posted April 13, 2007 07:48 AM            

I realize that this is a blog site and the stories are reported with commentary. Yet, even beyond that, WTH is wrong with people doing things like this?!

It's overwhelming and I don't know of a word that describes how horrible it is, not even evil.

posted April 13, 2007 08:03 AM            

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Some mystery mom has been running around abandoning her newborns…immediately getting pregnant and abandoning her baby again. She has now done this three times, each new one 11 months apart from the previous.

The frist newborn was found on a park bench. The second was found in the back of a parked pickup truck. The third, unfortunately, was not found in time and died of exposure. All three were within two blocks of eachother.

The police are baffled as to who this could be and have been asking around the community about a girl with 3 pregnancies and no children.

It seems odd, in a town where everyone knows eachother, there isn’t a single soul that knows who is doing this.

Come on people! We’ve gotta find this woman and get her spayed

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Oh yeah, this is that Pawtucket Case in my homestate of RI. They say that two of them have the same father while the other one doesn't. I don't know how they haven't foind the damn woman, Rhode Island is a small place!

posted April 13, 2007 10:10 AM              

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The rest of the stories make me wonder if it should be manditory to get certian people "fixed" (like cats and dogs).

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this site will provide lots of support for this sentiment.

posted April 13, 2007 10:23 AM              

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Un-natural Selection

How did dysgenics come about? Simple. By a process that might well be called "un-natural selection," because it is a reversal of natural selection resulting from society's corrupting influence. In a nutshell:

(1) Modern societies quite understandably take care of sickly people who previously would have died, but then these people go on to have children with a high incidence of the same illnesses, and

(2) although contraception is available to everyone, it's more consistently and effectively used by all of the "best" and the most admirable people, i.e., the smartest, most responsible, hard-working people who make a positive contribution to the larger society.

A high percentage of the "worst" and least-admirable people either don't know, or don't care, that unprotected sex brings babies into the world, so they have sex with little or no thought of contraception. They include: psychopaths; sociopaths; criminals; psychologically disturbed people of all varieties; alcoholics; drug addicts; irresponsible, short-sighted, and selfish people; the mentally retarded; just-plain-dumb people; and people who are too lazy to take a trip to the corner drugstore. Because of their negligence, they contribute a disproportionate share of their least- admirable genes to future generations.

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posted April 13, 2007 10:32 AM              

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The pill gave black women greater control over reproduction than ever before. Why should this seemingly positive development be so controversial? One reason is the role white-dominated birth control programs played in furthering racial injustice. As black Americans agitated for their civil rights, the white backlash included reproductive regulation. The pill was introduced at a time when scientists such as Arthur Jensen and William Shockley were promoting genetic explanations of racial differences in intelligence-test scores. During the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of poor black women were coercively sterilized under federally funded programs. Women were threatened with termination of welfare benefits or denial of medical care if they didn't "consent" to the procedure. Southern blacks claimed that black women were routinely sterilized without their consent and for no valid medical reason—a practice so widespread it was called a "Mississippi appendectomy." Teaching hospitals in the North also performed unnecessary hysterectomies on poor black women as practice for their medical residents. During this period, state legislators considered a rash of punitive sterilization bills aimed at the growing number of blacks receiving public assistance...

...Black concerns about family planning had arisen decades earlier during Margaret Sanger's crusade for birth control. As Sanger allied herself with the burgeoning eugenics movement, the call for birth control veered away from its radical, feminist origins to include programs to regulate the poor, immigrants and blacks, based on theories of genetic inferiority and social degeneracy.

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posted April 13, 2007 04:03 PM              

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If it weren't such a slippery slope to even go there in the first place, I'd suggest that there needs to be some kind of litmus test for having kids.... :\

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Hitler agreed with you.

Book explores eugenics' origins
By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

Hard as it may be to believe, Adolf Hitler wrote fan mail, finding time in the early 1930s to express his admiration of the American leaders of a vaguely scientific movement called eugenics.
In his new book, War Against the Weak, investigative reporter Edwin Black makes the case that 20th century American proponents of eugenics — the belief that controlled breeding can improve humanity — had substantive ties to the architects of Hitler's racial extermination machine.

Black documents many links, such as the Hitler letters, between the American eugenicists and Nazi Germany prior to World War II, including how one prominent eugenicist's book, Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race, became Hitler's "bible."

Eugenics came into vogue in the early 20th century. With a name coined in 1883 by British anthropologist Francis Galton, who hoped to see arranged marriages improve mankind, the movement eventually led to racist laws, such as ones prohibiting miscegenation, in many U.S. states, and the sterilization of more than 60,000 mental and moral "defectives."

"It's startling how much Hitler idealized American eugenics," Black says. His book required two years of research by dozens of volunteers who culled records from about 110 archives, diaries of eugenicists, case records of their victims and research reports on removing the unfit from humanity. The research builds on Black's best-selling book, IBM and the Holocaust, which looked at Nazi use of data-processing technology to fill concentration camps.

In War Against the Weak, Black lays bare the veins of collaboration between American eugenicists and Nazi scientists. There was financial support of genetic research and travel by Nazi doctors from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a leading genetics research institute. There was research collaboration and reports on the Nazi efforts in respected journals like the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Black also describes:

• Biologist Charles Davenport, head of the Eugenics Record Office based at Cold Spring Harbor (N.Y.) Laboratory. He wrote eugenics textbooks widely used in universities and high schools and led drives for sterilization laws that eventually emerged in 33 states. He supported "racial hygiene" concepts.

• The lauding of eugenics by prominent Americans, including Alexander Graham Bell and Woodrow Wilson.

