https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/richard-hanania-racist-pseudoscience-woke-silicon-valley/675335/
The pseudoscience of race provides both a justification of hierarchies and an enemy to rail against.
Dear conservatives.
If you want eugenics allow people to abort and do generic testing on their kids before they're born. It accomplishes the same thing without the brutal state control and human rights violations.
It accomplishes the same thing without the brutal state control and human rights violations.
Well, that's the problem. They can't control people without those two components. It's not really eugenics if it just naturally emerges from individual choices.
But I want to meet Emma Watson...
Actually, I don't. I'll be so cringy, onlookers will die of second hand embarrassment.
What? No they don't want eugenics to eliminate diseases. They want it to eliminate Jews, and weirdly also pitbulls.
It's a stepping stone.
They can't say Black people are stupid criminals because they're descendants of slaves.
So they say pitbulls are violent psychopaths because they were (supposedly) bred to be tough and aggressive. They act like all that matters is they're pitbulls, and it's nothing anyone can change because "that's just science"
The implication is individual variation doesn't exist and any population that's been artificially separated for a couple generations makes them inherently different.
Racists have always loved taking a tiny grain of truth out of context and then just bullshitting till they end up with their preconceived result. Then if anyone challenges it, they grab that tiny grain of truth out of their giant mound of shit and claims that proves everything.
But that wouldn't satisfy their sense of self righteous vengeance. If you prevent a problem altogether, there'd be nobody to punish for it.
Fashion trends seem to follow a 20 year cycle, and a 30 year cycle, where ‘90s trends are coming back into fashion.
Fascism trends seem to follow a 90 year cycle, where ‘30s trends are coming back into fashion.
When you've experienced something personally, like war for instance, you're going to know and remember personally how it felt to you, you will have strong opinions on it.
If it happened before your time, you will lack these feelings, and you will be basing your opinion on more abstract understanding that may or may not be accurate, since your understanding can only ever be as accurate as the historical material you were given.
Authoritarianism is a good example of this. It's seductively simple, and it sure would be nice if it "just worked" and we could live successfully that way. Sometimes a person needs personal experience of their own direct suffering before they can wake up from their fantasy, though, before they come to realize that we have the systems we do not because they're perfect or even great, but because they're demonstrably the least shitty of them all. Our way may be fairly bad, but other major ways are worse.
This is a very unpleasant conclusion to come to, and I understand why people may wish to hide from it inside their own fantasies of power and simplicity.
Authoritarian attitudes was the #1 predictor of Trump support if I recall.
I haven't lived through an authoritarian regime, but I lived through a terrible parent - so I've experienced the feeling of 'oh shit the structure that governs my life is fucked up and I must escape'. I think that's what made me anti-authoritarian.
I often wonder if there's a way to get people to shift away from authoritarianism. I think I get the appeal of 'simple, easy, you don't even have to think for yourself!' - but everyone needs to recognize those are trap cards.
The boot on the neck is fine, as long as you're the one wearing the boot. But you can't be sure that will always be true, can you?
It also takes a different sort of person to say that there shouldn't be a boot in the first place.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with your thesis here. Many, many people who supported Hitler and Mussolini had been through WWI. Hitler himself was wounded in WWI.
It was certainly not intended to be a description of how things must or always be. Simply how they often work, it is one factor that goes into a very complex equation.
It is a large factor though. But not overriding or anything.
I highly recommend "The Fourth Turning" by Strauss & Howe.
“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” - G. Michael Hopf.
I was once talking about the Strauss-Howe generation theory with a conservative buddy of mine and the above quote is what he was familiar with and made sense to him.
Huh. Looks like we'll be getting the Eugenics Wars after the Bell Riots in this timeline. Still on track for Irish Unification, too.
Not looking fwd to WWIII though, looks fucking horrifying. I hope I can make it to at least see first contact.
Just so you know, if you're really quick you can hit Ctrl-A and Ctrl-C and copy all of the article text before the paywall pops up. You can then just paste the text into notepad and read the full article. I was going to post the complete text here, but that big of a post seems to make Lemmy choke.
