#Eugenics

[cynicalclassicist]

The Christofascists are eugenicists. They clearly do not care for the lives of others.

The 'all lives matter' MAGA pro-lifers are a Christofascist eugenics movement.

[spooniestrong]

"This commission statement refers to people with Autism, ADHD, asthma, auto-immune disease, and chronic illness as a "dire threat to the American people and our way of life."

This is a manifesto against disability.

This is the language of eugenics."

[headspace-hotel]

I've been reading some more of the works of eugenicists while thinking about the state of education about this ideology. Yes, "Eugenics" is a dirty word nowadays; in my opinion, it's not nearly dirty enough.

Here's a fact to make your head spin: Eugenics wasn't about killing people. Yes, it ended up killing people, and if you examine the way eugenics has influenced the world, you realize it still does kill people, but the architects of eugenics weren't leading with, "My fellow countrymen, we should On Purpose Kill People."

The reason that's important is, people keep coming up with ideas labeled (by their critics) "uncomfortably similar to eugenics"--- ideas for a compassionate, scientifically-grounded way of improving humanity by understanding the heredity of good and bad traits and influencing the fertility rates of people with different genetic traits.

There is already a word for this kind of idea. That word is: eugenics. It is silly to set yourself apart from eugenicists by explicitly repudiating killing people or forcibly sterilizing them, when many founding eugenicists also explicitly repudiated killing people or forcibly sterilizing them.

Here is an Internet Archive link to "Heredity in relation to eugenics," a work by Charles Benedict Davenport, an early eugenicist. Please read at least the first four pages.

I'm afraid that his brief introduction to eugenics could sound, to the layperson, surprisingly less scary and disgusting than expected. Mister Davenport's word choices may provide a "red flag" to the reader: he refers to human babies as a "valuable crop," to marriage between people as "mating." The disquiet these word choices cause is because they dehumanize the subjects. Humans, from Davenport's perspective, are essentially the same as agricultural plants or animals, which in turn are assets, sources of economic gain---they are things.

Davenport articulates the contribution of a human being to the United States: "...forming a united, altruistic, God-serving, law-abiding, effective and productive nation." However, relatively few people are "fully effective" at this purpose, because a proportion of society is "non-productive"---either criminals or disabled, or among the people required to care for and control criminals and the disabled.

After you read the introduction of Davenport's book, read his wikipedia page. He was a Nazi. He was a Nazi until the day he died. He was rabidly and repugnantly racist, so much so that his later scientific works fudged together garbage conclusions that contradicted his actual data in order to prop up his racist beliefs. He lobbied Congress to restrict immigration into the USA, out of the belief that the immigrants would poison the blood of our country with inferior genetics.

Overwhelmingly, eugenicists were concerned with disability. They believed that disability would normally be eliminated by natural selection, and that caring for the disabled and allowing them to grow up and to have children would cause a steady increase in the proportion of society made up of disabled people---who were, as Davenport puts it, a "burden" on society.

Eugenicists were also concerned with race. They wanted to gather data that demonstrated what they already believed: that race was a biological reality, a reality that could only appear unclear or malleable because of harmful, aberrant, unnatural scenarios, namely miscegenation or race mixing. Basically, race was both a natural reality, and in need of enforcement.

But eugenicist ideology was not just about the inferiority of disabled people or people of color. Eugenicists thought of their ideas as a science and thought of themselves as scientists, and they broadly addressed virtually everything we would now consider a matter of "public health." Eugenicist writings almost universally address crime, and often don't recognize a clear distinction between crime and mental disability, or between either of those things and poverty. Criminals, disabled people and poor people were basically the same; they had something wrong with their genes that made them that way.

"Sexual deviance" is generally included in this, and Davenport explicitly references this in his introduction, where he says that "normal" people are not likely to have the kind of sex that leads to the transmission of STIs.

For many proponents (including Davenport), the key dogma of eugenics was that genes predetermined everything about a person. Tuberculosis was a huge problem at the time, and eugenicists were insisting that, although the disease was known to be bacterial, susceptibility to the disease was genetic, and therefore people who became sick with tuberculosis were genetically defective. Likewise if a child developed epilepsy after a head injury, the injury did not cause the epilepsy but instead revealed an inherent genetic weakness that was already there. This implied that spending resources on healing or rehabilitating anybody was a waste of time.

If you read more of Davenport's book, you will see that he makes some WILD statements---he asserts that artistic talent is a Mendelian trait controlled by a single gene, basically that you are either born an artist or you aren't. This seems absolutely absurd but, there is a good amount of popular belief in inherent aptitudes for art or music or math or what have you.

Eugenics isn't just about named prejudices like racism or ableism, it is even bigger than that, it is a set of beliefs encompassing how the potential and value of human beings is determined and how society should care for its members as a result of that.

[riderofthemist]

Mx.Papaya : bit.ly/FreeResistArt

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[ryjkowiec]

I remember reading about a woman that discovered Hans Asperger due to looking for help for her autistic child and regretting making him popular when she found out how he treated children under his "care" and his nazist activity. I don't know if this is confirmed but I do really hope so because I hate this nazi eugenist.

[where-your-eyes-dont-go]

It feels odd that while Lovecraft's racism is often the first thing the mind jumps to when discussing him, the same isn't really true for other prominent pulp authors. Especially considering Edgar Rice Burroughs whole oeuvre is a celebration of white supremacy and eugenics. Tarzan boasts that he's a "killer of beasts and many black men." Utopias that have bred out crime through execution or sterilization of criminals' families are a repeated staple of his fiction. It wasn't just his fiction either; the man wrote a newspaper column calling for the killing of "moral imbeciles" and their families [source].