• The career of one Harvard-credentialed doctor, Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen, an original member of the Eugenics Research Association created in 1913, who ended up as a physician prisoner and SS collaborator at the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Black says the labs and foundations he contacted, such as Cold Spring Harbor, were open to examining their past and are committed to legitimate scientific work today.

Science historian and geneticist Elof Carlson of the State University of New York, Stony Brook, argues that Black does not capture the scope of historical bigotry and global racism.

The author of last year's The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea, Carlson says that "liberals, left-wing ideologues, social reformers, people of good intentions, scholars, and totally innocent scientists all contributed to the eugenics movement" — not just a few malevolent scientists. (Black does note that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was "a bigot if not a racist" who associated with eugenicists.) "Evil movements try to pick legitimate science to bolster their fanaticism," Carlson adds.

"As an editor today, it's embarrassing," says physician Catherine DeAngelis, editor in chief of JAMA, who describes her journal as unremittingly hostile to eugenics today. As far back as a century ago, she notes articles in her journal were critical of eugenics, alongside other reports extolling the movement.

And elsewhere, Carlson notes, influential geneticist Hermann Muller denounced the American Eugenics movement as racist, elitist and sexist at the 1932 International Congress of Eugenics. A "Eugenics manifesto" signed in 1939 by 15 leading geneticists denounced race and class-based Eugenics, as well as the atrocities carried out in Nazi Germany.

After World War II, as Nazi atrocities became more widely known, eugenics largely disappeared. For example, the journal Eugenical News, changed its name to Social Biology, still published today but devoted to genuine demographic heath trends research.

The U.S. history of forced sterilizations is becoming more well-known: Last year, North Carolina's eugenics past was widely reported, resulting in the April repeal of the state's involuntary sterilization law.

Black worries that genetic engineering today poses the same dangers, expressing concerns about insurance coverage failing people with suspect genes, and parents augmenting children with "superior" genes in coming generations.

But DeAngelis sees echoes of eugenics in the plight of uninsured Americans. The sense of entitlement that led the best and the brightest to call for removal of the unfit allows 40 million to go without health insurance now, she says. "We don't castrate people anymore, but by not providing them access to health care, we still mistreat the weak and the poor."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2003-09-14-book-usat_x.htm

posted April 13, 2007 04:33 PM              

Everybody now knows how evil Nazi eugenics were: How all sorts of people were exterminated not because of anything they had done but simply because of the way they had been born. And we have all heard how disastrous were the Nazi efforts to build up the "master race" through selective breeding of SS men with the best of German women -- the "Lebensborn" project. Good leftists today recoil in horror from all that of course and use their "Hitler was a conservative" mantra to load those evils onto conservatives. But Hitler was a socialist. As he himself said:

"We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions." (Speech of May 1, 1927. Quoted by Toland, 1976, p. 306)

So it should come as no surprise that Hitler's eugenics were an intergral part of his socialism and that the great supporters of compulsory eugenics worldwide in Hitler's day were overwhelmingly of the Left. Left-influenced historians commonly blur the distinction between a belief in eugenic or dysgenic processes and actually advocating a state-enforced eugenics program but we can find the facts if we look carefully. And it was American Leftists upon whom Hitler principally drew for his "inspiration" in the eugenics field.

In the USA, the great eugenicists of the first half of the 20th century were the "Progressives". As it says here:

A significant number of Progressives -- including David Starr Jordan, Robert Latham Owen, William Allen Wilson, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Robert Latou Dickinson, Katherine Bement Davis, and Virginia Gildersleeve--were deeply involved with the eugenics movement.
And as we read further here:

The second stage in the development of the eugenics movement extended from 1905 to 1930, when eugenics entered its period of greatest influence. More and more progressive reformers became convinced that a good proportion of the social ills in the United States lay in hereditary factors....

An educator, biologist, and leader of the American peace movement, Jordan's main contribution as a major architect of American eugenics was to bridge the gap between eugenics and other reform groups. Like other progressives, Jordan subscribed to the Populist-Progressive criticism of laissez-faire capitalism. Jordan had faith in progress and in a new generation. Yet, this optimistic environmentalism of Jordan's contradicted his Darwinian-hereditarian outlook of the world. Ironically, a similar ambivalence - - a "love-hate" attitude toward environmentalism - - ran through most progressive ideology.

For Jordan, the first president of Leland Stanford University, education permitted society's better members to outlive inferior peoples. Jordan believed the twentieth century had no place for the weak, the incompetent, and the uneducated. In addition, Jordan urged an end to indiscriminate and sentimental charity, a major factor he believed in the survival of the unfit. Jordan, like most progressives, viewed the urban setting as detrimental and destructive to human life. He held the general progressive belief in the social goodness of the small town or farm. The progressive's romantic attraction to the countryside can be partly explained by the alien character of the urban population. An increasing number of city dwellers belonged to the "undesirable foreign element."
And who were the Progressives? Here is the same writer's summary of them:

"Originally, progressive reformers sought to regulate irresponsible corporate monopoly, safeguarding consumers and labor from the excesses of the profit motive. Furthermore, they desired to correct the evils and inequities created by rapid and uncontrolled urbanization. Progressivism ..... asserted that the social order could and must be improved..... Some historians, like Richard Hofstadter and George Mowry, have argued that the progressive movement attempted to return America to an older, more simple, agrarian lifestyle. For a few progressives, this certainly was true. But for most, a humanitarian doctrine of social progress motivated the reforming spirit"
Sound familiar? The Red/Green alliance of today is obviously not new. Hitler got his eugenic theories from the leftists of his day; Hitler's eugenics were yet another part of his leftism!

