to be extremely clear, eugenics is morally wrong and disgusting.
Easy one: means testing
an old friend from high school got a job approving loans for small businesses and I told him he was a “means tester”
he had no idea what that meant and I explained it to him and I think he kinda realized his job is evil but isn’t ready to confront it head on lol
(he’s a lib)
yeah, it’s surprising how many libs don’t understand the entire loans system in the United States comes out of Jim Crow redlining policies and was only fixed on paper.
Hoping your friend is able to eventually confront that contradiction and move left. Sometimes it takes seeing the machine up close to realize it needs to be destroyed.
Climate change. When the really bad shit starts happening that actually demands a government response, the first world will be able to do reforestation and build sea walls and things like that to mitigate the worst of the effects - but the third world will be trapped sending us materials for those projects while getting only the bare minimum built to keep the extraction going.
“Unskilled” labor. A lot of dangerous or life-shortening work requires just as much specialized knowledge as something like being an accountant, but we have organized society in such a way that the kids of poor people end up in dangerous jobs and the kids of wealthy people end up in safe ones (and the kids of the wealthiest people just pretend to work).
bruh
“Genuine” eugenics with voluntary participants isn’t bad because it is deontologically wrong, it is bad because it is a complete waste of time and effort
no, eugenics is morally and ethically wrong. eugenics is not a term that can somehow be reclaimed by throwing out its entire history.
This borders on sounding like “real eugenics has never been tried” which is :cringe:
I think about that a bit because you do see anti-abortion types making that point. Haven’t quite got an answer for it yet
Shit like that dude is why Pol Pot lost it and just started murdering everyone with glasses. Check out what they wrote in response to someone else in this thread :agony-shivering:
Defects are defects and don’t need scare-quotes. I personally was born with a genetically-inherited deformity and a deformity is likewise a deformity. Not all ways for a body to develop are equally good. Some are just bad for your health or leave you unable to do things that most people can. Gratefully, mine mostly just makes me ugly, but only a slight difference would have left me in a really miserable position and I would have been fucking insulted by someone saying that there’s nothing wrong with it. If I could have been given genes from someone else to change this specific trait (which was also entirely predictable, looking at my parents), it would be ridiculous for my parents to have abstained on the basis of such an act being “eugenics”.
The Nazi eugenics project was mostly oriented around a completely unscientific racial mythology. It shouldn’t be compared to attempts to avoid people being born with life-crippling defects that doesn’t involve coercing anyone or pandering to myths. I think that not all birth defects are genetic in nature as much as a byproduct of how the fetus happened to develop, but those that are actually genetically-driven being screened out is definitionally eugenics and, not because it is eugenics but because it helps avoid inflicting gratuitous suffering, it’s clearly a good thing. On the level of principals, this really is not a complicated concept. Gene therapy (to remove a disease) affecting a fetus or a person who plans to reproduce is also eugenics and it’s also a good thing outside of how the commodification of healthcare threatens to make such things another vector for the poor being fucked over. People should not be forced to suffer because of what their genes or their parent’s genes happen to dictate. There is nothing sacrosanct about DNA and superstition should not be a barrier to reducing suffering.
“But what about the Nazi genocide of the disabled?” Considering that they were just as happy to kill people who were disabled for non-genetic reasons, it still was not “real” eugenics. That aspect of the project was less “purging the gene pool” and more “removing the ‘useless eaters,’” as they wrongfully called them. Even some German veterans of WWI were killed for being disabled (though most were exempt because of nationalist lionizing). Obviously it still would have been wrong if they only murdered people with genetic conditions, but then it would have arguably been “real” eugenics (and would have failed even if the Nazi project didn’t kill itself by other means soon after it began).
The concept of intelligence versus stupidity. Nobody gave a shit about this before the 19th century. Eugenics arose then because the bourgeoisie needed a justification for their stolen wealth.
I used to think we were all still trapped in the 1980s or 1970s but we’re actually trapped in the 19th century, at least when it comes to ideas.
Take a look at the eugenics tree on google images. Justin Podur has some good podcast episodes on the 19th century too.
