There is a significant danger to not standing your ground on the linguistic stuff, like on the race and gender issues. A huge portion of the public now just wants to be able to say “trans women are women.” That means that the woke conceptual scheme is now calcified. The real answer in that debate has a lot to do with principles about how we use words, but that’s a cognitively demanding issue to hash out. It’s kind of a bind, because while the conceptual debate is too cognitively demanding for most, the alternative is to back a silly position (e.g. of a silly position: that the word “gender” necessarily equals biological sex and that the world will fall apart if the phrase’s usage shifts).
This is one way liberals win debates. They are more educated and therefore set the conceptual scheme for the debate. Then their opponents either have to argue from behind or make arguments that most people can’t follow.
The "trans women are women" slogan is an amazing brain twister. It's as if repeating "tofu chicken is chicken" enough times will make the tofu be chicken, even when the words on the page make it clear that tofu chicken is tofu chicken, not actual chicken.
And also for a dumb (or smart and motivated) person, a tautology is an argument, so it can stand alone as a refutation to "no they aren't." Yes they are, I just defined them as such!
I like the way you think. Can you expand on what you mean by a smart and motivated person? I would have imagined to any smart person, a tautology wouldn’t be an argument, so I wonder if you have a more specific definition here.
I should have said a smart person engaging in motivated reasoning (as a result of their conception of self, social pressure, whatever)- a really smart person will also have a definition of "woman" worked out that's capacious enough to feel like they're not contradicting themselves.
I think the right wing-ish version of this is "taxation is theft", which (as clever motivated people will explain) is totally true even though taxation is taxation, not theft, provided you use the right definitions of taxation and theft.
Slogans are the linguistic equivalent of empty calories when used by the masses. When used by activists, however, slogans are tools intended to deceive and manipulate the masses. "Trans women are women" really means "gender ideology is a good idea and you are a bad person if you disagree." "Taxation is theft" really means "income taxes are always unjust." If the activists wanted to be honest, they would lead with the normative arguments rather than bludgeon folks with their conclusions they wish you believe as fact.
There will always be a divide between what scientists and the general population think about a particular topic. Sometimes when I hear these debates on language it seems like it’s a small group of intellectually minded people sitting around a hot tub and only talking to themselves. Very little of the arguments and content around their words are adequately disseminated into the underlying public. Researchers need to realize that the average Joe is driven by emotion rather than logic. Thus, it is important to adjust for that. You made a good point about the cognitively demanding aspect of “hashing things out”. Most of the public doesn’t have the time to dispense their energy to discuss such things. This will not change. We must deal with how things are rather than how they ought to be. Sometimes we can turn the ought into the are, but it’s usually a pipe dream
One problem is that researchers and academics may use a well-defined and perfectly fine word in their own publications and forums and agree that it is better to use a different term with the general public. But there are always activists who will read or hear about that term being used in a paper and then broadcast it all over Twitter, falsely accusing the writer of being a horrible person. So, it's no longer feasible to separate academic/scientific and public discourses. (Except maybe in physics and chemistry!)
Yes, very true. Then perhaps an advisable way forward is to engage with the extremes in a manner that disarms them or makes them more understanding to alternative arguments. But Twitter often makes even typically cool-headed researchers turn malicious at times, going on block sprees. Kind and authentic dialogue with the extremes is necessary as well as a focus on everyday individuals through public talks and videos.
My main concern is that many researchers misunderstand scale and don’t seem to be able to properly “feel the pulse of the nation”. I have personally observed many receiving one or two negative comments on Twitter respond as though those remarks were the unequivocal consensus of the world. Many scientists in general have a poor understanding of what is desirable in the eyes of the public. This issue is further amplified by the fact that 25% of users are responsible for 99% of all engagement on the platform. An issue of selectivity also arises with the most vocal often being the most unrepresentative of the typical man of society. Therefore, if researchers are to engage with public discourse they must learn to disentangle the real from the vocal.
Good point. However, unrepresentative but persistent and harsh voices can have undue influence. We are seeing this when people get fired because a few people accuse them of views that they consider terrible (but which were universally accepted until a few years ago). I think it's may be less than 25% who are responsible for 99% of engagement but the minority have a stronger influence. Therefore, it's not unreasonable for a scientist to be especially concerned about those unrepresentative voices. Especially when their attacking tweet has thousands of likes.
