Indeed. Myself, I keep expecting a Mad Max-type of future. That’s not to say that’s what I want.
More than likely, what will be looked at as odd is something we’ve not even thought of yet. The future never works out like we think.
You mean we’ll look back on it and think “man, I wish we had control of our bodies as much as we did back then.”
I think we’re starting to see the emergence of a culture that takes ubiquitous electronic connectiveness for granted, on an almost Borg-like level. Going “off the grid” will seem like becoming a hermit in a mountain cave. Just as we have to stop and think how rare and precious even simple things were back when everything had to handcrafted before industrialization, our descendents will not intuitively grasp what it meant to not know someone’s current location or how to contact them.
No, I’m talking about surgeries currently available, not hypothetical ones. I don’t think there are any polls to demonstrate this, because it’s not something I’ve ever heard anyone question before. Even the doctors who perform the surgery admit that the state of the art for ftm sex change lags far behind it’s sister procedure.
Mind, there’s an entirely seperate issue, which is “Why are there so few ftm transexuals as compared to mtf transexuals?” I think you were right earlier in that the gender barrier for women passing as men is much more porous than it is in the other direction has a lot to do with it. A lot of people who might be considered ftm transexuals end up identifying as butch lesbians. (cf. Patrick Califia) Of course, most butch lesbians are simply butch lesbians, and have no desire to be biological males.
Or, it could be because those polls have used poor methodology or were conducted by heavily biased researchers. They’ve been brought up on the boards in transexual debates before, and some serious problems with their accuracy were raised. I don’t have any cites handy, though, sorry.
I agree entirely (and thanks for putting a name to the disorder for me) but I find the comparison with gender dysphoria troubling. The problem with Body Integrity Disorder is that the end result is objectively worse than the starting condition: there’s no way to argue that being short one or more limbs is better than having all four. The vast majority of people who have been forced to have amputations, or were born without all their limbs, will tell you that it would be much better to have the normal number of appendages. A transexual, on the other hand, is attempting to alter their body to something normal and (hopefully) functional. (Aside from reproduction, of course.) Comparing a man who wants gender reassignment surgery to someone who wants their legs cutoff carries the implication (for me, at least) that being a woman is somehow equivalent of being a cripple. Which, obviously, is not what you’re trying to say at all, but it’s a line of reasoning that I can’t escape when I see that comparison.
So long as the end result is also healthy, I don’t see a problem with it.
I agree, it would be better if many of these things could be addressed non-surgically, but I think there’s a limit to how much you can do with pills and hormones. For some things, you need the scalpel. I don’t think these things are necessarily undesirable simply because of the techniques necessary to achieve them at this time.
But this is immensely popular, a bona fide “opiate of the masses,” and has been ever since people started to make cities. Gossip is as human an activity as anything else. Many people may say they don’t like gossip, but ratings say otherwise. I don’t see any signs of this going away, only getting larger as we begin to follow more and more celebrities abroad.
But these are extremely popular. Sensational media stretches far back in history. Something will have to happen to human nature to stop its allure, I would think.
Whoosh, right?
Nah, they’ll understand. It’ll just be that, thanks to genetic engineering, everyone can have a pinkeye. Or whatever other color makes them happy.
No. Government regulation is going in the clear and definite direction of eliminating tobacco smoking as acceptable. I’m not talking about a personal opinion change on smoking, but on how it would be viewed after it has been regulated out of existence by the authorities.
How do you think it will be viewed if it’s legislated out of existence? I think there are two ways to think, either that it’s horrible that it was ever legal, or that it’s none of the governments business. I’m not sure how people in general feel about heroin though.
Perhaps, but what about lefthandedness ? It went from something horrible that had to be fought, to something people barely think about in a few generations. Irrational prejudice in general will probable be around as long as our descendants are human, but that doesn’t mean that there can’t be less or more of it, or that specific forms can’t vanish.
Or on the darker side, prejudice against homosexuality may vanish because genetic engineering will be used to totally eliminate it, and it will be an obscure historical oddity.
Wrong. It was questioned all the time, historically. That’s why there were so many excuses and rationalizations. The people of the time knew better; they knew that what they were doing was wrong, even by their own standards. They just didn’t want to stop, so their society became progressively more and more distorted by the effort to deny reality.
What makes you think that smoking is about control of your body ? It’s addictive; smoking is about a loss of control.
