[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.

[Dylan16807]

Which, again, is an argument about it being very easy to do.

That does not address jamesrcole's argument. He's not saying "it was always possible, therefore being easier is no different".

He's pointing out that there are worse bad things that are just as easy to do, yet they aren't considered scary.

You can't make an argument that the ease matters, because he's asking about things that are equally easy if not easier. Why is easy availability of such a drug different from easy availability of the knife/car/etc.?

[gaius]

It's a value judgement of course. As a society we accept that n deaths/year are worth it for the benefits that cars and butter knives bring to the wider population. In very recent history, sterilisation techniques have been massively abused by governments in an organised way. There was never a large-scale, systematic programme of running people over as policy. Forced sterilisation is still a thing in India...

[jamesrcole]

Means that can be used to kill people have also been abused.

You should be focused on access, control and any inappropriate uses. Not on whether the things being used exist or not.