I'd argue the opposite: it is paramount that researchers profoundly ignore connotations of laypeople and do their work with clear and already used terms rather than succumb to euphemism treadmill. They (we) are researchers, not politicians.
Eugenics is obviously good, so this is what should be defended, nothing less, at least in academic circles.
I don't see a contradiction. It is a tool. Most tools can be used for evil. Yet having tools is better than not having them. It works for knives, it works for science in general, and it works here.
Having tools is not always clearly better than their omission. A good example is nuclear weapons. In some ways they are good as a military offense but also provide clearly more risk over a long scale time frame. Phones are also a useful tool but are causally linked to depression and mental ailments of all sorts. Historically, eugenics always started off as “how could this possibly go wrong” before invariably leading to catastrophe. To say it’s obviously good is short sighted in my opinion, although I understand the sentiment. Sure it can be used for what many would subjectively call “good” but the opposite is also likely. It is by nature morally ambiguous.
I agree with Richard in the sense that I don't think "debates" matter or really exist. Certainly not for the mass public, although my sense is that they don't matter very much among intellectuals either. But Richard is absolutely right that the normie masses don't seem to even have the ability to properly understand what the arguments are for one thing or another. They just do whatever the people with power/status tell them to.
Love your work, but the main point you fail to address is that until very recently, eugenics was both widely used, and common parlance within bioethics and biology. Even Crick and Watson openly advocated (liberal) eugenics well after WW 2. For a representative sample of quotations or ordinary philosophers and scientists advocating eugenics, read this quick piece I published with Diana in 2021: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s40592-021-00129-1.pdf?pdf=button
The problem with abandoning terms whenever your opponents misuse them is that you’ll simply run faster on a euphemism treadmill that your opponents create for you. And no matter how fast you run, they’ll eventually trap you into using their moral framework.
This is fundamentally refuted by the reason we have things like embryo selection, etc, now, which is thanks to the pro-choice movement, which completely justifies itself based on freedom and women’s rights.
As noted above, Julian Savulescu, Nick Bostrom, Peter Singer, and I have all been called "eugenicists" even when we use language like "genetic enhancement." Indeed, your Rational Wiki stalkers call *you* a eugenicist. And they're not wrong.
Peter Singer and I made the point pretty clearly in "Can Eugenics be Defended?" because Singer is often accused of "eugenics" without even using the word himself.
Galton coined the term "eugenics" and also opposed significant state intervention to enact eugenics. There's no point in abandoning words whenever your opponents want you to. They can create new traps faster than you can avoid them.
The only reason they don't care about IVF is because it's beyond their current intellectual vista. Many Christian sects have explicit teachings against IVF (and fetal stem-cell research, which they've actively, politically opposed in the past). These positions can and will trickle down to the lay person. All the more reason why you shouldn't support backwards principle simply because you want to clumsily punish promiscuity and you think everyone on your side is too stupid or docile to take it further. I can always spot the man who became a moral authoritarian in the 2010s when he is unaware of these things.
"Will it?" It will. You must remember that many pro-lifers also have abortions. I remember the anti-ivf and fetal stem cell literature and movements from when I was a kid, they just faded after the financial crisis. IVF also creates life at the expense of mass extermination of conceived fetuses, which was enough of a philosophical distinction for those I grew up with. As to your last point, I am neutral toward both, I don't have prejudices about sex. And even if I did, I wouldn't punish people who need abortions to try and get at the frivolous woman for being irresponsible.
Eugenics as a term has never had anything but the worst and most negative connotation a word can have among the general public since at least the end of WWII. If you want to help progress the technology and its wide acceptance and use among the general public the last thing you should do is insist on calling it “eugenics.” The word is not salvageable.
Perpetual rhetorical retreat isn't without cost. Once a word becomes taboo, everyone who used it in the past becomes somewhat tainted. Say you refer to an article or book by a scientist who, say, used the term 'dysgenic' (now also being problematized) 20 years ago, and someone sees the use of the word and thinks, 'oh, this guy is just a racist crank,' and dismisses them out of hand. By ceding words you're not just ceding words, but also people, research, literature that used said words in the past; keeping them within the Overton Window requires enough people to keep using them to keep them normal. It's also costly to have to constantly invent new terms for the same thing, as no one outside of the rarefied few who are constantly up to date on the latest euphemisms will no what you're talking about. Constantly forcing your opponents to find new covert ways to express themselves probably does help hinder their ability to communicate and proselytize.