Both quotes above are from De Corte's "Menace of the Undesirable" (1978). Against all his own evidence, De Corte also claims that the Progressives were "conservative." But the book by Pickens (1968) sets out the connection between the Progressives and eugenics far more throughly than the few quotes here can indicate.

Eugenics, however, was popular science generally in the first half of the 20th century. As a scientific idea it was not confined to Leftists. But note the difference in the implementation of eugenic ideas (again from De Corte):

Even early social crusaders held similar illiberal views. Josephine Shaw Lowell, a leader in asylum reform, stated in 1884 that "every person born into a civilized community has a right to live, yet the community has the right to say that incompetent and dangerous persons shall not, so far as can be helped, be born to acquire this right to live upon others. Thus, strands of eugenic-style racism not only found their way into conservative philosophy represented by Sumner and other Social Darwinists but so did progressive reform ideals. Consequently, reformers began viewing the criminal, insane, epileptic, retarded and impoverished as more products of their heredity than of their social surroundings.

Whereas Social Darwinists desired to let nature take its course in eliminating the "unfit," eugenicists, on the other hand, felt Social Darwinism had not accomplished the task of guaranteeing the "survival of the fittest" quickly enough. For eugenicists, the "vigorous classes" should be encouraged to have more children, while the "incompetent classes" should be compelled to have fewer. Consequently, eugenicists in their distrust of laissez-faire concluded that "natural selection" must be helped along.
To state his message another way: conservatives wanted to leave well enough alone; left-wingers, in their usual way, wanted to introduce compulsion into the matter.

And in Great Britain, too, the leftists of the first half of the 20th century were outspokenly in favor of eugenics. As just one instance, that famous philosopher, peacenik and anti-nuclear camapaigner, Bertrand Russell spoke in favor of it. Writing in "Icarus Or the Future of Science" in 1924 he clearly approved of it, though he did voice doubts about its being employed for the wrong purposes. In a letter to his first wife, feminist Alys Pearsall Smith, about socialism and "the woman question," he wrote of eugenics in words that could well have been Hitler's -- even echoing Hitler's bad grammar:

"Thee might observe incidentally that if the state paid for child-bearing it might and ought to require a medical certificate that the parents were such as to give a reasonable result of a healthy child -- this would afford a very good inducement to some sort of care for the race, and gradually as public opinion became educated by the law, it might react on the law and make that more stringent, until one got to some state of things in which there would be a little genuine care for the race, instead of the present haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways." (Quoted here.)
Even when Russell came to realize that state-sponsored eugenics could very easily fall into the wrong hands -- a realization he expresses in Icarus -- he still clearly saw it as desirable at least in theory. Nor was Russell alone in Britain. As this author notes:

The fact is that eugenics was popular across the political spectrum for many years, both in England and in North America (e.g., Paul, 1984; Soloway, 1990). In England, many socialists supported eugenics. Even those viewed as critics, such as J. B .S. Haldane, Lancelot Hogben and Julian Huxley were not against eugenics per se, but came to believe that eugenics in capitalist societies was infected with class bias. Even so, some (see Paul, 1984), accepted the idea of upper class genetic superiority.

Not only were R. B. Cattell's eugenic beliefs commonplace in that milieu, but he was influenced by prominent socialists who supported eugenics, men such as Shaw, Wells, Huxley and Haldane, some of whom he knew (Hurt, 1998). Jonathan Harwood (1980) actually cited the example of Cattell to demonstrate that British eugenics was not a right-wing preserve in the inter-war years (although Keith Hurt, 1998, has noted that Harwood later characterised Cattell's 1972 book on Beyondism as a "right-wing eugenic fantasy").

Oppenheim (1982) claimed that American eugenicists were opposed by those in the Progressive Movement, juxtaposing the hereditarian reformism of the former with the environmental reformism of the latter. Actually many progressives were also eugenicists and incorporated the idea of eugenic reforms into their larger agenda (e.g., Burnham, 1977); there was a great deal of cross-over between the two movements (e.g., Pickens, 1968).
The few real critics of eugenics in the early 20th century were mainly conservatives and Christians like G.K. Chesterton who saw eugenic planning as just another arm of the wider campaign to impose a "scientific" socialist planning. In fact Chesterton subtitled his anti-eugenics tract "Eugenics and Other Evils" as: "An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State."

As we see from all the quotes above, the racialist thinking of the eugenic socialists was quite "scientific" and progressive in it's day, much as "global warming" is seen as scientific and progressive today. And many of the eugenics true believers continued on postwar moving into campaigns for legalised abortion, planned parenthood and population control. In fact some conservative critics have highlighted the racist roots of much of the liberal pro-abortion movement.

And eugenics of a sort is back on the Left: The Zero Population Growth brigade are back with their "people are pollution" attitudes! Only this time they want to halve our population. And it does seem to be the old gang from the 1960's again -- including Paul Ehrlich. The abject failure of their earlier prophecies, e.g., that we would all be doomed by the 1970s, has not given them occasion for pause.

The Feminist connection

And are feminists conservative? Hardly. And feminists are hardly a new phenomenon either. In the person of Margaret Sanger and others, they played an active and prominent role in the USA in the first half of the 20th century, advocating (for instance) abortion. For her energetic championing of eugenics, Margaret Sanger won a public admirer in no less a figure than Hitler himself. Naturally, the American eugenicists were virulently racist, desiring to reduce the black population. They shared Hitler's view that Jews were genetically inferior, opposing moves to allow Jews fleeing from Hitler into the United States. If Hitler's eugenics and racial theories were loathsome, it should be acknowledged that his vigorous supporters in the matter at that time were leftists and feminists, and their opponents were conservatives.