Its not like they were writing in wildly different times; the first Tarzan book came out only seven years before Lovecraft's Dagon. And they both were incredibly influential and celebrated figures in specific genre niches that still command wide attention. But while his racism isn't unknown, it doesn't seem to be attached to Burrough's public character in the same way it is for Lovecraft. Why doesn't he have multiple generations of pulp fans coming to terms with how the author they idolize is awful? Are there just not enough people reading A Princess of Mars these days?

[transsexualfiend]

Cripplepunk, madpunk, and neuropunk aren't just "I'm disabled and also left-leaning". It's a specific realm of activism rooted in dismantling the systems that put disabled, mad, sick, etc folks at a disadvantage in society. This mean not only being against the very systems that harm us but also understanding their colonial origins and continued racist legacies. (Anti-ableism, anti-sanism, anti-psych, etc). This means not only just identifying and finding pride in your disability but also building and constantly evolving your understanding of disability and diversity and learning how you can change your worldview to accurately highlight the struggles of disabled people. (EVEN if it sometimes means you will be uncomfortable or unsure of unlearning some kinds of hate.)

[theculturedmarxist]

In 2020, Robert Kuciemba, a woodworker in San Francisco was infected with covid by a co-worker after his Nevada-based Victory Woodworks transferred a number of sick workers to the San Francisco site for a few months. 

Through the proceedings of the case it turns out that the employer knew some employees might be sick but they transferred them anyway and ignored a San Francisco ordinance in place at the time to quarantine suspected covid cases.

Kuciemba was subsequently infected and he then infected his wife, who ended up in ICU on a ventilator.

The California Supreme Court just ruled against Kuciemba on the basis that a victory, while, in the court's words, "morally" the right thing to do, would create "dire financial consequences for employers" and cause a "dramatic expansion of liability" to stop the spread of covid.

There’s a few stunning details to note in this case. First, the court agreed that there is no doubt the company had ignored the San Francisco health ordinance. In other words, they accepted the company had broken the law. And then concluded “yeah, but, capitalism.”

Secondly, the case was so obviously important to the struggle between capitalism and mass infection that the US Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobbying organisation got involved and helped the company with its defence. Remember, this is a tiny company in a niche industry. The involvement of the biggest business lobbyists in the country tells us a lot about the importance of the principle they knew was at stake.

Thirdly, the defence of the company is very telling. They said “There is simply no limit to how wide the net will be cast: the wife who claims her husband caught COVID-19 from the supermarket checker, the husband who claims his wife caught it while visiting an elder care home." 

Well, exactly. Capitalism couldn’t survive if employers were liable for covid infections contracted in the workplace, and the ripple effect of those infections. And they know it. 

This case is something of a covid smoking gun, revealing what we always suspected but had never seen confirmed in so many words: the public health imperative of controlling a pandemic virus by making employers liable for some of that control is, and always must be, secondary to capitalist profit. 

This ruling is also saying out loud what has been obvious to anyone paying attention for the last two years: employers don’t have a responsibility to keep your family safe from covid. You have that responsibility. And if you give a family member covid that you caught at work and they get sick or die – even if it was a result of law-breaking by your employer – that’s on you buddy.

It is the same old capitalist story: the shunting of responsibility for ills that should be shared across society, including employers in that society, onto individuals.

This ruling essentially helps codify workplace mass infection and justifies it as necessary for the smooth functioning of capitalism.

This is not new. This is where the ‘just a cold’ and the ‘mild' narrative came from. It came from doctors and healthcare experts whose first loyalty was to capitalism. Not to public health. To money, not to lives. Abetted by media who uncritically platformed them.

While this ruling tells us little that we couldn’t already see from the public policy approach of the last two years, it is revealing (and to some extent validating) to see it confirmed by the highest law of the land in the United States. 

[nightmaretour]

The UK officially passed the "assisted dying" bill... and with a healthcare system that actively WANTS to get rid of you one way or another, to the point of being one of its main motivations in choice of treatments (alongside cost)...

Well, I think we've figured out what Kier Starmer is planning to do with all of the disabled people who he can't force to work.

[whereserpentswalk]

Gentle reminder that you can be 100% pro choice and still understand that aborting a fetus because it will be disabled as a human is a eugenicist idea that comes from absolutely horrifying ideas that have been placed in western culture as a result of more overt eugenics movements in our past.

[odinsblog]

Donald Trump's nephew recounts a conversation with then-president Trump after 2020 White House meeting with disability advocates. (source)

[noneedforbloodpressure]

The eugenicist commission statement in question. It gets worse.

They're just bringing back the useless eaters garbage. We might be thoroughly fucked

It's literally the same playbook as 90 years ago, they haven't changed anything. I feel like a crazy person trying to get people to see it.

[blackbrownfamily]

[bugboy-behaviour]

EGYPT IS LEAVING A DISABLED MAN TO DIE IN GAZA, DESPITE HIM AND HIS FAMILY HAVING THE FUNDS TO ESCAPE

PLEASE, WE NEED MORE PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT THIS!!!! SPREAD THIS WHEREVER YOU CAN!!!! PUT PRESSURE ON EGYPT TO PUT HIS NAME BACK ON THE LIST

[thebibliosphere]

Fully aware I’m bringing the straw discourse back myself but it’s almost like this is a systemic problem with how we manufacturer everything, including “eco-friendly” options.

Anyway, wishing all the ecowarrior girlies who told me and countless other disabled folks to our faces that if our disabilities meant we couldn’t give up plastic straws for safety reasons we were a burden on the planet and should consider suicide the moral option a very “suck on your toxic bullshit.”

Literally.