So the issue isn't as simple as 'just use the most socially acceptable phrasing of whatever you're trying to say.' For any individual, the best strategy is to always use the least offensive version one can come up with, but individuals who are willing to deploy marginal ideas and terminology at the expense of reputational damage may be benefiting everyone else by 'normalizing' their use and thus helping to keep them from slipping out of the Overton Window.
Well, this pretty much sums up a big part of the criticism of the modern right by neo-reactionaries like Curtis Yarvin. The left always wins because the right is adapting their framing of the world. “The democrats are the REAL RACISTS”. I wasn’t alive back then, but when the USSR was a thing I imagine republicans calling people “communists” and “socialists” was their effective version of this. People have short memories, and somewhere along the line in the last 20 years “socialism” became sexy and now those accusations have no bite.
A few months after Floyd riots I became completely disinterested in ever using the term “racism” in any intellectual discussion, unless referring to a person who’s literally covered in Nazi tattoos and goes to klan rallies. Long before that I realized the same with “communism” and “socialism” as they’re commonly used. When a person says “X is racist” or “X is a socialist” like that’s actually supposed to mean something in and of itself I view it as a very clear signal that this person isn’t going to be interesting to talk to.
The pro-choice movement has moved away from the term “clump of cells” for this reason. Ever since ultrasounds showed that fetuses do look like mini-babies, they’ve been reframing the debate around the right to choose rather than argue over whether or not fetuses are babies.
“Clump of cells” also sounds gross, which makes the speaker sound cruel to someone who isn’t already pro-choice. Maybe in an alternate reality where pro-choice people were dominant and trying to deepen pro-choice attitudes rather than broaden them, “clump of cells” would make sense.
It reminds me of Scott Alexander's concept of "The Worst Argument in the World" (TWAIW), which is an argument that conflates a term with negative connotations and a term with a neutral or specific definition. In this case, it’s "eugenics." The term itself is now widely seen as negative due to historical atrocities, but its literal meaning, improving the human species through selective breeding or genetic manipulation, isn't necessarily so. This dichotomy seems to be at the heart of the debate around "eugenics," with parties leveraging TWAIW to silence what might otherwise be productive conversations.
At some point though, words if used broadly enough will lose its meaning. I've seen nonwhites being called white supremacists more and more... Enrique Tarrio, Larry Elder, Asians that want affirmative action banned, etc. If overused, "white supremacist" will go from KKK members to literally anyone that disagrees with liberals.
In Iceland due to widespread genetic testing on the fetus, no children are born with Down's syndrome. Many conservatives make bad faith arguments to claim that is Eugenics, when it is not. Using modern medicine, one could test for heart, lung and mental defects.
My neighbor has a child with Down's syndrome, he would need life time support from his parents and care workers. They spend most of their free time caring for the child, taking him to different therapies etc. I understand Eugenics as term which means to kill such children and adults and no serious person would argue for it. Genetic testing fetus is not eugenics, as testing is precise and given as a society we accept abortion, abortion based on fetal defect is acceptable as well.
A bit of a misleading title. It should be, "Why I Oppose 'Eugenics'" (the word) and not "Why I Oppose Eugenics" (the practice).
Anyway, I'm fine with whatever rhetorical frame one wants to put it in, so long as it's practiced to some degree. It's certainly not about the women as far as I'm concerned. If women started aborting the healthiest fetuses for the sake of social justice, I'd very gladly take away their choice and regard deferring to them foolish. But so long as they're not, then it's okay. It's about the practice first and foremost, in whatever form it is provided (access to abortion when it's resorted to largely by the right demographics, designer babies when parents favor intelligence and stuff, etc.)
"Imagine Politician A, who adopts every left-wing position on race but uses slurs to refer to black people. He’s running against Politician B, who wants to abolish affirmative action, go all out with stop and frisk, etc., but always refers to “my beloved African Americans” and talks about how wonderful they are and how much they contribute to the country. Which one do you think would be perceived as the worse person by society? Who would be seen as more “racist”? I think the answer is quite obvious."
