Fair point. Either way, I don’t feel the urgency to spend a lot of time debunking those who have shown that agenda drives them far more than facts, fallacy or otherwise.
Well, it’s possible for a white supremacist to make a valid observation on genetics. It’s fair to assume until proven otherwise that he won’t, though.
AFAICS, if you got rid of all the stupid people, huge sectors of the economy would severely list, capsize or completely collapse. Stupidity and short-sighted folly are a crucial resource, if everyone was über-smart, society would be in constant turmoil.
In other words, we oppose eugenics because it is a serious threat to the peace.
And draft dodgers! The rest of the world’s endless and stupid wars, and their need for cannon fodder, have made America what it is today.
I hate you. I know where that link goes. I just didn’t know it was Ace Frehley. This thread has been educational because I also learned the word “nulliparous.” I already knew that if a poster gets his name from an Ayn Rand book I will probably disagree with him.
Turning it into Canada, they are!
Fortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a correlation between high intelligence and low short-sighted folly.
Brave New World wasn’t a documentary, you know.
So if Ms. Precious for example, has 6 children by age 22, dropped out of high school, has no job, and no income, how would she and her 6 children survive in a true natural selection environment? They would not. It is our welfare, food stamps, free healthcare in our emergency departments, etc. that allows them to live.
Are there any other species that hunt for or forage food, and then redistribute it to an unrelated family?
In a true natural selection environment, she and her children would kill you and take over your house and bank account. You’re now going to say that you mean a natural selection environment where people’s property is protected by the government. That’s not a true natural selection environment. At the point that we conceded any powers (yes, any powers whatsoever) to the government, we gave up on the idea that natural selection was the best system. What you want is for us to use just enough natural selection to keep you in power but not enough to allow other people to kill you or steal from you.
I disagree. Without entitlements many of her children would have died at birth, she may have died too. If not she would likely die of starvation. (Rather than a subsidized chronic obesity that she does right now with all the handouts she is getting.)
And no I would not cite property rights.
With my program, she could have actually truly earned some money, and the world would have been spared the resource drain, future crime, and costs of her 6 offspring. Everyone would be better off.
Most posters in this thread on that very topic disagree emphatically.
Probably by bringing your honor student’s carcass home for dinner.
And how’s that working out for the species? Humanity fading away?
So eugenics has failed in the real world. And you want a government program to step in and support it.
I’m assuming the irony of what you’re saying escapes you.
Not to detract from your “decrease the surplus population” thesis, but would it matter if Ms. Precious was instead Ms. Mary-Lee McOzark?
And?
Unlikely as it is to be, I’d really like the OP to address his incredibly obvious and quite serious misconceptions about natural selection and eugenics.
As noted in this thread (repeatedly, I might add), even assuming she would have died, what does that have to do with natural selection and/or the success of a eugenics program?
Maybe it’s pissing into the wind, but once again, the human gene pool is not somehow weakened by having these additional people in it. Natural selection doesn’t work that way. It would only be an issue if they crowded out resources for the “select”. But rich, intelligent people aren’t prevented from reproducing because other, poorer and/or less intelligent people are around. Their genes are still around and contributing to the human pool.
Again, “Idiocracy” was not a documentary. Nor was it a cautionary tale. It was a satire, and like most satires, it commented mainly on contemporary culture, rather than a potential future.
ETA: To put my point better, the OP is clearly conflating cultural darwinism with actual darwinism. I thought we got past that fallacy decades ago, but I guess not.
I was being a little cynical and sarcastic (excuses, excuses), blindly flailing away at consumerist capitalism. As has been noted elsewhere on this thread, “intelligence” is an idea that is too broad and diverse to submit to ready quantization – a quantum physicist might well be totally flummoxed by the workings and foibles of an automobile engines, the man who can construct and elegant and beautiful staircase would probably struggle mightily with ureter stent insertion, but these are useful skills, all, for people to develop. Valuing one type of skill greatly over another may be risky to the point of folly.
So you want the government to support eugenics because you believe in natural selection. Again, in so far as the government supports it, it’s not natural selection. Incidentally, by using the name “Precious,” I assume you’re referring to the film (and the novel it was adopted from, which I don’t know much about) Precious. First, let’s note that the heroine of that film is black. So when you have to come up with someone who should be sterilized, your example is black. Second, you don’t actually know much about that movie:
The character was not stupid. She grew up in poverty. She had two children by the time she was 16 because she had been repeatedly raped by her father. She was apparently of average intelligence, but she had learned almost nothing in school because of her chaotic home situation. The film ends with her living apart from her messed-up family trying to catch up for everything that had been done to her. She hoped to eventually get her GED.
Carrie Buck, arguably the most famous real life victim of eugenics, was also impregnated by being raped by a family member (a cousin in her case). When Buck became pregnant she was institutionalized and sterilized after her child was born. For good measure, her sister was also sterilized. Demonstrating the weakness of the eugenic argument, Buck’s daughter turned out to have normal intelligence.
If she leaves more offspring than you do then in Darwinian terms she is more fit than you. The fact she has learned to manipulate her environment to her advantage only demonstrates she is smart and adaptable. In other words, you’re jealous she’s doing better than you in evolutionary terms.
Slaver ants capture other, unrelated ants and make them hunt and forage for them.
OK, I was going to say, - your proposal has a “regressive” effect - but then I see that you do actually want to “kill off” the poor people, as a method of increasing IQ. Leaving aside the scientific issue of using “poorness” as a surrogate for “low-IQ”, and the moral-ethical issues, and political issues, and the scientific issues, of trying to breed-out poverty or low-IQ, you’re still left with an intractable practical problem:
Children provide social-security for poor people. In the absence of a good (expensive) wellfare program for poor people, they have, where ideas similar to this have already been tried, generally been unwilling to take up the offers.
In fact, it is generally accepted that it works better to spend the money on welfare programs, and let the people make up their own mind about the number of children they want, when they aren’t depending on the children to help them when they get old. Do you expect this to work differently in your city?