Let’s use eugenics to create a utopian world without women, creepy incel Redditor proposes

@Kereea

Back when I played 40k I always thought the Spess Marines were pretentious and poorly balanced and took great pleasure in reclaiming their biomass to feed the Great Devourer.

(I posted a comment on this earlier but it seems to have been eaten– or in moderation?) Has anyone read The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad? This incel bullshit could’ve come straight out of it.

(Spoilers follow)

Spinrad wrote The Iron Dream back in 1972 because of his concern at what he saw was an acceptance of right-wing tropes in SF and fantasy. The conceit of the novel-within-a-novel is that it is a work of fantasy by Adolf Hitler (!) who in a parallel universe emigrated to America after the Munich Beer Hall Putsch and became first an SF illustrator and then a pulp writer. It is deliberately lurid, badly-written, has a Mary Sue protagonist, and is terrible in every way Spinrad can make it. Then, to turn the troll-level up to 11, he closes it with a fake essay from a psychologist in the parallel universe who mentions the inexplicable popularity of Hitler’s work among SF fans, how they cosplay his characters at conventions (!), and how deeply psychologically disturbed it all is. In an early example of how some things never change, Spinrad had complaints from fashy-leaning SF readers about spoiling a good yarn with “politics” ?, while the American Nazi Party apparently had it on their reading list for years, not realising it was satire!

The novel takes place on a far-future, post-apocalyptic Earth populated by mutant abominations where in only the nation of Heldon (the German word for “hero”) is the “true human genotype” to be found. But after a genocidal war with the Dominators, the novel’s stand-in for (((you know who))), the Dominators succeed in finding and detonating an ancient nuclear device, blanketing the world in fallout and ensuring that the human race will never breed true again. But all is not lost! The scientists of Heldon perfect human cloning, ensuring the human race will continue in the form of blond Aryan supermen (and it is only men; there are literally no women characters in the novel), forever! The novel finishes with the Earth conquered by Heldon and them planning to, er, “fecundate the stars” in a scene of hilariously grotesque imagery:

This time the demonstration of fanatic ecstasy surpassed even what had gone before, and it took Feric [Jaggar, Hitler’s Mary Sue author-insert] a full five minutes to still the massive chanting of “Hail Jaggar!” that all but threatened to topple the great rocket from its launching pad with its incredible force.

“But my fellow Helder, there is one final glory that I have withheld until now,” he finally continued, unable to keep from breaking into a broad grin. “I myself have contributed cells to the cloning vats. This rocket and every one that follows it out into the trackless reaches of interstellar space for the next ten million years will be commanded by a clone grown from my own flesh and therefore my genetic equivalent, suited by destiny and pedigree to be a leader of men. Thus our colonies shall not fail no matter what manner of hostile aliens they may face under foreign suns, for the troops that will exterminate these subhuman horrors shall be none but the finest SS purebreds, and the leaders shall be created in my own genetic image! Hail Heldon! Hail the Swastika! Hail the Master Race! Hail the conquest of the universe!”

As the answering earthquake chanting of “Hail Jaggar!” reverberated every molecule in the air, the huge ring of SS troops began to march round the rocket and Feric’s platform, kicking the heels of their steel-soled boots high in the air with every step and then bringing them down with a force that was quite literally earth-shaking. Faster and faster these magnificent specimens in snug black leather marched, kicking their heels ever higher, until the platform and the rocket were surrounded by a whirling circle of slick black leather, and the universe shook with the thunder of Helder boots.

Then, as a single man, these two hundred thousand tall blond SS clones snapped their arms out in the greatest massed Party salute in history and held them in this outstretched position as the chant of “Hail Jaggar!” continued to rise toward the heavens from millions of fervent throats.

Faster and faster the marching troops whirled around Feric, kicking their heels skyward with ever increasing vigor and force, as if attempting to smash through the vault in the sky with the steel soles of their boots while the massed chanting merged with the rhythm of the falling boots, a staccato thunder that filled and shook the universe and pounded, with the blood racing in Feric’s skull.