This hypo is particularly funny because most left-wing positions on race are inherently condescending and racist. See opposition to voter ID, defund-the-police, and, for that matter, affirmative action.
There are a number of false equivalencies in this piece. Further, allow parents, particularly mothers, to select their children based on their preferred attributes makes children more and more like commodities that are easily disposed of . This makes it easier to argue that mothers must always be able to abort their children if they feel like it, especially if they're not perfect. The child does not matter unless he or she fits the mother's preferences of gender, looks and intellect, not to mention timing. Sad.
My question for eugenicists is where the line is drawn, if there even is one. If a child is born with undesirable qualities, why can't you simply dispose of it? What about passage through the vaginal canal confers a baby with implied immunity to "genetic selection?"
Icarus had a choice, too. He chose to fly to close to the sun when his wings melted and he fell to his death. The more we pretend to "have many choices about the babies we make" the closer we believe we have come to be God. Aborting babies who are too ugly is the killing of the unborn. They in all their deformed ugly selves have a right to life, too.
Sounds like how people viewed attempts to fly a plane, harness electricity, preventing pregnancy with a pill, etc. The kinds of god-like revolutionary technologies humans have came up with throughout our history is mind-boggling. And thank goodness we didn't listen to Luddites and conservatives each time a new frontier was about to be crossed.
Still, there's something new about today's conservative opposition to eugenics: it makes them supportive of degradation and decadence, which is atypical of any movement supposedly of the right. They seem fine with having an uglier, stupider, and sicker population just to steer clear of this puritanical idea of "playing God".
Your grotesquely arrogant post here and earlier remind me of the words scrawled on the walls of men's rooms by war protesters in the early 1970's: Nixon pull out as your father should have.
There is a significant danger to not standing your ground on the linguistic stuff, like on the race and gender issues. A huge portion of the public now just wants to be able to say “trans women are women.” That means that the woke conceptual scheme is now calcified. The real answer in that debate has a lot to do with principles about how we use words, but that’s a cognitively demanding issue to hash out. It’s kind of a bind, because while the conceptual debate is too cognitively demanding for most, the alternative is to back a silly position (e.g. of a silly position: that the word “gender” necessarily equals biological sex and that the world will fall apart if the phrase’s usage shifts).
This is one way liberals win debates. They are more educated and therefore set the conceptual scheme for the debate. Then their opponents either have to argue from behind or make arguments that most people can’t follow.
The "trans women are women" slogan is an amazing brain twister. It's as if repeating "tofu chicken is chicken" enough times will make the tofu be chicken, even when the words on the page make it clear that tofu chicken is tofu chicken, not actual chicken.
And also for a dumb (or smart and motivated) person, a tautology is an argument, so it can stand alone as a refutation to "no they aren't." Yes they are, I just defined them as such!
I like the way you think. Can you expand on what you mean by a smart and motivated person? I would have imagined to any smart person, a tautology wouldn’t be an argument, so I wonder if you have a more specific definition here.
I should have said a smart person engaging in motivated reasoning (as a result of their conception of self, social pressure, whatever)- a really smart person will also have a definition of "woman" worked out that's capacious enough to feel like they're not contradicting themselves.
Yep, good nuance. Smart people are also susceptible to cognitive dissonance.
I think the right wing-ish version of this is "taxation is theft", which (as clever motivated people will explain) is totally true even though taxation is taxation, not theft, provided you use the right definitions of taxation and theft.
Slogans are the linguistic equivalent of empty calories when used by the masses. When used by activists, however, slogans are tools intended to deceive and manipulate the masses. "Trans women are women" really means "gender ideology is a good idea and you are a bad person if you disagree." "Taxation is theft" really means "income taxes are always unjust." If the activists wanted to be honest, they would lead with the normative arguments rather than bludgeon folks with their conclusions they wish you believe as fact.