I think Arthur C Clarke had it right, when it one of his books it was referred to as “The Plague”, and smoking was digitally edited out of old movies so people would be willing to watch them. It’s not the authorities that are the driving force behind smoking being squeezed out of existence; it’s the general population. The authorities are just looking for votes by going along.
People will be surprized that there was a time when a TV show like Ow! My Balls! couldn’t be aired or that Brawndo wasn’t used to irrigate our crops. 
Actually, I’d question this premise to begin with – I just think that in many communities, the MtF crowd is just more visible than the FtM crowd.
“Ow! My Balls!” is already on TV, and has been for many years. We just know it as (Country’s) Funniest Home Videos.
As for Brawndo, though- you’re quite right. After all, it’s got what plants crave- it’s got Electrolytes! 
No, it DOES exist here, although Hormel Chavez doesn’t star. This actually came out earlier than Idiocracy, so it looks like we’re halfway there already.
Indeed—it’s all kind of reminding me of old (ollld old) science fiction, where the concept of society “progress” boiled down to “everyone acting like a Good Victorian.”
I dare say, to many of even the most radical liberals on the board, the social future of 100 years from now might just turn their hair white as much as the other way around. Even if it doesn’t include slipping into post-apocalyptic barbarism.
Eh, that makes me go WTF right now…
Perhaps, but it’s safe to say you’re in the minority on this issue. And your preferred attitude doesn’t exactly seem to be winning the day.
It isn’t about which attitudes we are enlightened enough to view as misguided despite the lack of such moral clarity on the part of the rest of society.
Does anyone honestly think that, in the foreseeable future, the idea of borders will be viewed as backward and utterly confusing? Or the way that we structure our cities? Or the idea of punishment rather than corrective reprogramming? These notions have existed for thousands of years, and we (with exceptions, of course), thousands of years hence, do not find them particularly WTF worthy. What makes us think people thousands of years from now necessarily will?
I have a book called Oddballs, in which the theory is advanced that social progress is only made by those who stick their neck out. Without oddballs, nothing would change. It takes a lot of courage to be one, which is why we have so few and it takes so long.
>Does anyone honestly think that, in the foreseeable future, the idea of borders will be viewed as backward and utterly confusing?
hopesperson, the idea of borders is apparently viewed this way by Aspidistra and me right now.
>I assume you mean this in a “someday” sense, as opposed to in the next, say, 100 years as stated in the OP.
What, viewing borders our way is so bizarre that I could only have suggested it if I misunderstood the OP and didn’t follow instructions?
Are you watching too much Lou Dobbs?
Those questioning it were few and politically weak. The very fact that it took so long before the ball got rolling suggests that the only objections to it were not frequent and not very public. If slavery had been questioned by more people, and more openly, it would have been removed a lot sooner. Inertia is a powerful force to resist social change.
The ideas of free trade over the last 30 years has all but ended the traditional border as far as trade is concerned. Confusing in the foreseeable future? no. Backward? - if you think having a tariff on textiles imported to the U.S. to keep textile mills in South Carolina in 2007, is “backward” (and I doubt you will find a major National party candidate who would advocate such a thing today) then yeah. In the foreseeable future - 30/40 years or so - I expect the EU will be more integrated economically and all the economies of earth to be basically 1 economy (it is really now but will be much more so in the future). Basically it will be harder to pretend what happens in the EU or US or Chinese central Bank doesn’t matter to the rest of world and some dude who got up and said "Within the borders of the U.S. we should be producing grain and every American should pay $1.00 more per more per loaf of bread to preserve this capability within our borders" - that will be seen as backward - you’d get some traction today but only some and much less in the foreseeable future.
Likewise a jacka@ss who said we shouldn’t be paying to eradicate West Nile because it is in Haiti or Tuberculosis in Mexico (or SARS whatever ) because it has no impact within our borders - less and less will doing something about that be seen as a moral/ethical/charitable thing and more and more it will be seen as a common sense thing … because borders in 2007 are all but irrelevant to movement of disease.
Given that borders have changed from tribe to village to city state to dukedom/state to country to Superstates like the EU and NAFTA - it is difficult to see how anyone could believe that our current idea of borders and what they mean has suddenly become static.
Absolutely not. In fact, I don’t disagree with your view. I just have no reason to believe that it will be adopted by enough people to have a meaningful effect in the foreseeable future. Our wishing it were so does not make it more likely to be so.