The Green connection

As in America, Hitler's eugenics were merely one aspect of a larger "Green" theme -- a theme that continues, of course, as the Red/Green alliance of today. The Nazis were probably the first major political party in the Western world to have a thoroughgoing "Green" agenda. A good short summary of that has been written by Andrew Bolt. He writes:

Here's a quote which may sound very familiar -- at least in part. "We recognise that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind's own destruction and to the death of nations.

"Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger . . .

"This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought."

That was Ernst Lehmann, a leading biologist under the Nazi regime, in 1934, and he wasn't alone. Hitler, for one, was an avid vegetarian and Green, addicted to homeopathic cures. His regime sponsored the creation of organic farming, and SS leader Heinrich Himmler even grew herbs on his own organic farm with which to treat his beloved troops.

Hitler also banned medical experiments on animals, but not, as we know to our grief, on Jewish children. And he created many national parks, particularly for Germany's "sacred" forests.

This isn't a coincidence. The Nazis drew heavily on a romantic, anti-science, nature worshipping, communal and anti-capitalist movement that tied German identity to German forests. In fact, Professor Raymond Dominick notes in his book, The Environmental Movement in Germany, two-thirds of the members of Germany's main nature clubs had joined the Nazi Party by 1939, compared with just 10 per cent of all men.

The Nazis also absorbed the German Youth Movement, the Wandervogel, which talked of our mystical relationship with the earth. Peter Staudenmaier, co-author of Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, says it was for the Wandervogel that the philosopher Ludwig Klages wrote his influential essay Man and Earth in 1913. In it, Klages warned of the growing extinction of species, the destruction of forests, the genocide of aboriginal peoples, the disruption of the ecosystem and the killing of whales. People were losing their relationship with nature, he warned.

Heard all that recently? I'm not surprised. This essay by this notorious anti-Semite was republished in 1980 to mark the birth of the German Greens -- the party that inspired the creation of our own Green Party.

Its message is much as Hitler's own in Mein Kampf: "When people attempt to rebel against the iron logic of nature, they come into conflict with the very same principles to which they owe their existence as human beings. Their actions against nature must lead to their own downfall."

Why does this matter now? Because we must learn that people who want animals to be treated like humans really want humans to be treated like animals. We must realise a movement that stresses "natural order" and the low place of man in a fragile world, is more likely to think man is too insignificant to stand in the way of Mother Earth, or the Fatherland, or some other man-hating god. We see it already. A Greenpeace co-founder, Paul Watson, called humans the "AIDS of the earth," and one of the three key founders of the German Greens, Herbert Gruhl, said the environmental crisis was so acute the state needed perhaps "dictatorial powers."

The "big government" connection

As they do today, the leftists of the 1920s and 1930s captured most of the intellectuals and much of the educated class of the day and this gave them access to the levers of government power, which is of course what leftists want above all. Once in power, a culture of death prevailed, to wit:

"President Woodrow Wilson signed New Jersey's sterilization law, and one of his deputies descended to greater fame as a Nazi collaborator at Buchenwald. Pennsylvania's legislature passed an 'Act for the Prevention of Idiocy,' but the governor vetoed it .... Other states, however, joined the crusade. ... Eventually, the eugenicist virus found a hospitable host in Germany. There... it led to the death chambers of Buchenwald and Auschwitz. Thanks to the Nazis, highly praised by eugenicists here, the movement eventually collapsed. But not before nearly 50,000 Americans were sterilized."
And someone from the past who is still something of a hero to the Left is the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who famously said: "When you pay taxes you buy civilisation." This was quoted approvingly recently by Simon Crean, Federal Parliamentary leader of the Australian Labor Party. Crean somehow failed to note that Holmes was also known for ordering compulsory sterilizations of the supposedly mentally ill: Yet another forgotten American inspiration for Adolf.

California was also one of the earliest supporters of eugenics laws and in fact provided the model for Hitler's laws:

Under the banner of "national regeneration," tens of thousands, mostly poor women, were subjected to involuntary sterilization in the United States between 1907 and 1940. And untold thousands of women were sterilized without their informed consent after World War II. Under California's 1909 sterilization law, at least 20,000 Californians in state hospitals and prisons had been involuntarily sterilized by 1964. California, according to a recent study, "consistently outdistanced every other state" in terms of the number of eugenic sterilizations....

California not only led the nation in forced sterilizations, but also in providing scientific and educational support for Hitler's regime. In 1935, Sacramento's Charles M. Goethe praised the Human Betterment Foundation for effectively "shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler…." In 1936, Goethe acknowledged the United States and Germany as leaders in eugenics ("two stupendous forward movements"), but complained that "even California's quarter century record has, in two years, been outdistanced by Germany." In 1936, California eugenicist Paul Popenoe was asking one of his Nazi counterparts for information about sterilization policies in Germany in order to make sure that "conditions in Germany are not misunderstood or misrepresented." .....

