriguing contradictions that arise from certain sociopolitical stances. They delve into complex issues like prenatal screening, abortion, and embryo selection, juxtaposing these topics against the backdrop of social biases. Listen as they highlight the inconsistencies in certain beliefs and reveal how individuals often tailor their convictions based on social approval rather than logical reasoning. Whether you're interested in bioethics, social commentary, or philosophical discussions, this conversation offers a fresh perspective that challenges conventional thinking.

Transcript:

Malcolm: [00:00:00] he is pro aborting. Fetuses. Yeah. If they show signs of a potential medical problem, yeah.

Malcolm: But against not choosing a pre implanted IVF embryo because they might end up showing one of those diseases. So he is more pro. Abortion, like even mid-stage abortion, then he is pro embryo selection.

Diana: That is whack,

Malcolm: well, not whack, but I think what it shows is this, and this is a wider topic I wanted to talk about here, is this insanity you get and you see this on both the left and the right, but right now the left is more in control of media, so they do it more.

Malcolm: Were they, there are individuals who clearly like put genuinely no thought into their actual beliefs about the world and they're choosing their beliefs on what they think will get them the most social

Diana: credit. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It's absolutely a progressive status quo bias [00:01:00] because at one point in a debate that we were having on Twitter months or years ago, Noah, Carl said, Let's say you could do prenatal screening with blood on a woman and a woman finds out that her baby's gonna have a lower IQ than she will on the basis of this genetic screening.

Diana: What do you think if that woman aborts the baby, is that eugenics? And he says, I think that's misguided, but I don't think that's eugenics. And so, because he can't say that. Any abortion is in any way bad because that is a sacred progressive cow, right? Ah, and so I remember when I used to ha teach I taught human sexuality and I taught some other Topics around philosophy of science to undergraduates.

Diana: I remember asking students is it worse for a woman to abort a baby that she finds out as a girl when she wants a boy? Or is it worse for her to choose an embryo that's a boy? Rather than choosing an embryo that's a girl and almost, I mean, it was really profound that people thought the abortion was okay [00:02:00] because abortion is a sacred value in the uk to abortion for any reason is a sacred value.

Simone: Wow. I think what that kinda

Malcolm: terrifying is the percentage of the population that are, I mean, so when we, we on our podcast talk about like this progressive mimetic somfy virus and I think that people might think we're going too far when we call it a virus that sort of whipes out people's higher order logic

Simone: hi. And we are excited to welcome back Diana Fleischmann, author of the Soon to Come Out book, how to Train Your Boyfriend, but also evolutionary psychologist, host of the Aporia podcast, an overall amazing and awesome.

Simone: Writer and reformed academic. She's made it out, ladies and gentlemen, and thank God,

Malcolm: so what we wanted to talk about today was an article that they're, they, they've actually recently written on us

Diana: it's called Bad Arguments versus Healthy Babies Rebutting Ruthford on Embryo Selection.

Malcolm: So it's about all of these deranged people who [00:03:00] attack Simone and I online. Yeah. For selecting against things like our kids getting cancer in terms of like the, the genetics of our embryos.

Malcolm: And arguing that this is just like, And Al, it'll always have terrible results to do this. Even though whenever you're doing ibf, a lot of people don't know this. They actually already sort your embryos, but by how pretty the embryos look. Yeah. Which isn't really correlated with that much, but they're still getting selected based on a, a trait like that.

Malcolm: But what I wanted to talk about this podcast was specifically like the meta around this. Why do people react like insanely to topics like this?

Simone: We can start with Adam Rath referred too. Cuz he, he presents a lot of great examples of just also being like, he conflicts in a lot of areas. It's very strange

Diana: you. I'll just give an overview of the piece really quickly. So the piece talks about polygenic embryo screening. Right now people do look at single trait or single allele diseases for their offspring.

Diana: They look at aneuploidy when they're [00:04:00] selecting an embryo. But polygenic screening is fairly new. You guys and raffles, McCrosky and some other people are, I don't know, are there 200 babies that have been polygenic screened? Something around that. Yeah. Yeah. And so there's this, this very outspoken critic who's a BBC presenter.

Diana: His name is Adam Ruthford. He's a geneticist and he's written a book against Eugenics and he has a beef with Steve Sue because Steve Sue has written some blogs about making sue intelligent people. And whenever I saw him come out saying polygenic screening is terrible, he kept saying, read my book.

Diana: Read my book. So I read. The relevant, whatever, 20 pages of his book. And it was almost entirely b******t. It's like, really, it's very, very bad. And the, the evidence he uses is really asymmetrical for his claim. Of course, about seven pages of it is just like about how bad Steve Sue is and how he's friends with Dominic Cummings, and then how Dominic Cummings is associated with some other people that liberals don't like.

Diana: And the actual meat and potatoes of like what his case is, [00:05:00] is made very succinctly and not very well. In a smaller portion of, of that book. So that's there's, there's a few different arguments that I make. Go

Malcolm: ahead. Oh, no. Before you continue, I wanna pull on something you said there, which was, I just find it really rich.

Malcolm: I. That he could be arguing like that. This guy who is clearly a eugenicist , is pretending to take an antigenics position. He's the guy here saying, we need genetically pure humans? Don't alter human D N a. I want to use the government. To restrict the reproductive choices of individuals to maintain humanity's genetic purity is like, is there anything more eugenics than that?

Diana: Well, I don't actually know if he's, this is one, one thing is like, it's, it's pretty short on actual policy. Mm. So he often endorses this guy called you and Bernie who says, yes, polygenic screening should be banned. Right or not allowed in the, in the uk. And it doesn't surp, I mean, the UK is really, has very strict laws, a lot of which don't make a lot of sense about reproductive freedom.

Diana: And [00:06:00] one of the best things I think about the United States is, is, is the reproductive freedom here is the fact that people can do IVF and can do sex selection, can do polygenic screening, can do, can do what they want, but. What I thought was really weird about what, how Rutherford responded to this.

Diana: It's one thing to say polygenic screening won't work. The people who are using it are like wasting their