this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
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That's not genocide, that's eugenics. Just as bad.
Sorry to disappoint you, but even just picking your partner off of looks is literally a form of eugenics if you preach being attracted to your partner... Parents who decide to abort a fetus with a terminal illness is ALSO literally and directly eugenics.
Eugenics itself isn't bad, it's just certain morons think THEY deserve to decide such things for and about others.
no that's part of natural selection. it's our biology telling us what we want. eugenics is systemic planned pairing and breeding. it's also had the ideas that a person's quality is defined at birth baked into it from the start. it's based on the concept of a person's worth being defined by the circumstances of their birth and not by their efforts in life.
also, actual science tells us that the best thing to "breed for",if that's the way you want to look at life, is genetic diversity. the healthiest stock has the most diverse gene pool. something every eugenicist also somehow manages to ignore that and deny that if improving or genetics is our goal we should be trying to all become a neutral brown and choose people the most different from us genetically.
cause that's the thing about dog breeds. we can engineer the perfect biological hunting machine... that dies by age 11 at the latest. because breeding for a trait never creates healthy offspring. which makes sense, we weren't breeding for health. the natural desire of most parents is a healthy child. it's what nature optimized for. when we start looking for other traits we tend to fuck it up.
Nothing I said was incorrect. Eugenics IS NOT ONLY Nazi-style eugenics. Period. Ever.
the points i was making in the latter paragraphs is that even if there is nothing morally wrong and you're not forcing anything it's still an inherently flawed view of genetics. breeding the smartest, kindest and most capable people to have those traits you'll still just end up with unhealthy offspring.
I do not defend the practice of attempting to pick "good" genes, but to point out eugenics is very much around and accepted by everyone. It's just a question to what degree, and certain people want to extend their decisions on the matter to others.
OFC you cannot simply pick pretty babies and end up with a "better" species. That is an ignorant, stupid, and Nazi-esque way to look at eugenics.
Stop letting Nazis and other similarly ignorant fucking morons define the world.
ok, so what is your definition of eugenics?
because the dictionary definition is "the selection of desired inheritable traits to improve future generations". that is what I'm saying is an inherently flawed ideology and practice. if you mean something different you might choose a different word.
Notice how NOWHERE in the definition is, "kill the undesirables".
The very fact that certain genetic traits are desirable means the entire culture has SOME eugenics built right in. I'm trying to point out how the very concept IS NOT out there weird and abnormal.
This is exactly why and how horrible political ideologies fester: by treating them as if they're abhorrent outliers that "cannot happen here". No. Eugenics is alive and well, even in the US. It is within human nature. To act like entertaining the idea is abnormal, you push people to the extremes.
Are people dumb for being so easily swayed? YES! Though there are a lot of dumb people who can be easily swayed.
Eugenics should NOT be a dirty word, because it DOES exist in normal circles, and that fact can be leveraged by extremists to get people to sign on to their more extreme forms simply because, "anyone who thinks eugenics is good is evil!". That's just purely wrong and misguided.
i never said Eugenics means to kill the undesirables,i never said it was morally wrong. i said it was factually wrong and that it misunderstands genetics. yes, it's societally common to think that there is merit to the idea that we could improve our species by selecting partners based on what we want out children to be like. I'm saying that it is misguided. not morally reprehensible, just not realistic.
please calm down, in not calling you a dick or anything. I'm just saying that eugenics doesn't have scientific or factual merit. it's a common misconception that genetics works that way.
Eugenics is not inherently bad, it's just frequently used as an excuse to do really evil shit.
There's personal and systemic eugenics. Systemic eugenics will always be bad.
Personal... Well, you're not obligated to have children you don't want either.
Eugenics is bad because it's based on fundamentally incorrect ideas about how genetics plays into personal development. Galton drew specifically upon the fundamentally incorrect ideas of scientific racism, and wrote about Eugenics as being a means to better improve the superior races. Galton argued that things like poverty and mass suffering could have been solved this way, essentially arguing that it was the personal incompetence of the less fortunate which lead them into misfortune (also fundamentally incorrect).
Even if you drop the baggage of scientific racism, Eugenics is still conceptually ableist, choosing to eliminate those we deem disabled rather than finding solutions to better their lives.
On top of that, we were kind of hinging on sequencing the human genome giving us the insight to how genetic diseases work, the single possible case that eugenic thought might have had a use in. This has since fallen through. Further research into genetics has also demonstrated just how unreadable DNA is right now. We are still nowhere near being able to predict most genetic diseases based on the genetics of a couple.
I also cannot think of a single thing that eugenics implies should be done that isn't absolutely evil. I'd argue that things that only encourage evil actions are themselves evil.
The concept of changing the species through genetic manipulation with intention as opposed to wild flailings of evolution (which is why I would consider to be eugenics) is not inherently evil, nor does it require anything horrible. As the poster above said, it is just often used as an excuse to do horrible things.
When we're talking about this kind of genetic manipulation, there's two methods. Being able to meaningfully read a person's genetic code (we do not understand the majority of a person's genetic code due to a variety of issues), or basing your actions on individuals.
The individuals version has already been done, where we barred certain 'undesirable' individuals from reproducing. We know this one to explicitly only leads to evil implementations. It turns the practice of finding a romantic partner into a game of fusing two people together to get a better one.
The other method currently has two tools currently: selective IVF and CRISPR. Both of these are in their infancy, with how effective they are still being up in the air. These techniques require highly specialized professionals and are thus expensive. These will likely always be expensive even after they get cheaper. The world we live in where the rich can have "super-babies" with no genetic defects, while most poor children are still born naturally, is one where discrimination based on genetics is treated as rational, and based on lineages. That is fundamentally the creation of an evil world.
We're also still ignoring the fact that we're still pretty explicitly ableist as a culture. How do you think it'll feel when a person who lives with a disability gets pressured into IVF "so the child doesn't end up like you". Blind people have a subculture, deaf and mute people have a subculture, most people living with disabilities find each other for solidarity and relatability. We call it 'living with disabilities', but they just call it 'living'. We're still treating these issues as if they're something to wipe out rather than changing our culture and infrastructure to accommodate them.