California's eugenicists could not claim ignorance that Germany's sterilization program was motivated primarily by racial politics. For example, in 1935, the Los Angeles Times published a long defense of Germany's sterilization policies, in which the author noted that the Nazis "had to resort to the teachings of eugenic science" because Germany had been "deprived of her colonies, blessed with many hundreds of defective racial hybrids as a lasting memory of the colored army of occupation, and dismembered all around." Not only did California eugenicists know about Nazi efforts to use sterilization as a method of "race hygiene" -- targeted primarily at Jews -- but they also approved efforts to stop "race-mixing" and increase the birth rate of the "Northern European type of family." The chilling words of Progressive reformer John Randolph Haynes anticipated the Nazi regime's murder of 100,000 mentally ill patients: "There are thousands of hopelessly insane in California, the condition of those minds is such that death would be a merciful release. How long will it be before society will see the criminality of using its efforts to keep alive these idiots, hopelessly insane, and murderous degenerates. … Of course the passing of these people should be painless and without warning. They should go to sleep at night without any intimation of what was coming and never awake."
Another country that is to this day a model and inspiration to leftists everywhere is Sweden -- with its all-embracing welfare State. So what happened in Sweden? As we read here:

During the Nazi era in Germany, eugenics prompted the sterilization of several hundred thousand people then helped lead to anti-Semitic programs of euthanasia and ultimately, of course, to the death camps. The association of eugenics with the Nazis is so strong that many people were surprised at the news several years ago that Sweden had sterilized around 60 000 people (mostly women) between the 1930s and 1970s. The intention was to reduce the number of children born with genetic diseases and disorders. After the turn of the century, eugenics movements -- including demands for sterilization of people considered unfit -- had, in fact, blossomed in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Scandinavia, not to mention elsewhere in Europe and in parts of Latin America and Asia. Eugenics was not therefore unique to the Nazis.
So what exactly did happen in the USA? I am indebted to one of my fellow bloggers for a useful summary of one of the cases. Some extracts:

In the 1920's, the eugenics movement was ... popular. So popular in fact, that mandatory sterilization laws were passed in 34 states from the mid-1920's to mid-30's. Basically, these laws stated that sterilization was mandatory for socially undesirable persons. "The socially inadequate classes, regardless of etiology or prognosis, are the following: (1) Feeble-minded; (2) Insane, (including psychopathic); (3) Criminalistic (including the delinquent and wayward); (4) Epileptic; (5) Inebriate (including drug habitues)..." [etc]. So basically, if you were hyperactive, promiscuous, an alcoholic or drug addict, had cerebral palsy or Down's syndrome, were epileptic, (etc., ad nauseum), or exhibited ANY socially undesirable behavior at all, you were eligible for mandatory sterilization. And not you, nor your parents (if you were a minor) had any right to say "No."

In the mid 1920's, Carrie Buck, at the ripe old age of 17, fought the state of Virginia's mandatory sterilization statute. She was classified as a socially inferior woman, having born a child out of wedlock and her foster parents stated that she was "a handful". Carrie's mother had also been incarcerated in a state institution as a 'promiscuous woman'. And at the age of 7 months, Carrie's child, Vivian, was 'certified' as being 'deficient,' based on the 'history' of Carrie and her mother.

Carrie lost her case at the state court level, and it wound up in front of the Supreme Court in 1927. The prominent Supreme Court jurist, Oliver Wendel Holmes, wrote the opinion in Buck v. Bell. The decision was 8-1, Justice Butler dissenting. Here's what the majority opinion boiled down to:

"In order to prevent our being swamped with incompetents... society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes." ...

"It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…Three generations of imbeciles are enough." — Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (Buck v. Bell, 1927)

Five months after this decision, Carrie was forcibly sterilized. It later came out that her promiscuity was nothing of the sort. She'd been raped by the nephew of her foster parents, himself a violent (unsterilized) little scumbag. And her daughter's school records show that Vivian was a B student, receiving an A in deportment (behavior), and she was on the honor roll. Genetic tests later showed that neither Carrie nor her daughter had any genetic defects.
Conservative eugenics?

I should note that economist Steven Levitt's work suggests that the old leftist eugenics program of reducing the birth rate (via abortion) among the "lower classes" was not totally misconceived. Levitt's findings seem to show that making voluntary abortion available to poorer mothers reduces the crime rate years later. He is at pains of course to indicate that his empirical findings are not an endorsement of either eugenics nor abortion. Slate featured a three-day correspondence between him and Steve Sailer dealing with the issue.

Given the traditional conservative regard for individual liberty, it seems to me that the only eugenics programs that conservatives could justify would be voluntary ones, such as the large material incentives to reproduce that the Singapore government offers to highly educated Singaporean women. Christian conservatives, however, tend to regard all reproduction as God-given so would oppose even voluntary eugenic programs that limit reproduction, such as the Woodhill Foundation programs that pay crack-addicted mothers to undertake contraception.

Leftists, however, oppose the Woodhill programs because they are voluntary and privately-funded. They like such matters to be in the hands of the State (i.e., under their control).

And the problem of a self-perpetuating and substantially criminal underclass does not need to be addressed by eugenics. It can be addressed by addressing its major causes, such as the over-generous welfare system that the Left has created to thunderous praise.

And despite everything, there are useful and non-coercive eugenics programs in operation right now. Genetic screening in the U.S. Jewish community has now all but eliminated the awful hereditary disease Tay-Sachs.

Shifting the blame

Modern-day left-wingers hate it when you point out that it was they who inspired Hitler and in their reaction try to shift the blame, even to the most unlikely targets. A recent book has tried to lay the blame for the Left's eugenics of the early 20th century at the door of someone who opposed all compulsion. As the book reviewer says:

It has long been open season on Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). Perhaps because he was the 19th century's most prominent defender of individual liberty and critic of the violence of the state, Spencer has always been the object of hatred and distortion; indeed, it sometimes seems that no accusation is too bizarre to be leveled against him...

