From the wiki link, bolding mine:
- this was cancer caused by a retrovirus.
- there was a high rate of that cancer.
I was talking about the taboo of Godwinizing a thread. (Sorry for the confusion.)
There are examples of societies that do whats easy and convenient, if there is nothing to stop them.
I hope that most societies are humane enough that they would afford full rights to clones.
But I wouldn’t bet my life on it. Maybe I’m too cynical for my own good.
Yee of little imagination. Don’t you watch movies? 
Antinor noted that people already have children for reasons 2 and 3. People have had children for reason 1 as well - there have already been cases in which parents have conceived a child in hopes that he/she will be a suitable tissue donor for an older sibling.
But my point is that it ISN’T easy or convenient to create an army of clone soldiers, or clone organ slaves.
Organ slaves are just about the opposite of convenient, they are an incredible extravagance.
Yes, we can imagine an incredibly wealthy sociopath creating a clone of himself, then having the clone murdered so the sociopath can get a heart transplant. But this requires several things to happen. The person must be incredibly wealth…not just a multimillionaire, but far beyond that. The person must be a sociopath who doesn’t mind murder. And, this is the important part, that incredibly wealthy sociopath must be sick with a disease that requires an organ transplant. Otherwise, they’ve raised their slave since babyhood for nothing. And of course, they’ll have to find a team of transplant surgeons willing to murder the donor for them. There are only a few top transplant teams in the world. And it seems to me that none of them are willing to muder healthy people to get their organs. Not even for millions of dollars.
You need to find a team of surgeons who are the top doctors in the world. And who are sociopaths willing to kill. And who need millions of dollars. And are willing to take the risk of going to jail for that million dollars, and more importantly to such a hypothetical sociopath top surgeon, risk the end of their career.
As I said, such a thing could happen in a dictatorship, where a few top officials maintain organ slaves for themselves. But it certainly won’t be common, because why would the oligarchs provide multimillion dollar medical care to anyone who wasn’t an oligarch? And again, the problem isn’t cloning, because these oligarchs can simply order their men to round up orphans from the slums, tissue type them, and harvest organs from the kids who match?
Even in a current day Nazi Germany, such a thing would not be common, cloned organ slaves would be a footnote. If you’re really worried about a future society where amoral people routinely clone themselves and have the clones murdered or abused, then don’t worry about stopping cloning, worry about the collapse of liberal democracy instead. If liberal democracy collapses and cloned organ slaves are common, then the slavery and murder of a few clones will be the least of our problems, because the rest of us will also be slaves.
As for cloning Hitler, how would an identical twin of Hitler be a benefit to the neo-nazis, except as a mascot? Hitler led a mass movement in 1930s Germany because 1930s Germany was ripe for such a mass movement. Drop Hitler into today’s Germany, and he’d get himself a job painting houses [insert The Producers reference here], not recreating the Nazi party. 2008 Germany wouldn’t be bying, and 2008 Hitler wouldn’t be selling.
Right, but note that the second child isn’t going to be killed to provide tissue for the older sibling. So a cloned child could be a tissue or organ donor for the genetic parent of the child, but only in circumstances where any other child who was also a tissue match could be a tissue or organ donor. If you had kidney disease and your child was a tissue match, it might be ethical for your child to donate a kidney, or bone marrow, or what have you. But it wouldn’t matter if the child was a cloned child or a conventionally conceived child.
Depending on the circumstances it would either be ethical to ask the child to donate tissue or it wouldn’t, but whether that child was a clone or not is ethically irrelevant.
From what I recall of the hoopla about cloning when Dolly etc came out, a lot of people don’t realize that. They get their idea of cloning from sci-fi where “clones” are perfect mental and physical duplicates. And, usually decanted from tubes as adults, not born as babies.
Sadly, I suspect many Americans still believe this.
To the tune of “Home on the Range”:
"Oh, give me a clone
Of my own flesh and bone
With its Y chromosome changed to X.
And after it’s grown,
Then my own little clone
Will be of the opposite sex.
Clone, clone of my own,
With its Y chromosome changed to X.
And when I’m alone
With my own little clone
We will both think of nothing but sex.
… ."
Well done Pochacco!
The only tiny problem is that I don’t want my clone to be of the opposite sex. At least not if I’m gonna be attracted to it. 
I’m just passing it along. Isaac Asimov deserves all the credit … .
Didn’t Ripley get cloned in one of the *Aliens *with the alien baby still inside the clone? Or some such BS.
That was pretty much what I was getting at. Tastes of Chocolate listed three distasteful scenarios involving human cloning, and we’ve determined that each one has already been realized without cloning. So yes, the cloned-ness of the child in question is not relevant.
Apples and oranges. The failure rate of cloning is many times higher AND gross abominations are almost inevitable. In other words, it’s practically a foregone conclusion that the first human clones will not live very long or will be hideous freaks. The natural human reproductive process is many times more reliable in contrast.
While I never watched it ( word of mouth was . . . less than encouraging ), it appears so. From just a blood sample, no less.
Could you stick up your stats? I wouldn’t mind having a look at them for a future debate.
Revenant, you’re not going to get stats on the success rate of human cloning. Why? **Because it isn’t done. ** However, our own experience with animal cloning shows it to be a difficult and extremely error-prone process. Couple that with our very limited knowledge of the human development process at the cellular level, and you have a recipe for disaster.
As for the success rate of natural human reproduction, everyday experience shows it to be a pretty darned reliable process. Not perfect by any means, but not the sort of thing in which early deaths and freakish abominations are practically inevitable.
What percentage of normal pregnancies make it to full term?
Something like a quarter, maybe as many as 50%, naturally abort. Often before a woman knows she’s pregnant.
Clearly early deaths are very common, allegedly because nature knows something’s gone wrong and takes appropriate action, or maybe it’s just bad luck.
How is that different to Doctors trying to clone humans and ending each project until they get it right?
If we can get to a 50 - 75% success rate we’re keeping up with nature.
In terms of nature’s freakish abominations, check out the BBC program “Top of the Pops”.
Clones would not have been imbued with an immortal soul by the Lord Your God. Thus they would serve as an empty husk to facilitate the return of the Prince of Darkness, who would rule over Hell on Earth for a thousand years. None will be spared. Please. Think of the children.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that. I would have thought miscarriages were pretty common, actually, and I would say the amount of people with freakish abominations depends what you mean by that - would you include the blind from birth, people with cleft palates, and so forth? Put apart they amount to a small amount of all births, but I would imagine that added up they’d add up to a decent swarth of the population. That’s why I wanted stats - I wanted to know what we’re comparing against.
I’d also point out that the general idea of cloning is that it’s a process that’s improvable. Natural reproduction is not. I would say your view is somewhat short-sighted - we might certainly end up with a higher than normal amount of disabled or otherwise severe-problem having people, but I think the idea is to end up with fewer.