Feric felt the sound and the glory permeate every cell of his body with an incredible joyous fire; his blood pounded like racial thunder through his veins, faster and faster. It seemed finally as if he must fly apart and burst in a million pieces with ecstasy.

At this climactic moment, when he could bear the preternatural joy no longer, he threw a small switch.

With a deafening bellow, a magnificent billow of orange flame spurted out of the rocket. Every throat in Heldon joined with Feric’s in a wordless cry of joyous triumph as the seed of the Swastika rose on a pillar of fire to fecundate the stars.

???? ?

@Bonelady

Presumably they think the Tleilaxu from Dune are a model worthy of emulation.
(Spoiler alert: All Tleilaxu women are converted into bioreactors.)

@ crip dyke

I don’t think that they’ve ever put an incel on the moon

Well there is that moon of Saturn; the one that looks to have a sub-surface ocean.

We already have the technology to do without men completely. It could be as simple as collecting semen from each young man before… well, getting rid of them. Maybe send them to Mars to have a nice female-free society.

Or perhaps using stem cells (or manipulating extra ova) to create sperm cells from females, thus eleminating the Y chromosome altogether.

No, I’m not in favor. I rather like most men, faults and all. I admit that finding a solution to the the societal ills that have created the modern incel would be nice. They are the victims of technological change that has been too fast for our culture to keep up with and our culture has changed enormously*. I believe their misery is real, even if it is hard to care because they are so fucking poisonous.

Until we solve that problem, my advice to the miserable incels is “Get off the fucking computer and go for a walk, for fuck’s sake”.

*Just understand, when I was a little girl, I wanted to be a cop. I was patted on my silly little head by everyone but my dad, who pointed out that I was probably going to be too small, but that if that was what I wanted I should go for it. Or to put it another way, I was an adult when the first video game was invented.

Ugh. Exterminationist MRAs legit terrify me, and I consider ideologies like theirs a very real and present threat. A world without women really is one of my fears for where our future is headed. (Along with many, many other forms of eugenics and slow genocide.)

I mean, I’m also quite paranoid about men’s motives. (See: PTSD.) But the distance from objectification to genocide is not as great as most privileged folk like to think, and genetic engineering is a thing now.

@Kereea

Oh gods 40K, I hate that franchise and much of its fan base with a passion. For those who haven’t heard, it’s where “God Emperor Trump” comes from.

The Y-chromosome is a crumbling little vestigial architecture, with a higher than normal mutation rate and a host of issues. It’s not some sort of all-powerful information carrier that carries What It Is To Be Man on it. It’s just got some information on it that informs hormone production as far as I’m aware.

All of the heavy lifting is – you guessed it – on the X-chromosome. Because all of the chromosomes are X-chromosomes, because that’s the shape of a chromosome, sex-based or otherwise. “Breeding docility into women” would absolutely breed it into men as well, because we’re the same damn species.

People with Y-chromosomes are more vulnerable to mutations resulting in cancer or disease because they don’t have that second X hanging around to correct for a fault in the first. The Y sucks!

I guess this is good news overall, though. These dickbutts aren’t gonna have much luck at engineering their all-male society with their grade 11 biology.

@Pen:

And I believe you need X-chromosomes in your other cells to be alive, e.g. there is no YY, although there is XYY (but I could be wrong about that).

Yeah, the Y chromosome is missing quite a few vital gene sequences (it’s why it’s visibly smaller than the X under a microscope and it’s what gives it its name) so that even if a YY zygote ever were to form, as far as I understand it, it would not be viable after more than a couple of cell divisions.

The way bio-essentialists go on, you’d swear that the Y-chromosome was some kind of essence of masculinity, like if you looked at it under a strong enough microscope, it’d be bright blue, wearing a little sports-team jersey, and holding a brewski in its tiny arm or something ?. This is pseudo-vitalist bullshit: in reality, there’s only a handful of genes on it that are actually responsible for producing male sex characteristics. The most important of these is the SRY gene which instructs the proto-gonad tissue in the foetus to start developing into testes and kicks off a developmental cascade that in most cases results in a male human. But it’s possible for someone with an XX karyotype to end up with a copy of the SRY gene. The opposite can also occur; a person can have an XY karyotype but their copy of the SRY gene is deleted or fails to express for some reason. This is in addition to conditions like X0, XXY, XYY, etc.