What common ground could there be between Spencer and the eugenicists? Both, to be sure, were 'Social Darwinists,' if that means that both thought there were important sociopolitical lessons to be drawn from evolutionary biology. But Spencer and the eugenicists drew opposite lessons. For the eugenicists, the moral of evolutionary biology was that the course of human evolution must be coercively managed and controlled by a centralized, paternalistic technocracy. For Spencer, by contrast, the moral was that coercive, centralized, paternalistic approaches to social problems were counterproductive and so would tend to be eliminated by the spontaneous forces of social evolution ....
It is a good comment on the dismal minds of leftists that they think that nothing can be accomplished except through compulsion. And accomplish a lot they have. And in the realm of eugenics, Adolf Hitler remains their most successful disciple.

References:

De Corte, T.L. (1978) Menace of Undesirables: The Eugenics Movement During the Progressive Era. University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Pickens, D. (1968) Eugenics and the Progressives. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Toland, J. (1976) Adolf Hitler Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday.

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obviously, and as unbelievable as it may seem to some, i do not agree with every single word, breath and ideal contained in this article. nor do i even -- gasp -- actively support and endorse with my entire body mind and soul the ideals and beliefs of the source of this article. it does however, contain some very eye-opening and relevant information.

and i think that the following, in a proper context, are actually admirable things, and that one can endorse them without being a supporter of hitler, or nazis, or their principles ~

quote:

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Hitler, for one, was an avid vegetarian and Green, addicted to homeopathic cures. His regime sponsored the creation of organic farming, and SS leader Heinrich Himmler even grew herbs on his own organic farm with which to treat his beloved troops.

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i think that one can be responsible for his/her health, not rape the environment, and grow organic veggies and herbs without endorsing genocide and fascism.

posted April 13, 2007 04:48 PM              

quote:

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(Oh, and way to go on trying to take the comment out of context to make me sound like Hitler )

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sorry, i've edited my post to reflect your entire quote. i thought that you were suggesting that you think a litmus test for having kids is a good idea, albeit a slippery slope. whether it's a slippery slope or not, i understood your statement to reflect your belief that such a thing is desirable. apparently i misunderstood your intention, as you misunderstood mine.

posted April 13, 2007 05:15 PM            

I guess it's their right to bear children because they're physically able to, only to lock them in the trunk on a road trip, or to try and burn them to hide prior abuse, lock them in the cellar and starve them, etc?

I guess to be totally cold about it, it's Darwinism in action. Those people's offspring don't survive to reproduce, therefore, there's no need to impliment a litmus test, they won't be contributing to the larger gene pool as it were, anyway. (Though my point had nothing to do with the gene pool, it had to do with preventing gross abuse of children by unfit parents).

But somehow that doesn't make me feel any better about those poor children....

Damned if you do, damned if you don't...

posted April 13, 2007 09:04 PM              

people across the spectrum of class, education, race, religion and so forth are capable of such inhumanity.

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(Though my point had nothing to do with the gene pool, it had to do with preventing gross abuse of children by unfit parents).

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'unfit', 'socially undesirable', who shall determine who may, or may not, and under what bias, fall into these categories, at some future time? it isn't about the gene pool only...it's about social control.

quote:

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Basically, these laws stated that sterilization was mandatory for socially undesirable persons. "The socially inadequate classes, regardless of etiology or prognosis, are the following: (1) Feeble-minded; (2) Insane, (including psychopathic); (3) Criminalistic (including the delinquent and wayward); (4) Epileptic; (5) Inebriate (including drug habitues)..." [etc]. So basically, if you were hyperactive, promiscuous, an alcoholic or drug addict, had cerebral palsy or Down's syndrome, were epileptic, (etc., ad nauseum), or exhibited ANY socially undesirable behavior at all, you were eligible for mandatory sterilization. And not you, nor your parents (if you were a minor) had any right to say "No."

In the mid 1920's, Carrie Buck, at the ripe old age of 17, fought the state of Virginia's mandatory sterilization statute. She was classified as a socially inferior woman, having born a child out of wedlock and her foster parents stated that she was "a handful". Carrie's mother had also been incarcerated in a state institution as a 'promiscuous woman'. And at the age of 7 months, Carrie's child, Vivian, was 'certified' as being 'deficient,' based on the 'history' of Carrie and her mother.

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these days there's the contraceptive pill, the morning after pill and abortion, all available for the purpose of promoting a sexually free, child-free society. children have very low status in this society, that places more emphasis on career, leisure time and a material lifestyle than responsibility for children. we're constantly exhorted to put our children in the care of strangers -- daycare workers and public institutions, emphasizing that their care, or even existence, is not as important as our more materialistic and pleasureable pursuits.

posted April 13, 2007 10:05 PM            

Yes, there are stupid people in the world. I doubt that killing them all or forbidding them to reproduce would leave us a world without stupid people. It's all relative. Today, an IQ higher than 110 = bright. If everyone had an IQ of 110 or higher than the scale would slide so that only those with an IQ higher than 145 = bright, and so forth.

Anyway, trying to "blame" genetics for everything is about as stupid as trying to "blame" astrology for everything. Where is the evil gene? The cold hearted, murdering b@stard gene? The child abuse gene? The superiority complex gene? The serial killer gene? The likes to abuse animals gene? The tyrannical dictator gene? A gigantic etc.

And how many "intelligent" people have produced "stupid" children anyway?

Anyone with an ounce of common sense and a "heart" realizes that eugenics is about as stupid and wrong as it is possible to be. That's where science without spirituality gets us. Luckily, it doesn't seem that eugenics is going to catch on any time soon. Some people just like to talk loud as heck about their crazy theories but never get far enough in implenting them to cause a world wide human disaster ... though some have gotten dangerously close.

