Imagine that there is a new scientific theory that warns of an impending crisis, and points to a way out.
This theory quickly draws support from leading scientists, politicians and celebrities around the world. Research is funded by distinguished philanthropies, and carried out at prestigious universities. The crisis is reported frequently in the media. The science is taught in college and high school classrooms.
I don’t mean global warming. I’m talking about another theory, which rose to prominence a century ago.
Its supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill. It was approved by Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled in its favor. The famous names who supported it included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret Sanger; botanist Luther Burbank; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University; the novelist H. G. Wells; the playwright George Bernard Shaw; and hundreds of others. Nobel Prize winners gave support. Research was backed by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out this research, but important work was also done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Johns Hopkins. Legislation to address the crisis was passed in states from New York to California.
These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus were alive, he would have supported this effort.
All in all, the research, legislation and molding of public opinion surrounding the theory went on for almost half a century. Those who opposed the theory were shouted down and called reactionary, blind to reality, or just plain ignorant. But in hindsight, what is surprising is that so few people objected.
More on this War Room episode, Fernandez segment begins about 26 minutes in.
Re: “Crichton continues: “After World War II, nobody was a eugenicist, and nobody had ever been a eugenicist.”
Well, except for Tommy Douglas.
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/tommy-douglas
I get that the Nazis made Eugenics untenable by pushing it it to dehumanizing extremes, but are we all supposed to pretend that eugenics isn’t actually a good thing?
Isn’t shitheads promiscuously breeding what got us here?
Kate you breed dogs right? Would you throw some violent mutt into the mix just to see if a champion arrives by chance?
Otherwise…point taken about the group think “science” thing.
Such as arranged marriages. Okay, those are more about maintaining wealth and power rather than boosting the gene pool.
Eugenics hasn’t gone away.
It merely found respectability in another way:
https://icelandmag.is/article/fact-check-no-iceland-not-systematically-eradicating-down-syndrome
UK: New ‘do not resuscitate’ orders imposed on Covid-19 patients with learning difficulties
People with learning disabilities have been given do not resuscitate orders during the second wave of the pandemic, in spite of widespread condemnation of the practice last year and an urgent investigation by the care watchdog.
Mencap said it had received reports in January from people with learning disabilities that they had been told they would not be resuscitated if they were taken ill with Covid-19.
https://www.blazingcatfur.ca/2021/02/13/uk-new-do-not-resuscitate-orders-imposed-on-covid-19-patients-with-learning-difficulties/
Many conservatives opposes eugenics, although not necessarily on humanitarian grounds. Rather they argued that who was to be born and who procreated was God’s decision, not man’s.
Duh the Cult of Calamitous Climate is Eugenics reborn.
While claiming to help,they are systematically destroying any chance that poor brown people might ever had to enjoy the comfort and luxury of a moderately high tech society.
Just a strange coincidence of course.
The flaw in Eugenics was simple.
Who decides what are desirable human attributes?
Is docility desirable?
How about obedience?
Blue Eyes?
Blond Hair?
The funny thing about breeding for “Best Traits”is over specialization.
Complete with hereditary diseases.
Dogs being a fine example.
The healthiest longest lived dogs in my life,have all been mongrels.
With out being religious,leaving it in Gods hands is not too far off the mark.
Cause damn near every bright idea by man,with the intent of “improving “man,has turned out to have a dreadful side.
Eugenics being a perfect example.
Beware the Do-Gooder bringing the perfection of man.
Fair enough on the “who gets to choose” point, but eugenics is a natural phenomenon due to mate selection in the first place.
General policies promoting general welfare of society need not be a bad thing. Tommy Douglas’s subnormal family thing isn’t quite to gotcha people pretend it is…
“According to Douglas, a “subnormal” family had a “low mental rating…anywhere from high-grade moron to mentally defective,” and below normal “moral standards” (including those who were sexually promiscuous or involved in prostitution). According to Douglas, these families were a heavy social and economic burden on Canadian society.”
