hello! this is a bit odd, but i remember reading one of your posts on my dash recently where you said your thesis had something to do with the eugenics movement. i'm currently in a genetics and ethics class and writing a paper on genetic screening so i'm curious as to what you think about present-day eugenics? do you think we're on the verge of another large country-wide eugenics movement? have we come far enough since the 20th century to prevent a repeat of those horrors?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA okay no this is actually the best question thank you so much oh my gosh
okay, fun experiment: go to the comments section of any story about someone doing something stupid
and I can guarantee you that AT LEAST ONE comment is going to be something like âletâs hope this person doesnât breedâ
if itâs about poverty, I can guarantee you that someone will make AT LEAST ONE comment about how poor people are always popping out more kids than they can afford and they should just stop breeding
as recently as 2010 California was sterilizing female inmates
itâs not âhave we come far enough,â itâs ânot even the fucking Nazis could get people to let go of their shitty, shitty ideas about how genes work AND WE STILL HAVENâTâ
like, the thing about the eugenics movement is that is basically shitty opinions + shitty science = shitty laws
THEY KNEW their science was flawed. like as early as 1911 they were throwing out all their research that tracked pauperism in families and musical talent in children and whatnot because it was all useless, because there was no way of isolating those traits in a lab
like, if you want to see if something is genetic, you need to have a control test subject. so if you grow a black rat in a lab, you know that black hair in rats is genetic. but thereâs no such thing as a poor rat, or a musically-talented rat, and you canât use human test subjects from birth for ethics reasons (incidentally this is my issue with a lot of evo pysch, they make claims that things are genetic when there's little to no evidence for it)
but they kept doing it as a movement, and justified it with their shitty science, because it was never about science
it was about confirming the biases they already had
and if you are inclined to think that poor people somehow deserve what they get and disabled people are burdens on society and that the country is being overrun with people of color and criminality is something youâre born with, then if someone gives you even the slightest shred of âproofâ that youâre right, youâll latch onto it even if itâs wrong
and the thing is, society still has those biases
now, will we have the exact same outcome, like laws preventing certain races from marrying or forcibly sterilizing people? not necessarily
could we have other things, like a license to have children that conveniently excludes people with mental illnesses or disabilities? itâs definitely possible
tl;dr: the seeds are there, they never went away, though if it does become a movement it might look different than the old eugenics movement