I guess it can't be all bad that some people have children that will end up sacrificing their lives as "murderers" for their countries to protect them from people like Hitler while alot of other children will grow up to complain about how all those people are killing each other without ever offering a real solution to the problems that caused things to devolve so far. Imagine the world left to these latter ones. Millions of words devoted to complaining about how evil Hitler is and how equally evil are those fighting him and how evil it is that all those innocent people are suffering and dying ... millions and millions of words of complaint and yet evil continues to thrive and good people still die. I wonder how satisfying it is to complain about evil and feel morally/spiritually superior for your intellectual stance and yet never bother to lift an actual finger to defend someone's life.

Imaginary Simplistic Scenario

Witness 1
"Yeah, gangs are bad ... they do horrible things to alot of innocent people. Of course, the government's no better. They're just one big gang."

Witness 2
"Hey, look that lady over there is being attacked! Omg, they're beating her up and trying to drag her into that alley!"

Witness 1
"Oh. Well, as I was saying, these criminals are no worse than the cops who are supposed to defend us from them ..."

Witness 2
"WTH? I'm calling the police."

Another witness decides to actually get physically involved ...

Witness 2
"Oh, thank God someone is trying to help her. Maybe I should go help, too. I wonder if they're armed ..."

Witness 1
"Ugh. Everyone is so violent. There's no difference between the supposed criminals here and the supposed heroes. They both resorted to physical violence to achieve their goals. There are many better ways to handle situations like these."

Witness 2
"You mean like just standing around and complaining while innocent people get hurt? You have no compassion! Why am I even listening to you? Forget you, I'm going to go help those people."

Witness 1
Calling after Witness 2, "You are such a brute!" Muttering to the crowd that has gathered, "Everyone is so aggressive these days. What's so hard about being passive? I guess resorting to physical violence is all some people are capable of. And I'm very compassionate! I'm more compassionate than those guys! I don't only care about the so-called victims here. I care about everyone. Those poor 'criminals' are going to have to go to the hospital just like that lady. But the cops and those civilian 'heroes' are just going to get away with their violent deeds. This country is so full of it. Why can't we resolve our problems without violence? I'm sure if someone would've just tried to talk to those 'criminals' that everything would have worked out for the best all around. But no one seems to want to talk peacefully ...."

Meanwhile, the lady is being treated for injuries and the criminals are arrested and treated for injuries as well. Then the media shows up to cover the story and, that evening, both extremes of media outlets begin to proselytize to the masses. And Witness 1 continues to rant on a blog about how evil the world really is.

******

But, anyway ... I couldn't believe some of those stories. How and why anyone could do such horrible things to their own children is incomprehensible to me. I understand parents are people, lose their tempers, have difficult life situations, etc. But none of that is an excuse for burning your children, or stabbing them, or starving them, or selling them for sex or any of the other horrible things that are being done.

CPS doesn't help everyone. Laws obviously don't deter everyone. Clearly, these parents don't read parenting books. Can't count on religion/spirituality because some people will twist the teachings to support abuse. Non-profits don't reach everyone with their money/aid. Praying/meditating/visualizing for the children is always good but what else can be done? Seriously? Even if you were to use media programming to spread the message that abusing children is wrong, and in many instances there is such programming available in one format or another, these particular parents are more likely to turn it off because it's "cr@p" and they "know better".

It's unbelievable. I read a statistic once that 1 in every 5 children will experience some form of abuse in the US. If anyone really wants the source, I'll try to track it down but it might take a while as I can't remember where I read that. Wait a minute ....

I think it was in "A Child Called It" by Dave Pelzer.

Oh, the irony. Read the "About Dave" section. This man who survived one of the worst cases of child abuse in California's history, who has become a leader and an inspiration in the fight against child abuse in the US ... this man is also a "murderer". He joined the Air Force at 18 and served in Desert Storm.

"While many make excuses and seem pessimistic, Dave carries the banner in a nation where opportunities are endless in what he calls 'The Greatness of America'."

I guess the "murdering" personality that caused him to become a soldier and participate in Desert Storm, and that keeps his positive outlook on the US, is a result of his traumatic childhood. Can we twist that, too?

posted May 08, 2007 12:16 PM              

*Henry Kissinger, put it very well when he made the statement that military men are "dumb, stupid animals to be used" as pawns for foreign policy. yes that is despicable way to describe military people, but unfortunately, that's what the ego-centric warmongers actually believe.

and what you won't hear Eleanore say in her fictional and imaginary slandering way, is that oftentimes those doing the 'rescuing' are just using that as an 'excuse' to further political agendas of greed and agression. and oftentimes, these governments and leaders support those exercising their 'evil' ways, as long as it suits their purpose. saying these things, bringing them to light, is indeed a form of defense, in the same way that Linda Goodman's ideas are a form of defense against tyranny. i suppose she didn't lift a finger in literal defense of innocent lives, but as she illustrates with her words/swords lexigrams, the pen really is mightier than the sword.

in answer to those who are believed to have 'saved' innocents from the evil Hitler, let's examine some of the origins from which Hitler gleaned his 'evil ways' ~

(from another GU thread ~ http://www.linda-goodman.com/ubb/Forum16/HTML/003400.html )

naiad
Knowflake
Posts: 882
From:
Registered: Sep 2006
posted May 06, 2007 01:50 PM
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it's interesting to note, isn't it, that Hitler was directly inspired, supported and invested in by the policies and practices of the United States....people such as the Bush family, who invested in Nazi Germany, in support of their ideals, companies like IBM which worked with the Nazi government in furthering its goals and policies, people like Henry Ford, who was a big supporter of Nazi ideals as well. So it's rather hypocritical and delusional to pat ourselves on the back for 'saving' anyone....through our 'benevolent' act of war...much the same as 'saving' anyone from Saddam, whose power and dominance arose as a direct result of U.S. support.

