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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   23800 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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wanting smart and beautiful people to have more children is eugenic

Using truly the broadest possible interpretation of a dictionary definition, sure. But we all damned well know that isn't what is being alleged when someone is called a eugenicist.

we all damned well know that isn't what is being alleged when someone is called a eugenicist.

Um, yes, in this case it very much is - Anomaly used the word himself in the paper Guardian is doing the Body Snatchers scream at, to refer (correctly) to what he was advocating.

More generally, "eugenics" is and has always been a very broad term; the eugenicists of the 19th and 20th centuries would absolutely consider these kinds of schemes eugenic. I agree that there's a lot of rhetorical trickery enabled by the term's breadth, but that breadth is authentic.

If you are out in public airing your view that it's an inherently good thing that smart and beautiful people are having more children then you are a eugenicist. The implications of what you have to think and believe to say such a thing are obvious.

Most people would not think this or perceive the darkly hinted implications. This maximally benign idly wishing beautiful smart would have kids is not the common use understanding of eugenics and the implications are more in your imagination than other people's.

There's a small fringe of progressives actively looking for wrongthink. They denounce all sorts of mainstream views as fascism, racist dogwhistling, etc. This appears to be their hobby. Getting enraged at "bad" people feels good to them. They are a very small portion of the population. I suppose these people would sniff out the wrongthink in this and declare it to be just like the Nazis and [bad thing]-adjacent and wave around a non-common-use understanding of 'eugenics' as one of many disingenuous rhetorical smears.

Whether most people are dumb enough to not understand something or not is irrelevant. The journalist is obviously smart enough to. Doing the maximally benign wrongthink is still wrongthink. The Stasi doesn't owe you any favors to interpret you flirtations with eugenics as anything other than an ultimately hostile act.

Whether they are actively looking for wrongthink or not is irrelevant. You can't do positive flirtations about verboten subjects. Even if you are an old fuddy duddy and think your tweets are benign.

I don't strictly disagree with you. I just don't understand why you are arguing this. Neither one of us makes the rules.

Almost everyone thinks this though. It's just one of those things that people generally agree on but people get uncomfortable if you're too explicit about it.

There are plenty of people who think that beautiful, intelligent people having fewer kids is evidence that they’re ‘responsible’.

And they probably think it's even more responsible for stupid ugly people to have fewer kids.

Well yes, lots of those people will go on to say inmates shouldn’t be released without being sterilized first.

Let's be precise.

The argument that high-IQ women should either get married and start having children as a first step after graduating from college, or avoid going to college altogether and focus on becoming mothers, i.e. that society should incentivize them to do so, I think it's fair to say, counts as borderline dissident among middle-class college-educated normies today. It doesn't count as 100% badthink maybe, but it's close. Ultimately this is the essence of positive eugenics.

Negative eugenics, i.e. the argument that the fertility rate of low-IQ people should be curbed in various ways, on the other hand, is definitely outside the Overton window. Yes, you can argue that liberal policies pertaining to abortion and birth control actually have this effect in the real world, but I doubt they actually reduce the relative fertility rate of low-IQ people as compared to that of high-IQ ones, so there's that.

Also, it's fair to say that, to the extent eugenics is dismissed as deplorable junk science by the Guardian-reading demographic, it is done so because it's interpreted as an outgrowth of White supremacism.

What I don't think is borderline dissident is the idea that smart beautiful women should have at least two kids starting in their mid to late 20s after getting their careers established and finding the right husband or that stupid ugly people should have at most two kids and also wait until they're financially and romantically stable. That is also a positive eugenics position albeit one less extreme and rarely stated explicitly. But I would guess most people agree with it.

White middle class people having one kid is morally irresponsible in the age of climate change and economic precarity, brown people having kids in a warzone is proof that we need to open our borders and wallets to alleviate human suffering. Liberals get squeamish at any suggestion that abortion be extended specifically to populations with current, let alone future, suboptimal life outcomes. Any suggestion that abortions be subsidized for poor (brown) people or for mentally ill is met with cries of racism, and that instead their choice to carry a crack baby to term should be supported now and forever with more social welfare.

Ultimately it is pretty easy to drill down the opposition to (current thing) purely on the grounds of 'the people I hate love it'. To be fair, the right is super guilty of this too. White supremacists (larpers or not) get tied in knots when informed that abortion rights means you get less black or brown criminals ala Piketty, and there are exceedingly few white babies being aborted these days. White girls use contraceptives and aren't afraid to request condoms, black girls use their (shitty) math skills.

It's perfectly consistent to think that people should have fewer children but that they should be looked after once they're born.

Actual population control efforts in the real world are mostly targeted at third worlders.

There was plenty of drunken campfire agonizing about the morality of neocolonial imposition of western values on local populations back in the mid 2000s already, and the rhetoric has gotten worse since. Between theological opposition to population control and liberal white guilt, population control is very much not in vogue any more. My own thoughts are that externally encouraged population control schemes have never succeeded but that goes too deep into anecdata.

My only nitpick is that you seem to be assuming that there's an overlap between racists and social conservatives. I doubt that is, or even was the case.

Yes there is. Old not-terribly online people.

I assume you mean Boomers? Because I doubt there was ever significant racism present among them.

And yet in 2006 Idiocracy presented the ‘stupid people having too many children is destroying this country’ school of liberalism pretty openly. It’s clear that the taboo isn’t really that, it’s more as you say in the last paragraph.

Indeed, but that was a different era, before the Great Awokening. It's also true that feminist websites posted recommendations to women for avoiding getting raped back then. It's no coincidence that liberal critiques of the movie have also appeared.

How many people are actually on board with the Great Awokening though? I don't think it's that popular.

By 'normie ideological purity standards' it's the law of the land. Whether it's popular or not doesn't matter.

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