@Cat Mara:

The programmer builds from pure thought-stuff

OT: I have seen this absolutely everywhere, and I just gotta wonder, what IS it with programmers and this incessant god-complex? What makes them think they’re so special?

This whole “we create amazing things from NOTHING!! WE ARE LIKE GODS!!” (literally what some fellow alumni have said) needs to burn in a fire and die. Programmers would be nothing more than nerdy outcasts if it weren’t for the electrical engineers who create the circuit boards that make up a physical computer, and electrical engineers would have nothing to work with were it not for chemists, scientists, etc who advanced work in metallurgy and electricity. Programmers are no better or more amazing than anyone else, and they rely on other people/occupations just like everyone else.

Like seriously, where did this hubris-large-enough-to-cause-gravitational-lensing even come from?

@Cat: I’ve not only read The Iron Dream, I have a copy, and alluded to same book in an earlier post.

It’s got a misaimed fandom among the American Nazi Party because of course it does…

Have you read any other Spinrad? Bug Jack Barron and Child of Fortune were entertaining.

@Jane Done:

In fairness to Fred Brooks, when he made that “builds from pure thought-stuff” quote, he was saying, “this is a bug, guys, not a feature!”; sorry if my quoting of him didn’t make that clear. You won’t get any argument about their being a surfeit of tech-bro hubris in this world, from me or from Brooks. In fact, he called them out on in back in the 80s when it wasn’t nearly as bad as it is now in a famous paper called “No Silver Bullet” that he issued as a challenge to the tech-bros. In summary his argument was, “you guys are on crack. You talk about all these new methodologies and new programming languages but I bet you that by the end of the decade, we won’t even see a 10% improvement on the delivery of big software project in terms of them coming in late, over-budget, or not at all. Prove me wrong, arseholes.” Well, he was dragged for this in the computer press. He was called a crank, a relic from the mainframe days, etc. The hotshots of the PC revolution would put this old geezer in his place! Guess what? He was right. He’s still right.

My take-away from Brooks is that when someone who works in another creative discipline has a job to do, there are certain constraints that are dictated by the laws of physics. When an architect, for example, executes a commission to build a house, there are a whole slew of possibilities they can immediately discount because the laws of gravity makes them impossible on the surface on the Earth given the materials we have to hand. This also places an upper limit on how long it will take for the house to be built. Computer programming, in comparison, is much more of a tabula rasa: there are no “laws of physics” as such inside the computer. The tech-bros have elevated this into some sort of proof of their own awesomeness, like they have anything to do with it– Brooks, on the other hand, points out that this lack of constraints, the endless malleability, just makes it harder to figure out how long it’s going to take to do anything. And people underestimate, badly: I’ve seen a quote from Margaret Hamilton which suggests that MIT didn’t even bother to send in an initial estimate to NASA for how long the software was going to take for the Apollo Flight Computer because how long would it take, really? Sure, it’s only software! The hardware is the difficult bit, right?

Like seriously, where did this hubris-large-enough-to-cause-gravitational-lensing even come from?

My opinion? A cheerleading and complicit press who will kiss the arse of anyone with money. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, all tech-bros, all billionaires; therefore, they’re doing something right. Listen to them, for they are wise and good ?. Forget that they have done actual crimes, just look at the size of those wallets! Software is eating the world, y’all, and you could be eaten first!

@Nequam:

Have you read any other Spinrad? Bug Jack Barron and Child of Fortune were entertaining.

I’ve read Bug Jack Barron. It’s fun, though very much of its time (a lot of the racial stuff in it probably wouldn’t pass muster nowadays), but not Child of Fortune. There’s a couple others of his I’ve picked up secondhand over the years: The Void Captain’s Tale, Between Two Worlds (both of which are quite feminist in theme), No Direction Home (a collection of short stories) and Little Heroes (a vaguely cyberpunk-y one). He’s still writing, or was, though I think he self-publishes now.

We’ll have to get an open thread for SF…