[gaius]

Slip it into someone's pills at a mental hospital say. Sweden was doing stuff like that up until the 1970s.

[jamesrcole]

What were they giving to the patients? Was the existence of what they were giving to those patients a scary thing just for existing - coz that's the question here.

[gaius]

The ease with which something can be done makes a huge difference and it's disingenuous to argue otherwise.

[jamesrcole]

a car can easily kill someone. As can millions of other things. It's ridiculous to suggest that that automatically makes their existence scary.

Is the existence of injectable insulin scary just because someone could kill someone just by injecting them with it?

[gaius]

Have a read of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilisation_in_Sw...

1975 isn't that long ago. If this technology is cheap and available, it will be abused.

[jamesrcole]

You haven't responded to any of my points, just ignored them.

What you're really trying to do is make out that somehow sterilisation is a special case of something with a potential negative use case, where if they can easily be used, they will be, without arguing why it's different from all the other things that meet that criteria.

[gaius]

Not at all. It's similar to Google and the "right to be forgotten". In the old days something might be public knowledge but would say require visiting a records office to uncover. People could move on from things they regretted. Now it's just a search away. Aha, people say, but the knowledge was ALWAYS public. In practice the ease of doing it makes it completely different.