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Hard as it may be to believe, Adolf Hitler wrote fan mail, finding time in the early 1930s to express his admiration of the American leaders of a vaguely scientific movement called eugenics.

In his new book, War Against the Weak, investigative reporter Edwin Black makes the case that 20th century American proponents of eugenics — the belief that controlled breeding can improve humanity — had substantive ties to the architects of Hitler's racial extermination machine.

Black documents many links, such as the Hitler letters, between the American eugenicists and Nazi Germany prior to World War II, including how one prominent eugenicist's book, Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race, became Hitler's "bible."

Eugenics came into vogue in the early 20th century. With a name coined in 1883 by British anthropologist Francis Galton, who hoped to see arranged marriages improve mankind, the movement eventually led to racist laws, such as ones prohibiting miscegenation, in many U.S. states, and the sterilization of more than 60,000 mental and moral "defectives."

"It's startling how much Hitler idealized American eugenics," Black says. His book required two years of research by dozens of volunteers who culled records from about 110 archives, diaries of eugenicists, case records of their victims and research reports on removing the unfit from humanity. The research builds on Black's best-selling book, IBM and the Holocaust, which looked at Nazi use of data-processing technology to fill concentration camps.

In War Against the Weak, Black lays bare the veins of collaboration between American eugenicists and Nazi scientists. There was financial support of genetic research and travel by Nazi doctors from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a leading genetics research institute. There was research collaboration and reports on the Nazi efforts in respected journals like the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Black also describes:

• Biologist Charles Davenport, head of the Eugenics Record Office based at Cold Spring Harbor (N.Y.) Laboratory. He wrote eugenics textbooks widely used in universities and high schools and led drives for sterilization laws that eventually emerged in 33 states. He supported "racial hygiene" concepts.

• The lauding of eugenics by prominent Americans, including Alexander Graham Bell and Woodrow Wilson.

• The career of one Harvard-credentialed doctor, Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen, an original member of the Eugenics Research Association created in 1913, who ended up as a physician prisoner and SS collaborator at the Buchenwald concentration camp.

and

Everybody now knows how evil Nazi eugenics were: How all sorts of people were exterminated not because of anything they had done but simply because of the way they had been born. And we have all heard how disastrous were the Nazi efforts to build up the "master race" through selective breeding of SS men with the best of German women -- the "Lebensborn" project. Good leftists today recoil in horror from all that of course and use their "Hitler was a conservative" mantra to load those evils onto conservatives. But Hitler was a socialist. As he himself said:

"We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions." (Speech of May 1, 1927. Quoted by Toland, 1976, p. 306)

So it should come as no surprise that Hitler's eugenics were an intergral part of his socialism and that the great supporters of compulsory eugenics worldwide in Hitler's day were overwhelmingly of the Left. Left-influenced historians commonly blur the distinction between a belief in eugenic or dysgenic processes and actually advocating a state-enforced eugenics program but we can find the facts if we look carefully. And it was American Leftists upon whom Hitler principally drew for his "inspiration" in the eugenics field.

In the USA, the great eugenicists of the first half of the 20th century were the "Progressives". As it says here:

A significant number of Progressives -- including David Starr Jordan, Robert Latham Owen, William Allen Wilson, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Robert Latou Dickinson, Katherine Bement Davis, and Virginia Gildersleeve--were deeply involved with the eugenics movement.

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these quotes are from the articles posted above.

I wonder how satisfying it is feed your ego and feel morally/spiritually superior for your intellectual stance and yet never bother to acknowledge those who actually do something about their concerns, that does not involve violence and murder, but discussion and dissemination of truth.

posted May 08, 2007 01:18 PM              

U.S. Christians Visit Iran's Top Leaders to Defuse Tension

U.S. Christian leaders are visiting Iran’s top political and religious leaders this week in hope of relieving tension between the United States and Iran.

A delegation of 13 Christian leaders from the Mennonite, Quaker, Episcopal, Catholic and United Methodist churches as well as representatives from the National Council of Churches, Pax Christi and Sojourners/Call to Renewal are visiting Iran from Feb. 17-25.

The group will dialogue with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, former president Mohammad Khatami, women serving in the Iranian parliament as well as Iran’s Muslim and Christian leaders.

“Our primary goal is to engage in dialogue with a variety of Iranians,” said Ron Flaming, Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) international program director, in a statement.

The delegation will spend most of its time with religious leaders in Tehran, Qom and Isfahan. Delegates will meet with Iranian Evangelical Protestant leaders, the Archbishop of the Armenian Orthodox Church in Iran, and Muslim religious leaders in the religious city of Qom.

Tension is escalating between the United States and the Iranian government over issues such as the country’s nuclear plans, its denial of the holocaust, and its human rights violations.

Currently, the two countries are not communicating directly with one another.

“We are making this trip hoping it will encourage both governments to step back from a course that will lead to conflict and suffering,” said Mary Ellen McNish of American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), an international social justice organization, in a statement.

The delegation is organized by AFSC and the Mennonite Central Committee.

Some of this week’s delegation members had previously dialogued with Ahmadinejad in New York last September. The religious leaders who met with the Iranian president last year had met with Congressional members afterwards to share important points in the discussion. Congressional staff members had encouraged them in their effort and visit Iran if possible.

Delegation members will again meet with the U.S. Congress to inform them of what the leaders in Iran said and suggest ways to decrease tension between the two countries.

“We are hopeful,” said Flaming. “As Christians we are called to talk with those we are in conflict with and move toward forgiveness and reconciliation. We pray this will open doors to diplomacy.”

By Ethan Cole
Christian Post Reporter
Sun, Feb. 18 2007