This is why we can't have a reasonable eugenics debate

[Cashew]

Abortion should be safe, legal, and encouraged, if not mandatory for immature teenage girls who are driving up our poverty rate.

You beat me to it. I don't even have words for that. Mandatory abortions...

The cause of most problems in today's society is the fact that stupid people are allowed to breed. In fact, they're fast out-pacing non stupid people. Most issues we have today, including viral videos, welfare families, victimhood mentalities, and most hate issues are simply the chickens coming home to roost. I think you ought to have to get a license to have a child, and you have to pass the same tests as you do to adopt a child. Nobody hears about an alcoholic, heroin-addicted, non-functioning junkie being granted custody of a child, and yet that tramp is allowed to pop out a kid.

As an individual with a balanced translocation, I can understand wanting to keep the gene pool as efficient as possible. The problem is that the most ardent advocates of eugenics quickly expose their malicious nature.

 I mean really, if genetics determine destiny, why do you bother insulting the woman as a "tramp" for something she did not choose, unless you get sadistic glee at attacking those less fortunate?

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

Eugenics isn't to be debated.

[Santander]

Natural selection is eugenics. We just need to stop leftist attempts to redefine strong as weak and beautiful as ugly.

[JA]

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Who's to define a gene pool's "efficiency"? What even constitutes "efficient"? Are you completely unaware that a person's environment and socialization play a far greater role in their outcome? If you care about improving society, then focus on reducing abuse and neglect of children, providing them a world class education, keep them out of poverty, and teach tolerance and empathy for all living things.

Eugenics is rightfully treated with extreme skepticism and disdain. It's the refuge of those who think of humans in terms of some genetic hierarchy; this is damnable as it too often leads to racism, ableism, classism, and a total lack of empathy towards their fellow man. No matter how you try to dress it up in benevolent terms, it's a sick view.

[Cashew]

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Who's to define a gene pool's "efficiency"? What even constitutes "efficient"? Are you completely unaware that a person's environment and socialization play a far greater role in their outcome? If you care about improving society, then focus on reducing abuse and neglect of children, providing them a world class education, keep them out of poverty, and teach tolerance and empathy for all living things.

I agree entirely with all your proposals. Nevertheless I have to play devil's advocate and will stand by the fact that there is a utilitarian case for eugenics. If future generations have to deal with birth defects, is is not morally obligatory for me to adopt instead?

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Eugenics is rightfully treated with extreme skepticism and disdain. It's the refuge of those who think of humans in terms of some genetic hierarchy; this is damnable as it too often leads to racism, ableism, classism, and a total lack of empathy towards their fellow man. No matter how you try to dress it up in benevolent terms, it's a sick view.

I agree, eugenics historically has attracted the worst people. Can we not separate an idea from the motives of those who promote it?

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

Having fewer morons in this world would benefit everyone, but seeing as humans can't even genetically engineer dogs without causing serious repercussions to the species, I'd be frightened at the prospect of humans trying the same experiment on themselves.  Artificial gene pools don't have a good track record.

If there is a reasonable eugenics debate to be had, then now isn't the time for it because we still have a minute understanding of how genetics works.  Simply talking about something, though, shouldn't be discouraged "because it offends people."

[Sumner 1868]

I agree, eugenics historically has attracted the worst people. Can we not separate an idea from the motives of those who promote it?

No. After all, not every anti-Semite approved of the Holocaust.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Most eugenics proponents have little to no understanding of genetics, evolution or how human society develops.

[mencken]

Natural selection is eugenics. We just need to stop leftist attempts to redefine strong as weak and beautiful as ugly.

Quite ironic given the implicit leftist endorsement of positive eugenics (at least for such valued traits as promiscuity and indolence)

[RINO Tom]

Eugenics isn't to be debated.

This.  We have finally reached a point where it is unacceptable to openly voice disrespect for any human life in society (let's not go down the abortion tunnel, at least not in this thread).  It is frankly unbelievable that anyone could voice support for eugenics in this day and age and not be completely ashamed of himself or herself, and I honestly don't believe the poster in question is ANYWHERE near clever or witty enough to be trolling/crying out for attention (not that it's funny to joke about).

Eugenics is pure evil, and I guess my naive self believed that the defeat of Hitler at the very least discredited the theory forever and put a much-deserved stigma of shame on anyone who'd even question that truth.

[Since I'm the mad scientist proclaimed by myself]

Having fewer morons in this world would benefit everyone, but seeing as humans can't even genetically engineer dogs without causing serious repercussions to the species, I'd be frightened at the prospect of humans trying the same experiment on themselves.  Artificial gene pools don't have a good track record.