There will always be a divide between what scientists and the general population think about a particular topic. Sometimes when I hear these debates on language it seems like it’s a small group of intellectually minded people sitting around a hot tub and only talking to themselves. Very little of the arguments and content around their words are adequately disseminated into the underlying public. Researchers need to realize that the average Joe is driven by emotion rather than logic. Thus, it is important to adjust for that. You made a good point about the cognitively demanding aspect of “hashing things out”. Most of the public doesn’t have the time to dispense their energy to discuss such things. This will not change. We must deal with how things are rather than how they ought to be. Sometimes we can turn the ought into the are, but it’s usually a pipe dream
One problem is that researchers and academics may use a well-defined and perfectly fine word in their own publications and forums and agree that it is better to use a different term with the general public. But there are always activists who will read or hear about that term being used in a paper and then broadcast it all over Twitter, falsely accusing the writer of being a horrible person. So, it's no longer feasible to separate academic/scientific and public discourses. (Except maybe in physics and chemistry!)
Yes, very true. Then perhaps an advisable way forward is to engage with the extremes in a manner that disarms them or makes them more understanding to alternative arguments. But Twitter often makes even typically cool-headed researchers turn malicious at times, going on block sprees. Kind and authentic dialogue with the extremes is necessary as well as a focus on everyday individuals through public talks and videos.
My main concern is that many researchers misunderstand scale and don’t seem to be able to properly “feel the pulse of the nation”. I have personally observed many receiving one or two negative comments on Twitter respond as though those remarks were the unequivocal consensus of the world. Many scientists in general have a poor understanding of what is desirable in the eyes of the public. This issue is further amplified by the fact that 25% of users are responsible for 99% of all engagement on the platform. An issue of selectivity also arises with the most vocal often being the most unrepresentative of the typical man of society. Therefore, if researchers are to engage with public discourse they must learn to disentangle the real from the vocal.
Good point. However, unrepresentative but persistent and harsh voices can have undue influence. We are seeing this when people get fired because a few people accuse them of views that they consider terrible (but which were universally accepted until a few years ago). I think it's may be less than 25% who are responsible for 99% of engagement but the minority have a stronger influence. Therefore, it's not unreasonable for a scientist to be especially concerned about those unrepresentative voices. Especially when their attacking tweet has thousands of likes.
I'd argue the opposite: it is paramount that researchers profoundly ignore connotations of laypeople and do their work with clear and already used terms rather than succumb to euphemism treadmill. They (we) are researchers, not politicians.
Eugenics is obviously good, so this is what should be defended, nothing less, at least in academic circles.
Eugenics is not “obviously” good. It can be used for either good or bad. One only needs to cite history to illustrate this
I don't see a contradiction. It is a tool. Most tools can be used for evil. Yet having tools is better than not having them. It works for knives, it works for science in general, and it works here.
Having tools is not always clearly better than their omission. A good example is nuclear weapons. In some ways they are good as a military offense but also provide clearly more risk over a long scale time frame. Phones are also a useful tool but are causally linked to depression and mental ailments of all sorts. Historically, eugenics always started off as “how could this possibly go wrong” before invariably leading to catastrophe. To say it’s obviously good is short sighted in my opinion, although I understand the sentiment. Sure it can be used for what many would subjectively call “good” but the opposite is also likely. It is by nature morally ambiguous.
I can argue that the existence of nuclear weapons prevented WW3, which would have been even worse slaughter and destruction than WW2.
I agree with Richard in the sense that I don't think "debates" matter or really exist. Certainly not for the mass public, although my sense is that they don't matter very much among intellectuals either. But Richard is absolutely right that the normie masses don't seem to even have the ability to properly understand what the arguments are for one thing or another. They just do whatever the people with power/status tell them to.
Okay boomer
Love your work, but the main point you fail to address is that until very recently, eugenics was both widely used, and common parlance within bioethics and biology. Even Crick and Watson openly advocated (liberal) eugenics well after WW 2. For a representative sample of quotations or ordinary philosophers and scientists advocating eugenics, read this quick piece I published with Diana in 2021: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s40592-021-00129-1.pdf?pdf=button
The problem with abandoning terms whenever your opponents misuse them is that you’ll simply run faster on a euphemism treadmill that your opponents create for you. And no matter how fast you run, they’ll eventually trap you into using their moral framework.
This is fundamentally refuted by the reason we have things like embryo selection, etc, now, which is thanks to the pro-choice movement, which completely justifies itself based on freedom and women’s rights.
As noted above, Julian Savulescu, Nick Bostrom, Peter Singer, and I have all been called "eugenicists" even when we use language like "genetic enhancement." Indeed, your Rational Wiki stalkers call *you* a eugenicist. And they're not wrong.