No kidding. Conservatives championing a society full of retarded hookers is bizarre.
John Robertson explains the TC Douglas motive pretty well and then
“Conservatives championing a society full of retarded hookers is bizarre”
What Where When. Jeff
You’ve built a strawman so large and reaches so high into the heavens the very sun itself could ignite it and burn us all to death.
I was referring to T.C. Douglas being smeared for his position paper on the subnormal family.
Isn’t there a middle ground between dysgenic breeding and Nazi death camps?
I’ve long thought the government would be better off offering ten thousand dollars to people between the ages of 18-35 to get sterilization.
The idea being that anyone willing to trade their reproduction for ten grand are probably the people we’d rather not have breeding in the first place.
Anyone I tell this to thinks I’m a scary asshole.
Prairie people have seen it all from hucksters and snake oil salesmen.
When Douglas wasn’t going on about his cats and mice stories he was building the ‘New Jerusalem’. The trouble with Douglas and his ‘new Jerusalem’ was that it was much like the old Jerusalem except this time around the thieves and tax collectors were on his side.
Huh? If you throw 10 grand at just about any 18, 19 20 year-old etc… or a poor person, they probably aren’t thinking about having a family, no? This is just a plain silly argument, and methinks your not nearly as clever as you think you are, your not scary just maybe a little conceited. The want of money isn’t the best arbitrator of how good a parent may be.
“Who gets to decide” is everything you need to consider about it. Eugenics wasn’t about free will and free choice, it was about state coercion in deciding who should breed with whom and for what traits and who “shouldn’t” breed at all. The state should be empowered only to protect rights not be the exclusive holder of and or granter of privileges disguised as rights.
Eugenics has morphed into econgenics. The USA is both importing and breeding a vast underclass of economic dependents. They come here in droves, and work for $nothing. They drop baby after baby in the ghetto for the government aid $$. The third world exports their elderly pensioners who suck up free medical care. Yeah … if you don’t believe we are breeding and importing our own economic destruction and/or bloody revolution … then you’re economically illiterate. One good recession and/or runaway inflation (stagflation?) … and the plan will have worked. The USA will be destroyed. The Marxists will take full control. We will all be Cubans then.
Stupid people breeding has brought us to our current circumstance and it ain’t pretty.
Stupid people VOTING has brought…..
It does seem almost quaint that we once concerned ourselves with poor people who had no marketable or productive skills in the labor market, and few prospects of ever attaining any skills.
For example it doesn’t seem to be a requirement for new arrivals to Canada today or is that question even allowed to be asked by immigration officials under Great Leader The Benevolent?
And (not so) smart girls have been brainwashed to be more concerned with establishing careers than having children during their biological prime years.
Abortion is the newest reincarnation of eugenics.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/noninvasive-prenatal-testing/about/pac-20384574#:~:text=During%20prenatal%20cell%2Dfree%20DNA,provide%20information%20about%20fetal%20sex.
The “problem” of “Substandard” persons would be self solving.
If we did not reward their dangerous incompetence with welfare.
At the moment we are breeding the most dangerous bunch of useless and clueless people to ever occupy one space.
And when we cannot find enough in our local populations,we deliberately import more.
Get rid of the Welfare State and laziness,willful stupidity and parasitism will not vanish,but they will no longer be rewarded and made the tax payers problem.
And,on a very similar note,eliminating a whole bunch of “workers safety” would put personal responsibility back on track.
Some people truly are too stupid and dangerous to work with.
The funny thing about the welfare state,is the only thing it grows,is the parasitic overload.
Almost like our politicians are so unique in their cluelessness,that they have to seek fellow travellers world wide.
From all the places where people have allowed fools to take them too low to survive.
I guess they feel Can Ahh Duh needs such expertise.
I have come to regard the “barbaric” practise of duelling to be a very necessary tool to prevent social decay.