If there is a reasonable eugenics debate to be had, then now isn't the time for it because we still have a minute understanding of how genetics works.  Simply talking about something, though, shouldn't be discouraged "because it offends people."

This. Hardcore eugenics (that actually fufills it's goals) is basically impossible with our current tech level. Eugenics was historically used as an excuse for (white) racists to dehumanize minorities. But declaring anyone who endorses anything with even the slightest whiff of it evil because of this isn't justified. There are many motives, methods, goals, and levels of extremity bundled into the concept behind the word "eugenics". Someone who wants to make the world a better place and believes that making the strongest, most resilliant, and smartest people's abilities more common will do that is very different from someone who wants to get rid of people because they have dark skin *ahem* "inferior genes"(or some other bs).

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

Eugenics isn't to be debated.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

Natural selection is eugenics. We just need to stop leftist attempts to redefine strong as weak and beautiful as ugly.

Quite ironic given the implicit leftist endorsement of positive eugenics (at least for such valued traits as promiscuity and indolence)

Not leaving people to starve in the streets for being worthless lazy sluts or the children thereof='positive eugenics,' apparently. Slink off back to /pol/ where you belong, fash.

[Cashew]

Eugenics is pure evil, and I guess my naive self believed that the defeat of Hitler at the very least discredited the theory forever and put a much-deserved stigma of shame on anyone who'd even question that truth.

Yes. And anybody who advocates limited government is evil because of the confederacy.

C'mon somebody, make a moral argument against eugenics.

[SATW]

Eugenics isn't to be debated.

[bore]

Whenever I hear people arguing for eugenics, I always think of this paragraph from David Bentley Hart:

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[RINO Tom]

Eugenics is pure evil, and I guess my naive self believed that the defeat of Hitler at the very least discredited the theory forever and put a much-deserved stigma of shame on anyone who'd even question that truth.

Yes. And anybody who advocates limited government is evil because of the confederacy.

C'mon somebody, make a moral argument against eugenics.

LOL, the CSA couldn't even bullshlt a fake ideology based on small government (Dred Scott, anyone?), and they CERTAINLY didn't have a small government once they were on their own!  Let's not pretend like proponents of small government today carry any weight of the Confederacy with political heritage.  That's ridiculous.

[Cashew]

Eugenics is pure evil, and I guess my naive self believed that the defeat of Hitler at the very least discredited the theory forever and put a much-deserved stigma of shame on anyone who'd even question that truth.

Yes. And anybody who advocates limited government is evil because of the confederacy.

C'mon somebody, make a moral argument against eugenics.

LOL, the CSA couldn't even bullshlt a fake ideology based on small government (Dred Scott, anyone?), and they CERTAINLY didn't have a small government once they were on their own!  Let's not pretend like proponents of small government today carry any weight of the Confederacy with political heritage.  That's ridiculous.

When they lie about history, just like the confederates there certainly is baggage.

But I will concede that was not my best example.

[White Trash]

We can't have a "reasonable" debate about eugenics for the same reason we can't have a "reasonable" debate about fascism. You don't debate evil, you destroy it.

[Cory]

Even I have abandoned a "positive/liberal" version of eugenics. C'mon people it's obsolete and in the past. The goal should be to make society produce better citizens. Something that we know can work not pseudo-science.

[mencken]

Natural selection is eugenics. We just need to stop leftist attempts to redefine strong as weak and beautiful as ugly.

Quite ironic given the implicit leftist endorsement of positive eugenics (at least for such valued traits as promiscuity and indolence)

Not leaving people to starve in the streets for being worthless lazy sluts or the children thereof='positive eugenics,' apparently. Slink off back to /pol/ where you belong, fash.

I would think that taxing those that are better able to plan for the future to fund those that cannot (and providing more money for each additional kid) is the very essence of "encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits"

[Since I'm the mad scientist proclaimed by myself]

Natural selection is eugenics. We just need to stop leftist attempts to redefine strong as weak and beautiful as ugly.

Quite ironic given the implicit leftist endorsement of positive eugenics (at least for such valued traits as promiscuity and indolence)

Not leaving people to starve in the streets for being worthless lazy sluts or the children thereof='positive eugenics,' apparently. Slink off back to /pol/ where you belong, fash.

I would think that taxing those that are better able to plan for the future to fund those that cannot (and providing more money for each additional kid) is the very essence of "encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits"

m'kay. You go keep thinking that.

[Intell]

You can't reasonably debate eugenics.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

Natural selection is eugenics. We just need to stop leftist attempts to redefine strong as weak and beautiful as ugly.