Peter Singer and I made the point pretty clearly in "Can Eugenics be Defended?" because Singer is often accused of "eugenics" without even using the word himself.
Galton coined the term "eugenics" and also opposed significant state intervention to enact eugenics. There's no point in abandoning words whenever your opponents want you to. They can create new traps faster than you can avoid them.
The only reason they don't care about IVF is because it's beyond their current intellectual vista. Many Christian sects have explicit teachings against IVF (and fetal stem-cell research, which they've actively, politically opposed in the past). These positions can and will trickle down to the lay person. All the more reason why you shouldn't support backwards principle simply because you want to clumsily punish promiscuity and you think everyone on your side is too stupid or docile to take it further. I can always spot the man who became a moral authoritarian in the 2010s when he is unaware of these things.
"Will it?" It will. You must remember that many pro-lifers also have abortions. I remember the anti-ivf and fetal stem cell literature and movements from when I was a kid, they just faded after the financial crisis. IVF also creates life at the expense of mass extermination of conceived fetuses, which was enough of a philosophical distinction for those I grew up with. As to your last point, I am neutral toward both, I don't have prejudices about sex. And even if I did, I wouldn't punish people who need abortions to try and get at the frivolous woman for being irresponsible.
Eugenics as a term has never had anything but the worst and most negative connotation a word can have among the general public since at least the end of WWII. If you want to help progress the technology and its wide acceptance and use among the general public the last thing you should do is insist on calling it “eugenics.” The word is not salvageable.
Perpetual rhetorical retreat isn't without cost. Once a word becomes taboo, everyone who used it in the past becomes somewhat tainted. Say you refer to an article or book by a scientist who, say, used the term 'dysgenic' (now also being problematized) 20 years ago, and someone sees the use of the word and thinks, 'oh, this guy is just a racist crank,' and dismisses them out of hand. By ceding words you're not just ceding words, but also people, research, literature that used said words in the past; keeping them within the Overton Window requires enough people to keep using them to keep them normal. It's also costly to have to constantly invent new terms for the same thing, as no one outside of the rarefied few who are constantly up to date on the latest euphemisms will no what you're talking about. Constantly forcing your opponents to find new covert ways to express themselves probably does help hinder their ability to communicate and proselytize.
So the issue isn't as simple as 'just use the most socially acceptable phrasing of whatever you're trying to say.' For any individual, the best strategy is to always use the least offensive version one can come up with, but individuals who are willing to deploy marginal ideas and terminology at the expense of reputational damage may be benefiting everyone else by 'normalizing' their use and thus helping to keep them from slipping out of the Overton Window.
Well, this pretty much sums up a big part of the criticism of the modern right by neo-reactionaries like Curtis Yarvin. The left always wins because the right is adapting their framing of the world. “The democrats are the REAL RACISTS”. I wasn’t alive back then, but when the USSR was a thing I imagine republicans calling people “communists” and “socialists” was their effective version of this. People have short memories, and somewhere along the line in the last 20 years “socialism” became sexy and now those accusations have no bite.
A few months after Floyd riots I became completely disinterested in ever using the term “racism” in any intellectual discussion, unless referring to a person who’s literally covered in Nazi tattoos and goes to klan rallies. Long before that I realized the same with “communism” and “socialism” as they’re commonly used. When a person says “X is racist” or “X is a socialist” like that’s actually supposed to mean something in and of itself I view it as a very clear signal that this person isn’t going to be interesting to talk to.
It sounds like you oppose the use of the word “eugenics”, not that you oppose what Fleischman calls eugenics. That’s an important distinction.
The pro-choice movement has moved away from the term “clump of cells” for this reason. Ever since ultrasounds showed that fetuses do look like mini-babies, they’ve been reframing the debate around the right to choose rather than argue over whether or not fetuses are babies.
“Clump of cells” also sounds gross, which makes the speaker sound cruel to someone who isn’t already pro-choice. Maybe in an alternate reality where pro-choice people were dominant and trying to deepen pro-choice attitudes rather than broaden them, “clump of cells” would make sense.