Something I didn't learn until this week, but James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family (wrote "Dare to Discipline", a book about how we really needed to start hitting kid again in the 70s), was an assistant to a counselor who was a eugenics-loving, racist marriage counselor. Dobson wrote/published materials for Popenoe (the eugenicist counselor) as his assistant. Very few years later, Dobson started writing many of those same ideas as himself, but wrapped up with religion.
So these young whippersnappers might be trying to bring back eugenics, but that's largely because for the last 50 years, eugenics have been evangelized to many, many (especially Christians) in all but name.
Yet another reason to despise that guy. That's an interesting find I was completely unaware of. Sad if anyone is actually taking childrearing advice from the writing of superstitious chumps from more than a millenia ago. Like, gee, we kind of learned a few things since then...
It shouldn't be a surprise the racist right is pushing racist pseudoscience. The right believes in an immutable race hierarchy despite race being a social and not biological construct. In other words believing things without scientific evidence as usual.
Too many people never get the "phenotype or genotype" talk in Jr high science apparently.
There already is a respectable kind of eugenics.
It's called "genetic counseling".
Here's why it doesn't sit well with pseudoconservatives (aka authoritarians):
It's consensual.
It involves giving accurate, scientifically based information to potential parents, on the risk of genetic disorders that might lead to unhealthy children, so that they can make better decisions about parenthood.
It does not involve racial pseudoscience, antisemitism, or violent compulsion of any sort. As such, it does not fit well with pseudoconservatism, fascism, etc.
They want it to eliminate phenotypes that are different...
Normal people want it to eliminate negative genotypes that lead to genetic issues and lifetimes of suffering for future generations.
Two completely different goals.
They just fundamentally don't understand genetics, like when you tell them there's more genetic diversity within Africa than between every other population outside of Africa. They can't see genes by looking at someone, but they can see phenotypes. So 9/10 a conservative will say "but they're all Black".
An astonishing amount of racism is actually about sex and reproduction. Many racists are more threatened by "race mixing" than by the mere existence of other races.
That’s not eugenics. To qualify as eugenics, you’d have to be getting genetic counseling because you wanted to improve the human race, not because you think it’d be unethical to make your kid go through the same suffering you did with a genetic disease. Making eugenics more palatable by ignoring the ideology that defines it can harm people, so please stop.
The end goal is to stop those diseases from continuing to affect the human race. Yes it starts with individual people but if we can prevent everyone from suffering, that is the goal. People need to understand that words are not bogeymen. Eugenics was used for horrible reasons by people who largely didn't understand the science, and by some who did. That doesn't mean it can't be used to accomplish something actually useful for humanity.
I grew up in a cult, so my perspective is a bit off. Did people actually reject eugenics after WW2 or did they just start whispering their approval of it?
The nazis were very upfront about how they got their thoughts on eugenics from America. The way we treated Black people and the native population. Especialy the nonconsensual sterilization.
When the nazis realized they were losing, they switched to killing everyone instead.
It's kind of hard to watch that happen and the majority of the world unite against it then saying "yeah, but we'll just go right up to that line".
To a lot of Americans it was a wakeup call. But what changed American culture the most was minority service members coming back after being treated not just as equals, but heroes by Europeans. A 1940s Black man from the South would have had their minds blown at even being treated like an equal.
That might explain my experience. The cult I grew up in has remarkably deep ties to white nationalism.
I think the problem is partly that things like not allowing convicted child rapists to have children seems like a really really good idea.
But then it's super duper difficult to draw the line.
If the state can take those human rights from a criminal, they can make laws that define any one of us as criminal and take them from us.
The chemical castration was never supposed to be about thinking sexual predation was hereditary. It was supposed to be about quelling sexual urges. Unfortunately it's generally a power thing, not a sexual impulse/urge thing. So it's just cruel and unusual.
Sometimes was awesome but many times it develved into the wrongest shit of all no wonder it ended up dying.
In 10-20 years, if not sooner, the highest IQ entity is not going to be bio-human. So, what’s the point?
Highly regarded conservatives are still coping with Jews and east asians kicking their ass
Yes, it's toxic and bad. But Eugenics is one of the worst things to ever happen to the world. I just don't want that downplayed at all. People who believe in eugenics literally think they should play God and decide who lives and who dies.