Quite ironic given the implicit leftist endorsement of positive eugenics (at least for such valued traits as promiscuity and indolence)

Not leaving people to starve in the streets for being worthless lazy sluts or the children thereof='positive eugenics,' apparently. Slink off back to /pol/ where you belong, fash.

I would think that taxing those that are better able to plan for the future to fund those that cannot (and providing more money for each additional kid) is the very essence of "encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits"

The purpose of these policies, you vile piece of sh**t, is to ameliorate the situation caused by the fact that these people are already having these children. Sure, you can argue that the effect of the policies is to tacitly encourage poor women to have 'too many' children--if you assume that the working poor of this country are Hugolian mauvais pauvre who value children and their lives based on how much sweet sweet welfare moolah they're 'good for'. However, arguing that says far more about you than it does about them, and the proposed 'solutions' that eventuate from this type of thinking obscure the real issues at play and also lead to endemic pediatric malnutrition in what is otherwise a first-world country.

One of the biggest actual reasons why poor women have 'too many' children too young and by too many men (no scare quotes around too in these cases because these are actual objective problems; I, the Catholic convert, am certainly not going to argue that teen pregnancy and promiscuity are somehow adiaphora) is that they simply see no reason not too, because unlike their f**ked-up neurotic 'betters' most of them still see children as a blessing and as a light to lives that don't really have much else going for them. Why not have a child at sixteen, if your chance of going to college is equally nonexistent whether you do or not? Why not shack up with another man after a while, if the father of your first child won't and can't marry you because he's in prison for a bullsh**t drug offense? Your proposed answer--'because if you do we will let you and your children die in a heap, you abhorrent slut'--certainly is an answer, but so are 'because you have legitimate hopes and dreams' and 'because public universities are actually affordable these days' and 'because you actually have attainable models of stable married love and family in your community who aren't senescent grandparents who got married back in the old days when the working class was still intact'.

I've been compared to Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the past, and I took that as a compliment because while Moynihan may have had some racist presuppositions and was certainly more of an advocate of 'tough love' in welfare policy than I think is appropriate he also did actually have a vision of an America in which working families of all races could form and stay together and live free from want. He identified the problem as that too many children were being raised without fathers—a debatable diagnosis, and obviously one that’s ~problematic~ by a lot of people’s lights, but one that’s a far cry from saying that it somehow constitutes ‘eugenics’ to not let ‘the wrong kind’ of children (or children born to ‘the wrong kind’ of mothers—WHORES WHORES WHORES WHORES WH, amirite?) have intolerably horrible lives and die miserable screaming deaths.

You cannot kill the poor mothers of America or their children. You can starve them and let them die of preventable diseases and kick them out onto the mean streets to your heart’s content, but there will always be more of them as long as people live free from outright murder, relatively free from forced sterilization, and spiritually free from the cancerous idea that children are at worst crushing burdens and at best optional accessories to be looked into (and if necessary made to order, possibly even using one of these disgusting tarts as a surrogate—it’s not like she’s using her womb for anything that would reasonably be more important to her than the precious Chester Peyton Fairweather IV you selected from his dozens of siblings) once you’re sick of your Bichon Frise. You can bitch and moan about having to support these undeserving ‘takers’ or ‘forty-seven-per-centers’ all the livelong day, but it’s useful to reflect, especially this time of year, that the primal image of the mother and child will still be here when all the best-laid plans of the upper and upper-middle classes are one with Nineveh and Tyre. We should by now have all learned the bitter lesson, that none of us in the end are ‘makers’.

P.S. It’s impossible to know the ultimate destiny of all but a select few people, and I’m certainly not one to despair of the mercy of God on even the most inveterate sinner, but it’s a distinct possibility that your namesake is currently burning in hell for his sins against the American reading public. I hope he is not. But if he is, there would be worse places to put him than the second ditch of the Malebolge, reserved for flatterers. Henry Louis Mencken spent his life flattering and fawning and toadying to a pseudo-intellectual pukwudgie aristocracy half of his own invention, insinuating his readers into his little cabal where they could titter about how superior they were to the ‘boobs’ and anybody so uppity as to try to better herself through something like the Chautauqua Movement. To snowclone a devastating but somewhat unfair observation that Christopher Hitchens, the farce to Mencken’s tragedy, made about Mother Teresa, not only did Mencken think it was beneath him to comfort the afflicted, he didn’t even bother to afflict the comfortable. For your sake, I hope you mend your ways and do not follow after him.

[DC Al Fine]

My train of thought while reading the above posts.

"This seems like a good graph supporting the elimination of welfare cliffs, I wonder why Nathan is so upsAW  HELL NO!"

Not much to add to what Nathan said except that Mencken's views are a horrifying glimpse into what our culture could very well look like if it continues down it's managerial, anti-natalist path.