It reminds me of Scott Alexander's concept of "The Worst Argument in the World" (TWAIW), which is an argument that conflates a term with negative connotations and a term with a neutral or specific definition. In this case, it’s "eugenics." The term itself is now widely seen as negative due to historical atrocities, but its literal meaning, improving the human species through selective breeding or genetic manipulation, isn't necessarily so. This dichotomy seems to be at the heart of the debate around "eugenics," with parties leveraging TWAIW to silence what might otherwise be productive conversations.
At some point though, words if used broadly enough will lose its meaning. I've seen nonwhites being called white supremacists more and more... Enrique Tarrio, Larry Elder, Asians that want affirmative action banned, etc. If overused, "white supremacist" will go from KKK members to literally anyone that disagrees with liberals.
Not liberals, progressives. Liberals still remember what it means.
In Iceland due to widespread genetic testing on the fetus, no children are born with Down's syndrome. Many conservatives make bad faith arguments to claim that is Eugenics, when it is not. Using modern medicine, one could test for heart, lung and mental defects.
My neighbor has a child with Down's syndrome, he would need life time support from his parents and care workers. They spend most of their free time caring for the child, taking him to different therapies etc. I understand Eugenics as term which means to kill such children and adults and no serious person would argue for it. Genetic testing fetus is not eugenics, as testing is precise and given as a society we accept abortion, abortion based on fetal defect is acceptable as well.
A bit of a misleading title. It should be, "Why I Oppose 'Eugenics'" (the word) and not "Why I Oppose Eugenics" (the practice).
Anyway, I'm fine with whatever rhetorical frame one wants to put it in, so long as it's practiced to some degree. It's certainly not about the women as far as I'm concerned. If women started aborting the healthiest fetuses for the sake of social justice, I'd very gladly take away their choice and regard deferring to them foolish. But so long as they're not, then it's okay. It's about the practice first and foremost, in whatever form it is provided (access to abortion when it's resorted to largely by the right demographics, designer babies when parents favor intelligence and stuff, etc.)
"Imagine Politician A, who adopts every left-wing position on race but uses slurs to refer to black people. He’s running against Politician B, who wants to abolish affirmative action, go all out with stop and frisk, etc., but always refers to “my beloved African Americans” and talks about how wonderful they are and how much they contribute to the country. Which one do you think would be perceived as the worse person by society? Who would be seen as more “racist”? I think the answer is quite obvious."
This hypo is particularly funny because most left-wing positions on race are inherently condescending and racist. See opposition to voter ID, defund-the-police, and, for that matter, affirmative action.
There are a number of false equivalencies in this piece. Further, allow parents, particularly mothers, to select their children based on their preferred attributes makes children more and more like commodities that are easily disposed of . This makes it easier to argue that mothers must always be able to abort their children if they feel like it, especially if they're not perfect. The child does not matter unless he or she fits the mother's preferences of gender, looks and intellect, not to mention timing. Sad.
My question for eugenicists is where the line is drawn, if there even is one. If a child is born with undesirable qualities, why can't you simply dispose of it? What about passage through the vaginal canal confers a baby with implied immunity to "genetic selection?"
Icarus had a choice, too. He chose to fly to close to the sun when his wings melted and he fell to his death. The more we pretend to "have many choices about the babies we make" the closer we believe we have come to be God. Aborting babies who are too ugly is the killing of the unborn. They in all their deformed ugly selves have a right to life, too.
Sounds like how people viewed attempts to fly a plane, harness electricity, preventing pregnancy with a pill, etc. The kinds of god-like revolutionary technologies humans have came up with throughout our history is mind-boggling. And thank goodness we didn't listen to Luddites and conservatives each time a new frontier was about to be crossed.
Still, there's something new about today's conservative opposition to eugenics: it makes them supportive of degradation and decadence, which is atypical of any movement supposedly of the right. They seem fine with having an uglier, stupider, and sicker population just to steer clear of this puritanical idea of "playing God".
Your grotesquely arrogant post here and earlier remind me of the words scrawled on the walls of men's rooms by war protesters in the early 1970's: Nixon pull out as your father should have.
Again, we have birth control now; no need to pull out. But I guess you're dead intent on living in the past.
I like your term "medical surveillance" when trying to enforce and monitor illegal abortions.
Richard, you should read "Authority and American Usage" by David Foster Wallace -> https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DFWAuthorityAndAmericanUsage2005.pdf
I just support evolution. Survival of the fittest.